An Awkward Signal: The ‘Petroleum and Minerals’ Imprint on the First Conference on Accounting, Governance and Sustainability
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay was prompted by an ‘atypical’ announcement, regarding an Accounting, Governance and Sustainability Conference co-organized by the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. I mobilise an epistemological base, drawing on Naomi Oreskes’ recent work, to question the logic and the appropriateness of associating Petroleum and Minerals’ interests with an academic conference on the topic of sustainability. My point is that significant epistemological consequences ensue when a ‘mere’ association of words arouses skepticism regarding the extent of conflict of interest surrounding an event being aimed at fostering knowledge production and dissemination processes on the theme of sustainability. One feature of my argument is that involving explicitly as co-organizer, in the frontstage, a university whose name carries the wording ‘Petroleum and Minerals’ constitutes an awkward signal, which is a disconcerting occurrence given the strong influence of ‘signaling theory’ in the eyes of many AAA members, who adhere to mainstream economic-based accounting research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it