Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Journal of Business Ethics
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics 1/2022

Open Access 03-06-2021 | Original Paper

Social Accountability, Ethics, and the Occupy Wall Street Protests

Authors: Dean Neu, Gregory D. Saxton, Abu S. Rahaman

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 1/2022

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

This study examines the 3.5 m+ English-language original tweets that occurred during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. Starting from previous research, we analyze how character terms such as “the banker,” “politician,” “the teaparty,” “GOP,” and “the corporation,” as well as concept terms such as “ethics,” “fairness,” “morals,” “justice,” and “democracy” were used by individual participants to respond to the Occupy Wall Street events. These character and concept terms not only allowed individuals to take an ethical stance but also accumulated into a citizen’s narrative about social accountability. The analysis illustrates how the centrality of the different concepts and characters in the conversation changed over time as well as how the concepts ethics, morals, fairness, justice, and democracy participated within the conversation, helping to amplify the ethical attributes of different characters. These findings contribute to our understanding of how demands for social accountability are articulated and change over time.
previous article Human–Animal Relations in Business and Society: Advancing the Feminist Interpretation of Stakeholder Theory
next article Correction: Social Accountability, Ethics, and the Occupy Wall Street Protests

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
In more technical terms, we assume, following from Kockelman, that characters and concepts are signs that stand “for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding to it own relation to the object” (2005, p. 234). Kockelman’s formulation is a re-phrasing and clarification of Peirce (1958, p. 99).
 
2
Taylor-Neu (2020) shows how concept terms such as ‘science’ were used to para-cite academic research and to, thus, selectively undermine climate change conclusions.
 
3
In the subsequent analysis, we include profit and tax as types of characters. Given the initial “people over profits” rallying cry, it is important to include these word terms. We view profit and tax as characters that are seemingly more abstract than the other characters but less abstract than the concept terms.
 
4
The review identified singular (i.e., ‘profit’) and plural forms (i.e., ‘profits’) of each of the figures.
 
5
We included rich and poor in the financial figure section since the rich were often positioned vis-à-vis taxes.
 
6
The use of a partial correlation matrix (where the correlation between two variables is calculated after controlling for all the other variables) generates similar results to Table 4.
 
