The tone from the top: Editorials within the Journal of Accountancy

Abstract

This study examines the tone of editorials published in the Journal of Accountancy. Drawing upon prior historical accounting and linguistic-anthropological research, the study proposes that editorials in practitioner journals like the Journal of Accountancy communicate an expressive tone to internal audiences. This tone from the top is important because it communicates a professional worldview to a geographically dispersed and somewhat heterogeneous readership. The study utilises computerised methods to identify the tone expressed about key topics in 46,189 sentence-level editorial utterances published in the Journal between 1916 and 1973. The analysis illustrates that topics involving external social actors, institutions and events were more likely to use a negative tone compared to the topics speaking about internal aspects of the profession. The study contributes to our understanding of professional accounting narratives by enumerating the topics that Journal of Accountancy editorials speak about, by illustrating how sentence tone varies depending on the sentence topic and by documenting how the prevalence of certain topics changes over time.