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Women find it difficult to achieve promotion into senior administration positions in education systems throughout the Western world. This paper reports on interviews with 23 women who are employed by Education Queensland (Australia). These women, who were all participants in a Women in Management course offered by the Queensland University of Technology, have been successful in being promoted into administrative positions in schools and school support centres. The focus of the paper is on why these women have gone for promotion and the successful strategies that they employed to achieve promotion. These strategies included “putting runs on the board”, being persistent, networking, managing in their own way and accessing appropriate professional development. The paper concludes with the warning that the culture of the central bureaucracy, however, is perceived as overwhelmingly male and this acts as a significant barrier to further career progress.

This paper aims to document women's reflections on their careers over a ten‐year period to provide quantitative baseline data on which to frame follow‐up in‐depth interviews. The participants work in the public service in Queensland (Australia) and had been recommended for, and participated in, women in management (WIM) courses conducted in the early 1990s.

Data were collected by means of a survey (containing closed and open items) which gathered demographic data and data related to employment history, perceptions of success and satisfaction, and the women's future career expectations.

Findings revealed that the percentage of women in middle and senior management had increased over the ten‐year period, although not to the extent one might have anticipated, given that the women had been targeted as high flyers by their supervisors. While not content with their classification levels (i.e. seniority), the majority of the cohort viewed their careers as being successful.

Questions arise from this study as to why women are still “not getting to the top”. There are also policy implications for the public service concerning women's possible “reinventive contribution” and training implications associated with women only courses.

The study is part of an Australian longitudinal study on the careers of women who attended a prestigious women‐only management course in the early 1990s in Queensland. This is now becoming a study of older women.

This paper takes position against the spread of the free-market logic in the domain of accountancy, where free market is often viewed as undeniably benefiting society and users of financial statements. A key moment that paved the way for the growing influence of the free-market logic in accountancy resides in the elimination of institutional ethics rules prohibiting direct and uninvited solicitation of clients, which occurred in the 1970s. Importantly, it was (some would say quite naïvely) assumed that auditors would be able to maintain their independence from auditees in a surrounding climate emphasizing market competition and individualism. However, research indicates that before the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen, a number of auditors were significantly concerned about auditor independence being undermined in actual practice. Yet, their concerns were kept largely in the dark. It took the billion-equity collapse of Enron and the powerful imagery related to the shredding of documents by its external auditor Arthur Andersen, as well as the collapse of WorldCom a few months afterwards, to bring to light the undermining of auditor independence in the public arena and to create a momentum in favour of reforming authoritative regimes of auditor independence, therefore constraining to some extent the influence of the free-market logic in accountancy. My main argument is that these collapses could perhaps have been avoided if auditors’ dissenting and negative points of view on auditor independence had been voiced, heard, and appropriately taken into account by accounting organizations and regulatory bodies. Accordingly, it is recommended that channels be established for practising auditors to communicate concerns that emerge from their daily experiences and which cast doubt on the conceptual foundations of financial auditing. Establishing such mechanisms may help to guard against the excesses of the free-market logic; the latter definitely should not reign unchallenged.

This case study deals with the financial accounting fraud at Sunbeam Corporation during the time “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap was the company’s CEO. This was a very pervasive fraud, involving improper revenue recognition, understatements of the reserves for sales returns and bad debts, abuse of the rules governing consignment sales, and other manipulations. While the amounts involved seem insignificant when compared to those of Enron and WorldCom, the study of Sunbeam is illuminating. Many of the problems at Sunbeam were caused by an abusive and egotistical CEO. In addition, Sunbeam’s external auditor during the period of the fraud was Arthur Andersen. Sunbeam can be viewed as being part of a continuum of audit failures extending from Waste Management to WorldCom. This case is designed in part to serve as an antidote to the coverage found in typical accounting by exposing students to a real situation in which people knowingly violated GAAP, and still received a clean audit opinion, and the company was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.

A basic principle underlying the public securities markets in many countries is that the interests of investors need to be protected. Independence from their clients (i.e., client management) is supposed to make it more likely that auditors will protect investors’ interests. This paper examines the question whether acting in accordance with professional rules governing accounting and auditing is sufficient to provide such assurance. In addition to a set of rules, it is argued that investor protection requires that auditors possess, or act with, integrity. An analysis of the principle of acting with integrity, as contained in the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, shows that its formulation of the principle conflicts with the concept itself, and thus that the profession's commitment to integrity is questionable. Five recent and prominent cases are examined, which show that the required integrity may be lacking. The implications of a lack of integrity are discussed at the end.

