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Building Ethical Narratives: The Audiences for AICPA Editorials

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Abstract

This study examines how the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) uses character and concept words to communicate normative narratives to different internal audiences. Our analysis of 552 editorials published in the AICPA’s Journal of Accountancy during the 1916–1973 period illustrates how the AICPA communicated similar yet different normative narratives to firm partners and students. During this time period, the centrality of ethically infused words such as ethics, conduct, and independence not only varied across different time periods but also across different target audiences. The findings draw attention to the importance of considering the audiences for ethical narratives as well as the ways that the intra-textual positioning of concepts and characters allow organizations to speak to slightly different audiences within the same communication medium.

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Data Availability

Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Notes

  1. Previous research notes that, within public accounting, the term auditor independence denotes an ethical stance and is assumed to be the cornerstone for serving the public interest.

  2. Hanson notes that “the PageRank algorithm used by Google's search engine is a variant of Eigenvector Centrality, primarily used for directed networks. PageRank considers (1) the number of in-bound links (i.e., sites that link to your site), (2) the quality of the linkers (i.e., the PageRank of sites that link to your site), and (3) the link propensity of the linkers (i.e., the number of sites the linkers link to.” Rosa et al., (2018, p. 3) provide more detail, stating that the page rank measure is a type of random walk model that focuses on the probabilities that a random walker follows a certain pathway from node to node.

  3. Both measures resulted in a mostly identical rank order listing of the central nodes.

  4. The provided analysis does not combine the separate words education, schools, colleges, etc. into an aggregate ‘education’ variable since the aggregation would bias the results in favor of finding an association between students and education.

  5. The logistic regression does not include the ties among the non-focal nodes as would happen in a full-scale ego network analysis (cf. Everett & Borgatti 2005). The benefit of our approach is that it allows us to explicitly foreground the ties between the dependent and independent variables.

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Funding

The funding provided by SSHRC is gratefully acknowledged as are the comments of our colleagues and attendees at the Schulich School of Business research seminar.

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  1. Schulich School of Business, York University, Room S343L, Seymour Schulich Building, 4700 Keele St. West, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Dean Neu & Gregory D. Saxton

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Correspondence to Gregory D. Saxton.

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Neu, D., Saxton, G.D. Building Ethical Narratives: The Audiences for AICPA Editorials. J Bus Ethics 182, 1055–1072 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-05003-y

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