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This paper addresses leadership and strategy issues associated with the management of safety. The paper proposes that companies conduct an annual safety leadership audit involving collaboration between their external financial auditors and their internal operational safety experts.

Three possible questions auditors should address in such a safety leadership audit are highlighted. The railroad industry is drawn upon for empirical support, including by reference to recent major railroa0d crashes in the US, Greece, and India.

The paper highlights the potential benefits of conducting a safety leadership audit, including that it will help assess whether a leader’s claims regarding safety are verifiable and accord with the data reported in financial statements. Several matters of critical but under emphasized importance in good safety leadership are highlighted.

This paper explores the somewhat novel idea of using audit procedures and external financial auditors to address matters of safety strategy and leadership. The paper proposes that a leader’s claims in respect of safety should be assessed in terms of whether they encourage a climate of “psychological safety,” report meaningful safety indicators, and use a “vocabulary of safety leadership.”

This paper explores the rhetorical and strategic nature of the language political and business leaders used during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic – or what we refer to as their pandemic-speak.

This paper draws opportunistically on examples of communications that have appeared variously in letters to shareholders, tweets, and public comments of CEOs of major companies, and in press briefings of several political leaders.

Good and bad examples of the exercise of leadership through pandemic-speak are presented. Some of the examples discussed are characterised variously by confected positivity, hubris, hyperbole, misinformation, recklessness, appeal to patriotic values, and abuse of the adjectives “unprecedented” and “extraordinary.” The term “COVID-19” is used as an ideographic “whipping post” to deflect attention from the implication of leaders in the inadequate level of preparedness for the pandemic.

This paper reinforces the point that the language of leaders is usually not innocent, but must be monitored closely to enhance meaning, transparency and accountability. CEOs should be less self-serving and instinctive in their crisis communications. Their language should reflect a caring attitude and encourage followers to have trust and confidence in them. Leaders should place greater stead in the wisdom offered in many studies of how to exercise strategic communication choices in a crisis.

This paper explores the benefits and pitfalls of a CEO’s personal messaging on Twitter.

The paper draws on recent professional and scholarly literature that has explored Twitter use by executives. For empirical support, some personal tweets of Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk are cited.

Twitter enables the exercise of leadership through language, especially by CEOs who learn how to harness its benefits and avoid its pitfalls. Communicating via a CEO’s personal Twitter account can help establish the actual and perceived organizational culture of a company; build and maintain the CEO’s reputation as an honest broker of information; and influence how a company’s business model and priorities are perceived.

This paper is one of the first to explore the implications of the use by CEO’s of their personal Twitter account for corporate purposes.

This paper reviews an array of psycholinguistic techniques that auditors can deploy to explore written and oral language for signs of deception. The review is drawn upon to propose some elements of a forward research agenda.

Relevant literature across several disciplines is identified through keyword searches of major bibliographic databases.

The techniques highlighted have considerable potential for use by auditors to identify audit contexts which merit closer audit investigation. However, the techniques need further contextual empirical investigation in audit contexts. Seven specific propositions are presented for empirical testing.

This paper assembles literature on deceptive communication from a wide range of disciplines and relates it to the audit context. Auditors’ attention is directed to potential linguistic signals of fraud risk, and opportunities for future research are suggested. The paper is consciousness-raising, has pedagogic purpose and suggests critical elements for a future research agenda.

This paper aims to highlight the accountability reporting objectives of four Māori-controlled organizations. The examples cited reflect the core values of the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand (Aotearoa) and help demonstrate how these values are manifest in the accountability reporting of Māori-controlled organizations.

Narrative sections of ten annual reports of two small and two large Maori organizations, drawn variously from their financial years ending in the calendar years 2009 to 2014, are read closely. These organizations represent diverse tribal and regional associations in terms of size, scope and structure; and in terms of the business, social and cultural activities they pursue.

Three core Māori values are identified: spirituality (wairuatanga); intergenerationalism and restoration (whakapapa); and governance, leadership and respect (mana and rangatiratanga). The commitment to these values and the way this commitment is reflected in accountability reports of Maori organizations, is presented.

The examples provided, and the associated discussion, should help inform reporting initiatives of organizations that are seeking better accountability in terms of their long-term engagement with indigenous communities, the environment and broader society.

This paper points to five features that CEO language should have to help enable a robust safety culture.

The paper draws empirical support mainly from the CEO-speak of the CEO of Norfolk Southern Railway in the year prior to the major derailment of a company train and subsequent toxic chemical spill in East Palestine Ohio in February 2023.

CEOs should incorporate the following five features into their CEO-speak. They should actually use the word safety but “in doing so” avoid platitudes about safety. They should exude genuine commitment to safety “cite meaningful safety performance measures” and not ignore operating risks.

