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Given the calls for increased ethics education following recent corporate collapses, this paper aims to examine the significance of ethical issues that challenge the profession and, more specifically, professional accounting bodies.

The study assesses the perceptions via an online survey of 66 professional accounting bodies worldwide in respect of ethical issues, potential causes of ethical failure and the need for ethics education.

Respondents identified a number of important challenges including conflicts of interest, earnings management and whistle‐blowing. The findings also demonstrate strong support for participation in prescribing the nature of ethics education by members of professional accounting bodies.

The results of this study are based on feedback from 41 per cent of member bodies of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). Despite a number of follow‐up reminder notices, some regions are under‐represented in the responses to the survey distributed to the (then) 160 member bodies of IFAC. Geographic isolation and language limitations contributed to the failure to gain a higher response rate.

The findings demonstrate that professional bodies support ethics education at the pre‐ and post‐qualifying levels of education and a willingness to take an active role in promoting ethics education to their members.

By addressing member bodies' attitudes to ethics education, this paper fills a gap in prior literature that has been restricted to addressing the attitudes of academics, students and business organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how learning styles and learning spaces interact to stimulate deep learning. Specifically the paper investigated the interaction of learning styles with ethics education and the ethical climate to influence the likelihood of engaging in ethical behavior.

Data were collected from two groups of students – those who had completed a business ethics course and those who had not completed a business ethics course. The sample consisted of 180 undergraduate students at a private university in the USA. Data were analyzed using regression analysis to test the hypotheses. A scenario-based measure of the likelihood of engaging in ethical behavior was developed and implemented in the study.

Both ethics education and ethical climate had a direct impact on a student ' s likelihood of engaging in ethical behavior. The interaction between learning style and business ethics class significantly impacted experiential learners’ likelihood of engaging in ethical behaviors. Results for non-experiential learners as relates to ethical climate were non-significant, but ad hoc analysis indicates ethical climate significantly impacted likelihood to engage in ethical behaviors.

The findings have practical implications for how universities should utilize learning spaces both inside and outside the classroom to be stimulate deep learning and be more effective in sensitizing students to ethical behavior.

The results support using formal and informal learning spaces to stimulate deep learning as it relates to ethics education in universities.

The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes toward business ethics of Vietnamese business students based on gender and the experience of having taken a business ethics course.

A quantitative self-administered survey was conducted with a convenience sample of Vietnamese business students at a banking university in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This study used the 30-item Attitudes Toward Business Ethics Questionnaire (ATBEQ) constructed by Neumann and Reichel (1987) based on the work of Stevens (1979). The Vietnamese version questionnaire was distributed, and 282 surveys were used for analysis. An item-by-item analysis was conducted based on gender and the experience of having taken a business ethics course.

Significant differences were found on seven items based on gender and four items based on the experience of having taken a business ethics course. However, respondents appeared to have similar attitudes on the majority of the items.

Perhaps the greatest limitation of this study is the relatively uneven distribution of the respondents in the sample. The sample is skewed slightly toward women who are a bit older, fourth year or post-graduate and those who have not taken a business ethics course. In addition convenience sampling technique reduced its generalizability. This study is important because it supports the idea of ethics education to improve ethical decision-making of future business leaders and that education has an effect in Vietnam.

As business students are the main subjects of this research, it can be useful for those involved in development of management and business education in Vietnam to have an overview on how gender impacts business students’ ethics perception. For the executives of multinational corporations, this study provides important information and adds support to a decision to do business in Vietnam.

Although there may be a perception of a less than ethical climate in Vietnam based on its Corruption Perception Index scores, it appears that Vietnamese business students in general express an ethical viewpoint. This study emphasizes the importance of ethics education that is culture-specific to build a strong ethical business environment that can help Vietnam prevent bribery and corruption and achieve sustainable growth and prosperity.

This study contributes to the attitudes toward business ethics research and sheds light on the impact of gender and education (business ethics course) on Vietnamese business students’ ethical attitudes. There has been little research on business ethics in Vietnam. Academicians, managers, practitioners, policymakers, government leaders and the like can benefit from the findings of this paper.

This matched-pairs study of undergraduates at an Australian University investigates whether business ethics education has a positive effect on student ethical behaviour. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study uses a matched-pairs design to look at responses before and after students have taken a semester-long unit in business ethics. The authors used ethical scenarios and analysed both the starting position and changes in responses for the total student group, and by gender and citizenship.

The results from this matched-pairs study show ethics education has a limited impact on students’ responses to ethical dilemmas.

Ethics subjects are now ubiquitous in business schools, but it may be time to consider alternatives to the philosophical normative teaching approach.

This paper is significant in that it uses 142 matched pairs to look at responses before and after students have taken a semester-long unit in business ethics. This study provides qualified support for the proposition that business ethics education has an impact on students’ ethical decision making.

