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This paper aims to explore the notion of communication in accounting and in doing so elucidates the wider connotation of accounting frontiers offered in the Islamic philosophy, reflecting upon the Islamic doctrines that are indicative towards and offer a variety of implications for communication and accounting.

Drawing from the Islamic sources – Quran and other key texts – and other relevant preceding literature, the paper deliberates key Islam principles of significance and outline what they suggest for communication in accounting.

Islam has a profoundly embedded concern of the communicative aspect from a holistic viewpoint that is clear within its accounting implications as well. This paper illustrates the social aspects of Islamic accounting through its stance on communication, thereby opening up the more enabling potentials of Islamic accounting informed by wider and more facilitating dimensions of Islam’s teachings: Islam’s holistic approach to life; its attentiveness on society and its various groups; and its emphasis on behavioural conduct and emotional aspects. Consideration on these principles throws into questions the Western ways, develops and hones the existing stand of hegemonic positions and submits new ways forward.

Aspiring organisations and larger entities such as nations who encourage the development of Islamic economy can benefit from the added accountability of entities to encompass the social and ethical responsibilities.

The paper highlights Islamic doctrines as a basis of just and responsible accounting communication via incorporating the macro-societal elements and the behavioural communicative aspects.

The Islamic communication principles open up the inclusion of the missing behavioural aspect from accounting communication. This paper provides the necessary theoretical framework on how to include the humane side within accounting communication.

This paper examines the influence of stress arousal and burnout as mediators of the negative relations between role stressors and job outcomes (satisfaction, performance, and turnover intentions) among a sample of AICPA members working in public accounting. It extends prior research which examined these linkages (Chong & Monroe, 2015; Fogarty, Singh, Rhoads, & Moore, 2000; Smith, Davy, & Everly, 2007) by evaluating a model that simultaneously incorporates stress arousal and the three fundamental dimensions of burnout, i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. This paper also utilizes a recently validated stress arousal measure designed to capture the worry and rumination aspects of arousal posited to be responsible for a number of negative personal outcomes.

The results indicate that role stressors, mediated by stress arousal and the individual burnout dimensions, have a negative influence on job outcomes. In line with predictions regarding the temporal ordering of stress arousal and burnout in the model, each of the job stressors had a significant positive influence on accountants’ stress arousal, and the influence of the individual role stressors on each burnout dimension was either partially or fully mediated via their relations with stress arousal. In turn, the influence of stress arousal on each of the job outcomes was either partially or fully mediated through its relations with emotional exhaustion.

This research note investigates the relationship between the constructs of professional skepticism and client advocacy as they relate to accountants’ roles as auditors and tax professionals. Although Pinsker, Pennington, and Schafer (2009) implicitly treat advocacy and professional skepticism as opposing constructs, the purpose of this research note is to explicitly examine whether an accounting professional can be both a professional skeptic and a client advocate. Two hundred and six experienced accounting professionals with a mixture of accounting and tax backgrounds responded to a client advocacy scale (Pinsker et al., 2009) and a professional skepticism scale (Hurtt, 2010). Results indicate that while tax professionals have higher levels of client advocacy than auditors, both groups have similar levels of professional skepticism. Moreover, no correlation emerges between participants’ responses to the advocacy and the full professional skepticism scale or five of its six sub-scales. These results provide evidence that client advocacy is a separate and distinct construct from professional skepticism. These findings have implications for behavioral accounting researchers by demonstrating that these two constructs are not related; thus, it is important to separately measure client advocacy and professional skepticism when they are relevant to a research question.

