Making the Best of It: Three Essays on Overcoming Challenges in the Public Accounting Profession

This dissertation reports on three essays relating to challenges public accountants face in exercising their profession. These essays explore how public accountants sensemake about these challenges and reframe (or not) their vision of the value their occupation provides. The first chapter draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics framework and narrative interviews with twenty Tunisian auditors to understand how they make sense of ethical challenges in a context where transnational norms for the profession are at odds with the local customs. In this context, auditors adapt their purpose within the profession to serve a telos that is congruent with their moral tradition. The second article leverages a qualitative field study into the blockchain specialty practice of a large accounting firm to study the practices auditors deploy when expanding into the blockchain field. This chapter explores the role of Bourdieu’s master concept of habitus in guiding auditors’ approach to and understanding of the terrain they seek to conquer. Without shared habitus, auditors and blockchainers fail to agree on which types of assurance are needed in the blockchain ecosystem, how assurance should be communicated, and who should be providing it. Ultimately, this study sheds light on how auditors can establish a lasting presence in settings where technological innovation is prevalent. The final chapter draws on 31 semi-structured interviews with public accountants carried out during the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It suggests that accountants can experience a sense of freedom when they are given choices that appeal to their value set, which, in this case, is their desire to make rational choices that maximize their human capital value. Choice itself becomes a technique of governmentality because employers control the array of available choices, or the choice architecture, and the information used to evaluate those choices. Altogether, these three studies dig into settings where practicing the profession is difficult – and shed light on how accountants as a profession and as individuals can overcome these obstacles

A Case Study of White Secondary Teachers' Perceptions about Their Students of Color and the Impact on Instruction

This study was designed to explore how White secondary teachers’ perceptions about their students of color impacted instruction in a successful, diverse school district. In order to develop more positive attitudes toward cultural groups different from their own, teachers should be exposed to students of color and must look carefully at their own attitudes and behavior in their classroom. Biases, prejudices, and socioeconomic inequities continue to plague our nation’s schools. Teachers who are insensitive or unfamiliar with the needs of multicultural students make learning difficult for them. For this study, the district and four participants were purposefully selected. A single high school was used for this case study. A purposive sample of four White secondary teachers was interviewed and content analysis was conducted on the data. The district studied had achieved academic success (closing the achievement gaps) because of its focus on both the beliefs and instructional skills of its educators. The adults believed they were responsible for student learning. Research participants bonded with students and mentored them and expected all students to achieve at a high level

Framing Leader Messages for Highly Reliable Organizing

This dissertation tests high-reliability organization (HRO) theory's claim that strategic leadership messages can direct followers’ sensemaking in adaptive ways (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015). Specifically, two experiments tested whether mindfulness-based leader language choice enhanced followers' performance during a planning task. The experiments also tested the relationship between leader language choice and followers' willingness to speak up with dissent—an outcome known to be prominent in mindful, learning organizations (Kassing, 2011). In the first experiment, working adults (N = 197) in a single high-reliability organization (i.e., U.S. Army) read one of four leader message conditions prior to engaging in a scenario planning task. Leader message conditions varied by framing density, mindfulness language, and optimism. Results indicated no significant differences between leader message treatments for any of the predicted outcomes—self-reported feelings of mindfulness, participants’ performance during a planning task, and willingness to speak up with dissent. A second experiment was conducted to answer whether mindfulness-based leader messages are influential in the case of a general working adults sample (N = 481). Results did, indeed, indicate statistically significant differences in participants' performance during a planning task. Specifically, participants generated more numerous contingencies during planning when exposed to the framing- and mindfulness-dense leader message as compared with an optimistic leader message. Furthermore, participants generated significantly higher quality contingencies during planning when exposed to a mindfulness-based leader message dense with metaphors as compared with participants who received a leader message with few or no metaphors to reinforce the need for mindfulness. Finally, consistent with HRO theorizing, participants exposed to an optimistic leader message produced significantly lower quality contingencies during planning as compared with participants who received a mindfulness-based leader message. Results indicated no significant differences between leader message treatments for self-reported feelings of mindfulness or willingness to speak up with dissent. A post-hoc analysis was conducted to compare the two samples. Again, consistent with HRO theorizing, results indicated that participants drawn from a single high-reliability organization performed better on the planning task than participants sampled from a general working adult population, regardless of leader message condition. This dissertation contributes to organizational communication literature in three primary ways: First, results confirmed leadership communication can, indeed, stimulate followers’ adaptive sensemaking, which can be seen in improved performance during a planning task. Second, this research is consistent with HRO theorists' claim that lessons drawn from HROs are transferable for improving the performance of working adults outside the HRO context. Third, the observation that participants from the single HRO outperformed their general working adult counterparts on the planning task supported the notion that mindfulness is, in fact, being routinized by their HRO culture. The dissertation concludes with practical recommendations for leadership communication practice