Literature
Agarwal, S., Heltberg, R., & Diachok, M. (2009). Scaling-up social accountability in World Bank operations (No. 51469, pp. 1–12). The World Bank.
Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31, 211–236.CrossRef
An, W., & Liu, Y. H. (2016). keyplayer: An R Package for locating key players in social networks. R Journal, 8, 257–268.CrossRef
Anduiza, E., Cristancho, C., & Sabucedo, J. M. (2014). Mobilization through online social networks: The political protest of the indignados in Spain. Information, Communication & Society, 17, 750–764.CrossRef
Asenbaum, H. (2018). Cyborg activism: Exploring the reconfigurations of democratic subjectivity in Anonymous. New Media & Society, 20, 1543–1563.CrossRef
Ashtiani, M., Mirzaie, M., & Jafari, M. (2018). CINNA: An R/CRAN package to decipher Central Informative Nodes in Network Analysis. Bioinformatics, 35, 1436–1437.CrossRef
Barthold, C., Dunne, S., & Harvie, D. (2018). Resisting financialisation with Deleuze and Guattari: The case of Occupy Wall Street. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 52, 4–16.CrossRef
Beekun, R. I., & Badawi, J. A. (2005). Balancing ethical responsibility among multiple organizational stakeholders: The Islamic perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 60, 131–145.CrossRef
Borgatti, S. P. (2003). The key player problem. In R. Breiger, K. Carley, & P. Pattison (Eds.), Dynamic social network modeling and analysis: Workshop summary and papers. (pp. 241–252). Committee on Human Factors.
Borgatti, S. P., & Cross, R. (2003). A relational view of information seeking and learning in social networks. Management Science, 49, 432–445.CrossRef
Borgatti, S. P., & Everett, M. G. (2006). A graph-theoretic perspective on centrality. Social Networks, 28, 466–484.CrossRef
Briggs, C. L., & Bauman, R. (1992). Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2, 131–172.CrossRef
Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. . Harvard University Press.CrossRef
Calhoun, C. (2013). Occupy Wall Street in perspective. British Journal of Sociology, 64, 26–38.CrossRef
Castañeda, E. (2012). The indignados of Spain: A precedent to Occupy Wall Street. Social Movement Studies, 11, 309–319.CrossRef
Castelló, I., Morsing, M., & Schultz, F. (2013). Communicative dynamics and the polyphony of corporate social responsibility in the network society. Journal of Business Ethics, 118, 683–694.CrossRef
Chapman, C. S. (1998). Accountants in organisational networks. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 23, 737–766.CrossRef
Coleman, G. (2014). Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of Anonymous. Verso books.
De Bakker, F. G., & Hellsten, I. (2013). Capturing online presence: Hyperlinks and semantic networks in activist group websites on corporate social responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 118(807), 823.
Fieseler, C., Fleck, M., & Meckel, M. (2010). Corporate social responsibility in the blogosphere. Journal of Business Ethics, 91, 599–614.CrossRef
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. . Springer.
Fox, J. A. (2015). Social accountability: What does the evidence really say? World Development, 72, 346–361.CrossRef
Freeman, L. C., Roeder, D., & Mulholland, R. R. (1979). Centrality in social networks: II. Experimental results. Social Networks, 2, 119–141.CrossRef
Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. Pluto Press.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press.
Graeber, D. (2002). The new anarchists. New Left Review, 13, 61–73.
Graeber, D., & Hui, Y. (2014). From Occupy Wall Street to occupy central: The case of Hong Kong. Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2011). The fight for ‘real democracy’at the heart of Occupy Wall Street. Foreign Affairs, 11, 301–320.
Ho, C.-H., & Lin, C.-J. (2012). Large-scale linear support vector regression. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 13, 3323–3348.
Jalili, M., Salehzadeh-Yazdi, A., Asgari, Y., Arab, S. S., Yaghmaie, M., Ghavamzadeh, A., & Alimoghaddam, K. (2015). CentiServer: A comprehensive resource, web-based application and R package for centrality analysis. PLoS ONE, 10, e0143111.CrossRef
Jones, M. D. (2014). Cultural characters and climate change: How heroes shape our perception of climate science. Social Science Quarterly, 95, 1–39.CrossRef
Jones, M. D., & Song, G. (2014). Making sense of climate change: How story frames shape cognition. Political Psychology, 35, 447–476.CrossRef
Juris, J. S., Ronayne, M., Shokooh-Valle, F., & Wengronowitz, R. (2012). Negotiating power and difference within the 99%. Social Movement Studies, 11, 434–440.CrossRef
Kockelman, P. (2004). Stance and subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14, 127–150.CrossRef
Kockelman, P. (2012). Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives—Edited by Alexandra Jaffe. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22, E105–E108.CrossRef
Lazer, D. M., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., Metzger, M. J., Nyhan, B., Pennycook, G., Rothschild, D., & Schudson, M. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359, 1094–1096.CrossRef
