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1 – 2 of 2Karen McBride, Jill Frances Atkins and Barry Colin Atkins
This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.
Design/methodology/approach
The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.
Findings
Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.
Originality/value
The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.
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Scott Storm and Emily C. Rainey
Research on disciplinary literacy in English has struggled with how to represent large-scale disciplinary communities and consider issues of justice and power. The purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
Research on disciplinary literacy in English has struggled with how to represent large-scale disciplinary communities and consider issues of justice and power. The purpose of this study is to offer insights into the disciplinary practice of a community of literary scholars.
Design/methodology/approach
Using statistical topic modeling augmented with complementary qualitative analysis and interpretive rhetorical analysis, the authors describe patterns in a corpus of 4,039 articles published in the year 2018 and drawn from 215 peer-reviewed literary journals, a corpus comprising 15.5 million words.
Findings
Analysis suggests that contemporary literary scholars collectively build knowledge that considers diverse matters of form, including literary and linguistic forms, literary works and other representational forms; criticality, including critical theories and critical concepts; and humanity, including humanistic themes, human institutions and people/places.
Originality/value
This manuscript offers detail about the nature of contemporary literary scholarship as evident through linguistic patterns in and across published works.
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