 Every story tells a picture: Lessons from cartoons on corporate governanceRia Wiid, Leyland Pitt and Adam J. Mills Business Horizons, 2012, vol. 55, issue 6, 543-550 Abstract: While pictures tell stories, in the case of cartoons, stories also tell pictures. A theory of cartooning suggests that cartoons reflect public sentiment toward issues. As such, cartoons are a useful way of gauging and tracking public sentiment over time. This article uses a historical cartoon analysis to track public sentiment toward issues surrounding corporate governance. Specifically, it compares what cartoons reflected prior to the economic crash of 2008 and what they portrayed after. The criteria of narrative, location, binary struggle, and normative transfer were used as a framework to analyze 258 cartoons. We found that three major changes emerged after the 2008 crash that hold important lessons for those who govern corporations: the public's concern is no longer so much about corporate and individual fraudulent behavior as it is about corporate and individual greed; there is an impression that corporations do not do bad things so much as they do not do any good things; and ordinary people, workers, and taxpayers are those who suffer most when corporations are not governed well. Keywords: Corporate governance; Senior executives; Cartoons; Humor (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:55:y:2012:i:6:p:543-550 DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2012.07.001 Access Statistics for this article Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier |
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