Dr. Neil Dunne

Dr Neil Dunne B.Comm, MSc Finance, FCA, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Accounting at Trinity Business School, and is also Programme Director for Trinity's Postgraduate Diploma in Accounting. An award-winning lecturer and researcher, Neil is a Chartered Accountant with many years' experience in both practice and industry. As a financial controller in industry, he was responsible for financing commercial assets valued at almost 1 billion euro. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce from University College Cork, a Master's degree in Finance from Trinity with first-class honours achieved, and a PhD from University College Dublin. Prior to joining Trinity, Neil held positions in two other educational institutions in Dublin for almost seven years. He has been involved in course and syllabus design for a range of institutions in Ireland and France. Teaching responsibilities in Trinity include undergraduate and postgraduate modules in financial reporting. Neil also engages extensively in thesis supervision within the School. Neil's research takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach to audit and financial reporting, and mobilizes concepts such as impression management, strategic framing, institutional logics and Stoic philosophy. In connection with this, he has presented at a range of international conferences and doctoral seminars, and published in major international scientific journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society and Critical Perspectives on Accounting. Neil has also served as a judge at Chartered Accountants Ireland's Published Accounts Awards, and serves on ACCA's University Steering Group.

  Accounting   AUDIT   Sociology

My research takes an interdisciplinary and interpretive approach to audit and financial reporting. In particular, I apply sociological and philosophical concepts to study the behavior and experiences of individuals and firms in the accounting and auditing professions. I apply concepts popularized by the sociologist Erving Goffman, such as impression management and strategic framing, to organizational contexts, such as the behavior of accounting firms in their annual reviews and in their responses to the scrutiny emanating from public and regulatory inquiries. For instance, building on prior sociological and organizational work, I devised a typology of impression management strategies that accounting firms use when defending against public scrutiny. I am also interested in the nature, origin and influence of institutional logics on large and small accounting firms, and in how these institutional logics (e.g., the professional and commercial logics, amongst others) affect and are affected by the individuals that comprise these firms, as well as the role of Stoic philosophy and image repair as it pertains to accounting. Much of my research has achieved not only academic impact via publication in leading international journals, but has also attained practitioner impact through publication on websites such as the Council of Business and Society.