Creativity is a critical skill across disciplines and contexts, and it is an important trait for humans to survive and thrive, personally and collectively. The fast-paced culture of business innovation has sought to promote and reward creativity as a coveted thinking skill. Creativity in and of itself, however, is a value-neutral construct, because novel and effective ideas may also have negative consequences. This darker aspect of creativity has come to the forefront in many recent cases, particularly in contexts involving digital and networking technologies, where the rapid pace of technological change does not encourage the kind of deliberative thinking necessary for nuanced and ethical business decisions. The authors consider why education is essential for expanding the ethical capacity of creative agency in business, describing the need to bring creativity and ethics together in educational opportunities and cultural values. The authors explore the idea of ‘wise creativity’ and the need to infuse more human-centred learning from the arts and humanities into business fields. Further, the authors suggest better practices for creative business education, such as: infusing real-world ethics learning into business education and professional development; infusing the liberal arts curriculum in business; offering opportunities for arts-based approaches in business learning; and instilling genuine mindfulness training in business education environments. The authors’ focus is on a shift away from a culture that values creativity purely as an instrumental approach for greater profitability, and towards one that values wise and humanizing creativity for good business practices that consider societal and individual wellbeing.

With the large majority of colleges and schools of business integrating ethics into their curricula, business ethics educators must work to improve the quality of instruction and find methods that enhance student learning. Because many films now address business ethics issues, the content of these films may be used to enhance the teaching of business ethics to undergraduate and graduate business students. This chapter suggests films that may be presented in business ethics classes to illustrate the four ethical categories set forth by the accrediting body for schools of business, The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), in their 2004 report on ethics education in business schools: ethical decision-making, ethical leadership, responsibility of business in society, and corporate governance.

The purpose of this work is to consider how to best prepare current and future business students for the inevitable ethical dilemmas that they will face in the course of their professional careers. To that end, the – still under-researched – rich history of the academic study of business ethics is leveraged in order to consider how a better understanding of the history of business ethics can help prepare for the future of business ethics. In addition to the above, the inescapable central role of the individual decision maker is demonstrated, with special emphasis on what is known about contemporary students of business can inform with regard to what business ethical challenges may await them and those impacted by their decisions.

Undergraduate accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia is a unique case. The program includes 147 credit hours of which 28 credit hours are religious courses. This study aims to examine the effect of teaching these religious courses on students’ ethical perceptions and decisions.

A survey was conducted for a sample of accounting students at Umm Al-Qura University. The sample was divided into two groups; the first group includes students who did not study religious courses, while the second group includes students who study religious courses. The questionnaire contained three groups of questions that aimed to explore students’ perceptions of ethics in general, students’ perceptions of business ethics and explored their ethical attitudes regarding some accounting decisions that involve ethical dilemmas. Independent two-sample t-test and multiple regression analysis were used to determine whether the responses of the two groups were significantly different.

The findings of the study revealed that teaching religious courses led to an improvement in students’ perception of business ethics and an improvement in students’ ethical decision-making. However, the results of the independent sample t-test showed that this improvement was not significant. The results of the study also revealed that male students tend to make less ethical decisions than female students.

The findings offer an indication for those responsible for managing the accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University to start developing the program so that some of the general religious courses are replaced with specialized courses in accounting ethics that focus directly on ethical dilemmas faced by the accountant when practicing the accounting profession.

This study contributes to the current literature related to examining the effect of teaching ethics courses on the ethical perception of accounting students by focusing on accounting students in Saudi Arabia as a context that has not been examined before.

The information technology (IT) related ethical issues will only increase in frequency and complexity with the increasing diffusion of IT in economies and societies. The purpose of this paper is to explore Egyptian students' attitudes towards the information ethics issues of privacy, access, property, and accuracy, and it evaluates the possible impact of a number of personal characteristics on such attitudes.

This research utilized a cross‐sectional sample and data set to test five hypotheses. It adopted an instrument to collect the respondents' background information and assess their attitudes towards the information ethics issues of privacy, property, accuracy, and access. Egyptian business students at Alexandria University were asked to participate in the survey. A total of 305 responses were collected and analyzed.

The analysis revealed that students are sensitive to the ethicality of information privacy, information accuracy, and information access. However, students are insensitive to the ethicality of property (software) right. In addition, years of education have a main effect on students' attitudes towards property, and gender and age have an interaction effect on students' attitudes towards access.

The findings of this research are based on a cross‐sectional data set collected from a sample of business students at a public university. Students, however, may make poor surrogates for business or IT professionals. Future similar research designs that employ large samples from Egyptian working professionals and students in other private and public universities are needed to verify the findings of this research.

The findings suggest that the investigated university as well as the other similar Egyptian universities should consider integrating ethics education into their curricula. Teaching information ethics, especially from an Islamic perspective, is expected to positively influence students' information ethical attitudes. The enforcement of the existing property right protection laws should also curb software piracy in the Egyptian market.

It is vital to expand the ethical research currently being performed in IT in order to help bridge the gap between behavior and IT. The findings of this research extend the understanding of students' attitudes towards the information ethics issues in Egyptian culture and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on global information ethics.