The Anatomy of Earnings Conference Calls: An Integrative Framework for Management Research

The use of earnings conference calls in management research has exploded over recent years, yet insights remain fragmented due to differing assumptions about how calls should be analyzed and interpreted. To synthesize this work, we review 207 articles across management, accounting, and finance journals and map how prior studies have drawn on specific call components—structural attributes, prepared remarks, and question-and-answer exchanges. Building on this anatomical mapping, we inductively identify three epistemic roles through which earnings calls have been mobilized in management research: communicative disclosure (“window”), performative communication (“stage”), and communicative trace (“fingerprint”). Each role reflects distinct assumptions about how earnings calls reveal, enact, or encode managerial and organizational phenomena, and each highlights different opportunities for future theorizing. By making these inferential logics explicit, our framework provides a conceptual foundation for more precise and cumulative use of earnings conference calls as a data source in management scholarship and outlines promising areas for future research.