The Perceptions and Experiences of Elementary Georgia Science Ambassadors: What Educational Leaders and Policymakers Need to Know

The purpose of the study was to characterize the Georgia Science Ambassadors Program (GSAP) by investigating the perceptions and experiences of elementary-level (K-5) Georgia Science Ambassadors (GSA). The GSAP was instituted to augment the leadership capacity of science educators across the state and to support the implementation of the new Georgia Standards of Excellence (GSE) for Science. The study explored GSA’s perceptions about how the relative distribution of leadership and support has influenced their ability to lead GSE implementation. A sample of 15 elementary-level ambassadors was purposively selected for the study. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Data analysis was conducted within a theoretical frame of distributed instructional leadership and systems theory. A combination of provisional, structural, and values coding was used to identify emergent themes and patterns. The findings suggested that elementary-level GSA have been largely marginalized by principals. Distribution of leadership and support to the elementary science ambassadors has been sparse and inconsistent. Even in rare cases when leadership and support were distributed to ambassadors, it was oftentimes mediated by other factors, such as time constraints, conflicting priorities, and teachers’ receptivity of the GSE. Ambassadors’ perceptions and experiences generated insights and recommendations for improving the program, orchestrating similar policy endeavors, and leading the implementation of reform-based science standards. A summary and discussion of the findings include limitations of the study, suggestions for future lines of inquiry, and the theoretical, practical, and policy implications of the study

Vulnerability and Response-Ability in the Pandemic Marketplace: Developing an Ethic of Care for Provisioning in Crisis

This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview study, we find that the pandemic transformed ordinary shopping spaces into places fraught with a sense of fear and vulnerability. Being forced to face one’s own vulnerability created an opportunity for individuals to relate to one another as significant others through a sense of “response-ability”, or the capacity of people to respond to ethical demands through situated ethical reasoning. We argue for a practical ethos of care in which seemingly small decisions such as how often to go shopping and how much to buy of a particular product serve as a means to relate to both specified and generalized others—and through this, ‘care with’ society. Our study contributes to displacing the continuing prevalence of an abstract and prescriptive morality in consumption ethics with a situated and affective politics of care. This vocabulary seems better suited to reflect on the myriad of small and unheroic care acts in times of crisis and beyond

Making It to the Next Grade: How Elementary School Principals Make Sense of Grade Retention Policies for English Learners

Critical approaches to policy suggest that policy, even in the most apparently democratic polity or institution, codifies and extends the interests of those who disproportionately wield power (Levinson et al., 2009). While many people are involved in conversations and decisionmaking processes related to the implementation of grade retention or promotion policies, the final decision is made at the school level. Critics of grade retention, meanwhile, also warn that retained students may be harmed by stigmatization, reduced expectations for their academic performance on the part of teachers and parents, and the challenges of adjusting to a new peer group (Schwerdt et al., 2017). The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine how school leaders developed and implemented retention policy for the fastest growing student populations in the United States: English learners (ELs) (Rubio, 2014). I conducted a survey of 62 elementary school principals in one large suburban school district in Virginia. Preliminary analysis of the survey responses that was used to purposefully select a subsample of principals that engaged them in semi-structured interviews that deeply explored how school leaders made sense of grade retention policies for ELs. In particular, I focused on if and how school leaders’ personal characteristics and school context influenced how they made sense of and implemented retention policy for ELs in their schools