Lupo, L. (2014). Democratic uprisings and protest politics: An analysis of the organization structures within the Occupy San Diego social movement. Interface, 6, 357–370.
Lyon, T. P., & Montgomery, A. W. (2013). Tweetjacked: The impact of social media on corporate greenwash. Journal of Business Ethics, 118, 747–757.CrossRef
Manning, P., & Gershon, I. (2013). Animating interaction. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3, 107–137.CrossRef
Mason, P. (2013). Why it’s still kicking off everywhere. Soundings, 53, 44–55.CrossRef
Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19, 1–31.CrossRef
Munro, I. (2014). Organizational ethics and Foucault’s ‘art of living’: Lessons from social movement organizations. Organization Studies, 35, 1127–1148.CrossRef
Murphy, G. H., & Pfaff, S. (2005). Thinking locally, acting globally? What the Seattle WTO protests tell us about the global justice movement. In D. E. Davis (Ed.), Political power and social theory (pp. 151–176). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Neu, D., Saxton, G. D., Everett, J., & Shiraz, A. R. (2020). Speaking truth to power: Twitter reactions to the Panama Papers. Journal of Business Ethics, 162, 473–485.CrossRef
Neville, B. A., & Menguc, B. (2006). Stakeholder multiplicity: Toward an understanding of the interactions between stakeholders. Journal of Business Ethics, 66, 377–391.CrossRef
O'Meally, S. C. (2013). Mapping context for social accountability: A resource paper. World Bank.
Peirce, C. S. (1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6, C. Hartshorne, & P. Weiss (Eds.), Vols. 7–8, A. W. Burks (Ed.), (pp. 241–52). Harvard University Press.
Postill, J. (2014). Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain’s indignados movement. Ethnography, 15, 51–69.CrossRef
Preuss, L., & Dawson, D. (2009). On the quality and legitimacy of green narratives in business: A framework for evaluation. Journal of Business Ethics, 84, 135–149.CrossRef
Reinecke, J. (2018). Social movements and prefigurative organizing: Confronting entrenched inequalities in Occupy London. Organization Studies, 39, 1299–1321.CrossRef
Richardson, A. J. (2009). Regulatory networks for accounting and auditing standards: A social network analysis of Canadian and international standard-setting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34, 571–588.CrossRef
Richardson, A. J. (2017). Merging the profession: A social network analysis of the consolidation of the accounting profession in Canada. Accounting Perspectives, 16, 83–104.CrossRef
Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., & Tingley, D. (2014). stm: R package for structural topic models. Journal of Statistical Software, 10, 1–40.
Ruf, B. M., Muralidhar, K., Brown, R. M., Janney, J. J., & Paul, K. (2001). An empirical investigation of the relationship between change in corporate social performance and financial performance: A stakeholder theory perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 32, 143–156.CrossRef
Shachaf, P., & Hara, N. (2010). Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls. Journal of Information Science, 36, 357–370.CrossRef
Shrivastava, P., & Ivanova, O. (2015). Inequality, corporate legitimacy and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Human Relations, 68, 1209–1231.CrossRef
Taylor-Neu, R. H. (2020). Parasites and post-truth climate. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 30, 4–26.CrossRef
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
UNDP. (2013). Reflections on social accountability: Catalyzing democratic governance to accelerate progress toward the millennium development goals. United Nations Development Programme.
Whelan, G., Moon, J., & Grant, B. (2013). Corporations and citizenship arenas in the age of social media. Journal of Business Ethics, 118, 777–790.CrossRef
Winkler, I. (2011). The representation of social actors in corporate codes of ethics: How code language positions internal actors. Journal of Business Ethics, 101, 653–665.CrossRef
Metadata
Title
Social Accountability, Ethics, and the Occupy Wall Street Protests
Authors
Dean Neu
Gregory D. Saxton
Abu S. Rahaman
Publication date
03-06-2021
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 1/2022
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04795-3

Other articles of this Issue 1/2022

Journal of Business Ethics 1/2022 Go to the issue

Original Paper

Harmful Leader Behaviors: Toward an Increased Understanding of How Different Forms of Unethical Leader Behavior Can Harm Subordinates

Original Paper

Seeing Through and Breaking Through: The Role of Perspective Taking in the Relationship Between Creativity and Moral Reasoning

Original Paper

Discrimination in Services: How Service Recovery Efforts Change with Customer Accent

Original Paper

When Moral Tension Begets Cognitive Dissonance: An Investigation of Responses to Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior and the Contingent Effect of Construal Level

Original Paper

Alignment Versus Monitoring: An Examination of the Effect of the CSR Committee and CSR-Linked Executive Compensation on CSR Performance

Correction

Correction: Social Accountability, Ethics, and the Occupy Wall Street Protests

Premium Partner

    Image Credits