Business PhD Spotlight: Kieran Taylor-Neu
PhD candidate Kieran Taylor-Neu is interested in professional norms and ethics in accounting. His research explores the intersections of accounting, corporate governance, and public interest, in particular in how governance practices and professional expertise are made visible through corporate disclosures, professional publications, and related organizational communications.
Taylor-Neu’s educational background includes a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) and a Master of Accounting from the University of Alberta. During his studies, he developed an interest in corporate governance and emerging sustainability standards. He carried these interests into public practice at PwC Edmonton, where he successfully completed the Canadian Common Final Examination (CFE), the final CPA certification exam, before beginning his doctoral studies. Mentorship from academics in the Alberta School of Business community during this period played a pivotal role in his decision to pursue doctoral research.
Currently in the fourth year of his PhD, Taylor-Neu’s dissertation examines how organizations use disclosures to signal expertise, legitimacy, and compliance to external audiences. His empirical study explores how Canadian reporting issuers present financial expertise in securities regulatory filings from 1997 to 2022.
“By tracing how financial expertise is constructed in mandated disclosures, my dissertation provides an historical account of the relationship between governance practices and professional expertise within Canadian capital markets during a period of significant regulatory and institutional change.”
Beyond his dissertation, Taylor-Neu has co-authored three papers that examine discourse in professional accounting publications, internal corporate communications, and environmental accountability in Canadian industries. Across these projects, his research examines how organizational ethics are communicated in practice and how formal regulatory expectations diverge from organizational practices.
Methodologically, his research integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches to archival analysis. He uses computational textual analysis in R and Python to identify patterns across large corporations, and interprets and contextualizes these patterns through close discursive analysis of key documents.
In his leisure time, Taylor-Neu enjoys playing basketball and guitar.
Kieran Taylor-Neu joined the Alberta School of Business in 2022 as a PhD student in Accounting and is supervised by professor Karim Jamal.