This study, based on our analysis of survey data from 1,242 partners and employees of a U.S. national public accounting firm, examines the impact on psychological well-being from the moderating effects of flexibility and role clarity on work-home conflict experienced by public accountants. Most prior research in public accounting deals with the antecedents and consequences of role stress and primarily focuses on job outcomes of turnover intentions and job satisfaction as dependent variables. Public accounting firms have responded to stressors with worker-friendly policies, largely by introducing flexibility and clarity in their organizational culture. Using a multi-disciplinary research model, we analyze the causal relationships of flexibility and clarity as moderators of the bi-directional nature of work-home conflict (work interference with home and home interference with work) on psychological well-being. Our study finds that perceptions of flexibility and role clarity drawn from a career position in public accounting can mitigate role conflict between work and home environments and contribute to enhanced psychological well-being. We also find that certain relationships described in the model are moderated by family status and age, but not by gender. Results of our study have implications to both individual public accountants and to their firms.

This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

The value of a cost-management initiative rests on its ability in producing new and/or more accurate cost information for decision making. As such, insights on antecedents and consequences of using different types of cost information in decision making are important in evaluating cost-management initiatives. Behavioral research paradigm offers researchers a framework to interpret relationships between uses of different types of cost information and individuals’ behaviors. This chapter presents a review of behavioral studies on cost information usage in decision making published in 1998–2007. Findings of the review shows that using different types of cost information in decision making have significant impacts on individuals’ behaviors and uses of cost information are likely to be moderated by various human, system, and market factors.

Psychological contracts represent unofficial or informal expectations that an individual holds, most commonly applied to an employer–employee relationship. Understanding psychological contracts helps explain the consequences of unmet expectations, including increased budgetary slack and reduced audit quality. This chapter reviews and synthesizes accounting behavioral research that discusses psychological contracts and that was published in academic and practitioner journals in the areas of financial accounting, management accounting, auditing, taxes, non-profit organizations, accounting education, and the accounting profession itself. Despite the prevalence of psychological contracts in the workplace and the applicability to behavioral research, accounting literature remains limited regarding applications of psychological contracts. This chapter aggregates research across all areas of accounting to provide suggestions for use of psychological contracts in future research and thus create a connected research stream.

The purpose of this paper is to examine circumstances under which auditors subordinate their judgment. More specifically, the authors investigate factors associated with auditors’ propensity to accept client-preferred accounting methods that conform to accounting standards but do not faithfully represent the entity’s financial position, financial performance and cash flows.

Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the authors developed a survey that was sent to auditors at a non-Big 4 audit firm.

Main results suggest that auditors tend to agree with a client’s preferred accounting method when they anticipate little fallout from this decision, they believe they can easily justify the method, and they perceive that colleagues, shareholders and creditors would also agree with the decision.

Results benefit auditing standard setters and regulators and are relevant for accounting institutes and audit firms because practitioners can learn about circumstances under which auditors subordinate their judgment.

This study contributes to the audit literature by using the TPB to identify factors associated with auditors’ judgment subordination. In addition, it applies the TPB in a context where a client-preferred accounting method is considered acceptable but is not the most appropriate in light of the audited entity’s specific circumstances.

This paper proposes a framework for the future of behavioral accounting information systems (AIS) research. A broad definition of AIS research is adopted which provides for a breadth of contemporary research drawing heavily from both the accounting domain and the information systems domain. Further, arguments are made for why AIS research must become the primary stream of accounting research if the accounting domain's research is going to have an impact on practice and provide leadership in the accounting and auditing environment that is currently evolving. In essence, researching accounting as an information systems discipline is becoming imperative.

Behavioral accounting research deals with a complex set of phenomenon including the broad domain of human decision making under uncertainty. Two aspects of decision making of particular relevance to accounting and auditing research are two constructs that are inexorably interrelated: uncertainty and information (evidence). This paper introduces a theoretical perspective that enriches the knowledge-set that may be used in behavioral accounting research when confronting decision contexts that involve uncertainly.

The main body of the paper is an introduction to belief functions. The introduction includes a discussion of the fundamental constructs and then illustrates the use of belief functions in two audit settings: traditional financial statement audit planning and the evaluation of evidence in a cascaded-inference setting involving the ebaluation of internal accounting control. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of some of the research issues and opportunities that are related to the potential use of belief functions in behavioral accounting research.