Safety is a critically important aspect of corporate endeavor. Yet discussion of it is grossly under-represented in the professional and academic literature. This paper offers sound suggestions that reinforce the need for CEOs to write and speak in a way that ensures their company’s commitments to a strong safety culture are not merely platitudinous buzzwords but are genuinely key strategic elements of their company’s business model.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) literature has focused mainly on larger firms. Only recently has discussion of the engagement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in CSR emerged in research studies. Here we contribute to that growing discussion of CSR in SMEs by analyzing the disclosure practices of 57 Portuguese companies of different sizes (small, medium, large).

We use stakeholder theory to identify the stakeholders that SMEs and large firms prioritize. By means of thematic content analysis and an index of disclosure (calculated according to company type and stakeholder type) we analyze whether business characteristics influence CSR disclose strategies.

Companies give priority to CSR activities that are directly related to maintaining business and achieving economic results. CSR disclosure practices of SMEs and large companies do not differ significantly. However, larger companies disclose more information on Environment and Society. Companies who are closer to consumers disclose more information on Customers, Community and Society. The act of assuring a CSR report drives system improvements and extended CSR disclosure.

We recognize that it is difficult to compare CSR in Small and large enterprises. For this reason, we have developed a methodology based on the most basic aspects of the CSRD, and therefore applicable without distinction to large and small companies.

A framework to evaluate the CSRD of SMEs was developed. We identify CSR indicators divided in five dimensions (customers, employees, environment, community and society) that are applicable to firms of all sizes.

This study extends knowledge of CSR by comparing the disclosure practices of SMEs and large (listed and un-listed) Portuguese companies. This study takes account of the particularities of SMEs and other fundamental business characteristics using a replicable assessment framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine autobiographical vignettes that are embedded in the annual report letters to shareholders of chief executive officers (CEOs). The aim is to reveal the capacity of this narrative to self-construct leader identity, show how they can help CEOs attain legitimacy and how they help CEOs to exert management control.

The paper is positioned within literature that focuses on the importance of the annual report CEO letter and the strategic use of CEO autobiographical vignettes therein. Three autobiographical vignettes included in letters to shareholders signed by E. Hunter Harrison, CEO of Canadian National Railway (2004, 2005 and 2007), are analysed using close reading techniques. This involved the authors separately reading each vignette by slowing down the reading process to aid understanding of the text’s “inner workings”. Several close readings of each vignette were conducted until a consensus was reached between the authors.

Autobiographical vignettes have strong potential to be used strategically, as rhetorical devices, to help CEOs exert management control, facilitate change, shape leader-follower relationships and sustain self-legitimacy.

This paper is the first within the accounting domain to highlight the potential for autobiographical narrative in a CEO’s annual letter to shareholders to convey corporate information (including strategic intent), to construct leader identity and to exert management control.

We explore the relationship between the balanced scorecard (BSC) and neo-bureaucracy by investigating whether the operationalization of the BSC incorporates “neo-bureaucratic” ideas and whether the BSC implemented in a Portuguese Local Health Unit (LHU) demonstrates a neo-bureaucratic approach.

We conduct semi-structured interviews with LHU staff and analyse documents to assess whether features of bureaucratic organization were evident in the use of a BSC by the LHU.

We found nine bureaucratic features evident in the LHU's BSC. These were systematization, rationality, authority, jurisdiction, professional qualification, knowledge, discipline, transparency and accountability. The BSC used at the LHU demonstrated a neo-bureaucratic approach.

Our study helps to demystify bureaucracy and overcome prevailing prejudices regarding some of its principles. Health care managers should recognize and endorse neo-bureaucratic principles in developing a BSC. They should recognize the BSC as involving a neo-bureaucratic approach. The BSC is a valuable management tool that hospital managers should find useful in fostering flexibility, collaboration, innovation and adaptation – all of which should help lead to improved healthcare outcomes.

This paper investigates the effect of the global financial crisis (GFC) on the level of corporate social responsibility disclosures (CSRD) in the annual report and/or CSR report of 36 major listed Portuguese companies in each of the years 2005, 2008 and 2011.

The analysis is framed principally by stakeholder theory. Data were explored using thematic content analysis and an index of disclosure calculated by year, industry type (consumer proximity versus environment sensitivity) and category of information.

Before the GFC, Portuguese listed companies increased their CSRD practices significantly. During the crisis, there was a slight decrease in CSRD. However, this was not as pronounced, as it would otherwise have been because it was counteracted by increased disclosures of company interactions with society, particularly in matters of corruption prevention and community engagement. CSRD was higher for companies with high consumer proximity but did not appear to be influenced by companies’ level of environmental sensitivity.

The results reveal a strong concern by companies for stakeholder management (particularly in respect of community relations) in a period of financial crisis. This study highlights the effect of a company’s proximity to consumers on levels of CSRD.