ABSTRACT

Social media is widely used by accounting firms to achieve a variety of business objectives and is a key enabler of non-market strategies. Socio-political involvement (SPI) involves firms taking positions on issues that lack societal consensus, have low information rationality, evolving viewpoints and issue salience, with no clear performance outcomes for firms. SPI may result in firms alienating stakeholders with opposing views, resulting in no or adverse performance outcomes. Accounting firms traditionally may not engage with such issues due to the associated reputational risk. Further, research suggests firm size is one of the most prominent firm-level antecedents of socio-political engagement. As the empirical context for this paper, we choose the Brexit referendum, a significant historical but divisive event with contested social norms. This paper explores the engagement of accounting firms on Twitter with the #Brexit discourse from the referendum announcement to one month after the vote. The objectives of the study are to understand the nature of non-market socio-political engagement by accounting firms in the #Brexit discourse on Twitter, and explore the differences between accounting firms of different size in this context. Our findings suggest that accounting firms engaged in the #Brexit Twitter discourse through a variety of non-market socio-political engagement activities, and that smaller firms tended to engage more than larger firms, most likely reflecting the ideological inclination of firm management. The engagement of accounting firms in socio-political discourse extends our understanding of how accounting firms of all sizes use social media and supports critical accounting and institutional perspectives.

摘要

社交媒体被会计师事务所广泛用于实现各种业务目标，并且是非市场策略的关键推动力。社会政治参与（SPI）涉及企业就缺乏社会共识，信息合理性低，观点不断演变和问题凸显的问题担任职务，而企业没有明确的绩效结果。SPI可能会导致公司疏远利益相关者的反对意见，从而导致无结果或不利的结果。传统上，由于相关的声誉风险，会计师事务所可能不会涉及此类问题。此外，研究表明，公司规模是社会政治参与的最重要的公司层面先决条件之一。作为本文的经验背景，我们选择了英国退欧公投，这是一次重大的历史性但具有分歧的社会准则的分裂事件。本文探讨了从脱欧公投公告到投票后一个月的#Brexit讨论中，会计师事务所在Twitter上的参与。该研究的目的是了解Twitter上#Brexit话语中会计师事务所的非市场社会政治参与的性质，并探讨在这种情况下不同规模的会计师事务所之间的差异。我们的发现表明，会计师事务所通过各种非市场的社会政治参与活动参与了#Brexit Twitter讨论，而小型公司的参与度往往大于大型公司，这很可能反映了公司管理的意识形态倾向。