Victoria Edgar

Associate Professor Department of Economics and Finance

Email: victoria.edgar@uia.no
Phone: +47 38 14 14 09
Office: 9I262 (Universitetsveien 19, 4630 Kristiansand, Norway)

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Areas of responsibility

Victoria Edgar is an Associate Professor at the University of Agder (UiA) School of Business and Law. She holds a PhD in Accounting from Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK. Prior to joining the University of Agder, she worked in Queen’s University Belfast for 3,5 years. She also has experience working in the UK public sector in the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

Edgar’s research interests are in Public Private Partnerships and corporate communications. She has published her research in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal and The British Accounting Review.

Teaching

International Financial Reporting (from Autumn 2023)

Financial Accounting 5 (2019 - 2022)

Management Accounting 2 (2020 - Present)

Business Administration for IT Students (2021)

Research

Public Private Partnerships
Corporate communications

Edgar, Victoria & Stewart, Elaine (2024). Making sense of climate change in central government annual reports and accounts: A comparative case study between the United Kingdom and Norway. Financial Accountability and Management. ISSN 0267-4424. p. 1–20. doi: 10.1111/faam.12409. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Taking a sensemaking and accountability perspective, this paper explores how the Norwegian and the United Kingdom (UK) central governments understand climate change in the annual reports and accounts and how this shapes its accountability. Using a thematic analysis, we find that the Norwegian central government makes sense of climate change as a global problem requiring coordinated actions with shared responsibility and accountability to international agreements. In contrast, the UK central government understands climate change as a problem for individual departments and accountability to national guidelines. Sensemaking is enabled primarily in the narratives but also visually in the UK central government. Our research contributes to climate-related and accounting research by illustrating how central government understands climate change. Theoretically, we extend the literature on sensemaking to the public sector and how sensemaking shapes accountability for climate change.
Brennan, Niamh M.; Edgar, Victoria C. & Power, Sean Bradley (2024). Director and shareholder interactions at shareholder meetings: Compromising accountability in the service of colonialism. Critical Perspectives on Accounting. ISSN 1045-2354. 100. doi: 10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102763. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
This research explores director and shareholder two-way face-to-face interactions at the shareholder meetings of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, as reflected in verbatim minutes of those meetings. Shareholder meetings are traditionally viewed as being for accountability. Alternatively, directors may engage in manipulative game-playing through skillful political maneuvering of shareholders, thereby compromising accountability. The research analyzes unique data, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim meeting minutes of 29 shareholder meetings over the period 1895–1925, using manual close-reading interpretive content analysis. Our unit of analysis is the interactions between directors and supportive/approving and dissenting shareholders. Our research question is how did the directors and shareholders interact at the shareholder meetings. We develop a typology of 16 types of interactions the directors and shareholders used in their exchanges. We complement our analysis with illustrations of types of interactions extracted from our verbatim minutes. We demonstrate how powerful directors mobilized supportive/approving shareholders to quash the dissenting shareholders’ voices. Our findings have implications for how modern-day shareholder meetings are conducted.
Edgar, Victoria C.; Brennan, Niamh M. & Power, Sean Bradley (2022). The language of profit warnings: a case of denial, defiance, desperation and defeat. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. ISSN 1368-0668. 35(9), p. 28–56. doi: 10.1108/AAAJ-04-2020-4519. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Purpose Taking a communication perspective, the paper explores management's rhetoric in profit warnings, whose sole purpose is to disclose unexpected bad news. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a close-reading approach to text analysis, the authors analyse three profit warnings of the now-collapsed Carillion, contrasting the rhetoric with contemporaneous investor conference calls to discuss the profit warnings and board minutes recording boardroom discussions of the case company's precarious financial circumstances. The analysis applies an Aristotelian framework, focussing on logos (appealing to logic and reason), ethos (appealing to authority) and pathos (appealing to emotion) to examine how Carillion's board and management used language to persuade shareholders concerning the company's adverse circumstances. Findings As non-routine communications, the language in profit warnings displays and mimics characteristics of routine communications by appealing primarily to logos (logic and reason). The rhetorical profiles of investor conference calls and board meeting minutes differ from profit warnings, suggesting a different version of the story behind the scenes. The authors frame the three profit warnings as representing three stages of communication as follows: denial, defiance and desperation and, for our case company, ultimately, culminating in defeat. Research limitations/implications The research is limited to the study of profit warnings in one case company. Originality/value The paper views profit warnings as a communication artefact and examines the rhetoric in these corporate documents to elucidate their key features. The paper provides novel insights into the role of profit warnings as a corporate communication vehicle/genre delivering bad news.
Brennan, Niamh M.; Edgar, Victoria Carol & Power, Sean Bradley (2021). COVID-19 Profit Warnings: Delivering Bad News in a Time of Crisis. The British Accounting Review. ISSN 0890-8389. doi: 10.1016/j.bar.2021.101054. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Profit warnings (large negative earnings surprises) are important corporate reporting documents for delivering bad news and a distinctive corporate communication genre. The 2020 COVID-19 exogenous shock provides a unique worldwide crisis context for company disclosure of bad news. The research develops a genre-based typology/analytical framework for assessing COVID-19 profit warnings’ quality comprising: (1) Four profit warning/forecast quality characteristics and (2) Eight profit warning/forecast disclosures. For a sample of 160 profit-warning documents, the research manually analyses their content, culminating in a disclosure quality score/index. The research tests a model of the factors influencing disclosure quality. The research finds companies regress to silence when investors most need guidance and poor-quality disclosure, coy ambiguous language, possibly reflecting minimal regulatory guidance on this form of corporate report. Two variables are significant – Profit warnings disclosed following Financial Reporting Council guidance are of higher quality and quality varies by industry. The paper finds faux disclosure and the performativity of disclosure, which may allow boards of directors to tick-box compliance with market abuse regulations. The paper concludes with recommendations for policymakers on improvements required to enhance the quality of these highly important corporate documents.
Edgar, Victoria C; Beck, Matthias & Brennan, Niamh M (2018). Impression management in annual report narratives: the case of the UK private finance initiative. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. ISSN 1368-0668. 31(6), p. 1566–1592. doi: 10.1108/AAJ-10-2016-2733. Full text in Research Archive

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Edgar, Victoria & Sheppard, Gail (2025). PPP in Ireland and Norway: Emergence, Evolution and Embeddedness. Full text in Research Archive
Edgar, Victoria & Stewart, Elaine (2022). The adaption of climate change in public sector financial reporting: A comparative case study between United Kingdom and Norway. Full text in Research Archive
Edgar, Victoria Carol; Brennan, Niamh M. & Power, Sean Bradley (2021). The Language of Profit Warnings: A Case of Denial, Defiance, Desperation, Defeat. Full text in Research Archive
Edgar, Victoria Carol; Brennan, Niamh M. & Power, Sean Bradley (2021). The Language of Profit Warnings: A Case of Denial, Defiance, Desperation, Defeat. Full text in Research Archive
Edgar, Victoria C.; Brennan, Niamh M. & Power, Sean Bradley (2021). The Language of Profit Warnings: A Case of Denial, Defiance, Desperation, Defeat. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA

Published Apr. 16, 2024 11:26 AM