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This research note investigates the relationship between the constructs of professional skepticism and client advocacy as they relate to accountants’ roles as auditors and tax professionals. Although Pinsker, Pennington, and Schafer (2009) implicitly treat advocacy and professional skepticism as opposing constructs, the purpose of this research note is to explicitly examine whether an accounting professional can be both a professional skeptic and a client advocate. Two hundred and six experienced accounting professionals with a mixture of accounting and tax backgrounds responded to a client advocacy scale (Pinsker et al., 2009) and a professional skepticism scale (Hurtt, 2010). Results indicate that while tax professionals have higher levels of client advocacy than auditors, both groups have similar levels of professional skepticism. Moreover, no correlation emerges between participants’ responses to the advocacy and the full professional skepticism scale or five of its six sub-scales. These results provide evidence that client advocacy is a separate and distinct construct from professional skepticism. These findings have implications for behavioral accounting researchers by demonstrating that these two constructs are not related; thus, it is important to separately measure client advocacy and professional skepticism when they are relevant to a research question.

Charities in the United States contribute to the public good by delivering a broad range of services and by promoting civic engagement and social change. Though these dual roles are widely acknowledged, a relatively few studies explore advocacy among service-providing nonprofits. Analyzing a random sample of charities in the San Francisco Bay Area, the authors conceptualize nonprofits as institutionally embedded formal organizations and actors. The authors find that a majority of service providers blend advocacy and service provision. Organizational rationalization constructs nonprofits as goal-oriented actors working to benefit their constituents and society at large, increasing the likelihood that nonprofits will embrace advocacy. Moreover, collaboration embeds nonprofits in networks of mobilization and information for advocacy and facilitates engagement in political and social change activities. By contrast, embeddedness in the market is negatively associated with advocacy. These results reinforce the salient role of service-providing nonprofits in collective civic action and demonstrate how nonprofit embeddedness in multiple institutional influences affects engagement in advocacy.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This study introduces three variables related to brands that have the potential to enhance university students' advocacy intentions. The research explores how university brand identification, the perceived prestige of the university brand and the social benefits associated with the university brand impact students' advocacy intentions. Additionally, the study examines the moderating role of gender in these relationships.

Cross-sectional surveys of 326 undergraduate students enrolled in a Spanish university, and structural equation modeling was used to test and validate the conceptual model.

The findings from the structural equation modeling indicate that university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits significantly influence students' advocacy intentions. Furthermore, the multigroup analysis reveals a gender difference in the factors influencing advocacy intentions. Female students demonstrate significance in all three antecedents, whereas male students only show significance in university brand identification and perceived university brand prestige.

The current study's findings provide several insights for higher education institutions in developing enduring and committed relationships with their students.

This study offers relevant insights into the body of research on university branding, explaining the students' advocacy intentions through the variables of university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits. Also, this study is a novelty in introducing empirical evidence for the importance of the moderating role of students' gender.

The objective of this paper is to compare the advocacy role of civil society organizations in the United States and Brazil. We conducted an exploratory case study of three peak organizations that engage in public policy advocacy as part of their strategies. We analyze how they advocate and the role this form of action plays within different democratic contexts that assume public discussion and deliberation, by citizens, about matters relevant to them, such as the formulation, execution, and monitoring of public policy. The study concludes that the policy advocacy role of civil society organizations strengthens internal and external democratic processes by bringing for the deliberation process in the public sphere organizations that represent different groups in society. However, this process also poses some risks and challenges that shall be taken into consideration.

Individuals with disabilities may not be aware of their communicative, academic, social, and/or vocational needs. Over the last 20 years, self-advocacy has been referred to as a goal for education, a civil rights movement, and a component of self-determination (Test, Fowler, Wood, Brewer, & Eddy, 2005). As a measurable skill, self-advocacy can be specifically defined as a skill that helps “individuals communicate their needs and stand up for their own interests and rights” (Yuan, 1994, p. 305). Individuals diagnosed with a variety of disabilities (learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, language disorders, etc.) experience difficulty in achieving success in situations where they are required to communicate their needs and stand up for their rights. Test et al. (2005) documented 25 definitions of self-advocacy that were published between 1977 and 2002. The most recent definition focused on self-advocacy in the realm of social change and civil rights; the enablement of individuals with disabilities to make decisions, speak for themselves, and stand up for their rights.

While protests are important for communal and “in the moment” communication, we rely on writing when we want to think more deeply and express concerns and issues in our lives and the lives of others. Writing teachers have a duty to instill in students the impact writing can have on influencing society and its issues. In this chapter, the authors argue for and demonstrate how active citizenship can be encouraged and taught through writing. Inspired by one of the author’s negative police interactions, the authors were compelled to push beyond the protest and begin instructing students in active citizenship through the rhetorical practice of writing. Authors were curious to know how a unit on advocacy writing would influence students’ understandings of using writing to solve social problems. This led to the research question examining how viable an advocacy unit for a first-year writing class is with influencing students’ perceptions of using their voices to advocate for self and for others. To study this question the authors conducted a qualitative classroom inquiry experiment where they collected a variety of data. They examined pre- and post-reflections on advocacy/active citizenship, self-advocacy writing samples, and community advocacy writing samples. Through analysis of these artifacts, this chapter describes how the sequence of writing assignments affected students’ perceptions of themselves as active citizens and the power they have to advocate for change through writing.