It is in the context of the huge (but largely unaccountable) impact of accounting and accountants that the demise of Arthur Andersen and the financial scandals of the past few years need to be seen. These scandals raise questions of independence and the role of the audit industry in alerting investors, employees, suppliers, customers and the general public to the realities of corporate wrongdoing and weakness. This paper introduces a Special Issue that offers a counter-hegemonic story, pointing out that things can be different and better in substantive ways, that auditor independence and integrity require more substantive thinking and analysis than simple re-arrangements of regulatory institutions or calls for superheroes who can transcend pressures to abet crime. After reviewing the contents of the various contributions to this Special Issue, the paper makes some brief comments about possible solutions to the problem of independence of audits and suggests a focus on audit, not auditor, independence.

Ethics play an important role in society; however, many economics models assume that individual players act “economically” rational and ignore situations where an individual may forgo economic benefit for the public good. This chapter models the strategic interaction between auditors and management and allows for management to choose the economically irrational outcome of behaving ethically even when doing so defies their own financial self-interest. One of the model's assumption is that a certain percentage of managers do not engage in a “strategy” to misreport their financial statements because doing so is “unethical”. If recent accounting scandals are indicative of an ethical crisis in this country, this model offers hope because an increase in the percentage of unethical mangers leads to a decrease in fraudulent reporting. The model also illustrates the effects of an increase in the rewards for committing fraud (e.g., greater numbers of stock options, restricted stock, and accounting-based performance incentives) and an increase in the penalty for detected fraud (e.g., stiffer penalties for fraud from Sarbanes–Oxley).

Whitehead's notion that if you say something for long enough, it will be believed, aptly describes the development of the latest corporate governance regimes. Curbing managerial opportunism is the current focus, but the regimes contain only more of what has failed in the past. Inexplicably, at a time when reformers are declaring their allegiance to principles over rules, long-standing principles are being by-passed and more rules imposed. Whereas much of what the rules address is contestable, the frequency with which it is proclaimed has been seductive – it is being accepted as if it were true, not by virtue of either convincing evidence or argument, but through the power of repetition. Stock options in executives remuneration packages are to be expensed, not because they satisfy expensing criteria, but because of the penetration of the mantra that they are expenses; independence is being accepted as the consequence of not being in particular relationships, not because that will change one's state of mind, so much as it will appear likely to have done so; and impairment calculations are being declared superior to conventional amortization techniques, not because of any demonstration that they better indicate the decrease in the market price of a physical asset, but because of the repetition of the impairment litany. Corporate governance is being perceived as a set of processes, rules to be complied with, rather than the desired outcome of them – that is, the authority exercised with probity and unquestionable integrity over corporations’ affairs, for the public good. There is a less than clear explanation of whether or how the separate governance processes mesh with one another. The governance miasma confuses rather than clarifies corporate activity. Underpinnings of the mechanisms in the governance regimes have achieved a false status of concreteness. Contrary to the universal indoctrination, the case is stronger for fewer, rather than more, governance rules.

This paper reviews key aspects of the regulatory response in the UK and the USA to the apparent crisis of confidence in auditing stimulated by Enron and other recent corporate scandals. Drawing on a consideration of the nature of the market for auditing services and the regulatory and corporate governance structures in which auditing is embedded, the paper argues that the bulk of recent regulatory attention appears to have been on matters of auditor independence rather than auditor competence. Such a focus is seen to have parallels with former ‘crisis’ eras in the auditing arena, while the analysis presented also raises questions about the status of the auditing function within accounting firms and the capacity of regulatory reform to deliver a fundamentally enhanced auditing function. The paper concludes by stressing the importance of making more transparent what is being done in the name of auditing and audit regulation.

The integrity of audited financial statements has been widely criticized, especially over the last decade. Arthur Levitt, then chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), brought widespread attention to the practice of earnings management in a speech he delivered in 1998 (Levitt, 1998). His successors in the SEC have also focused on the issue. The business media has also devoted much coverage to the topic and criticized the creative accounting practices of many well-known companies. These factors, in conjunction with the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, have probably engendered a loss of confidence in the credibility and transparency of audited financial statements. Two months after the Enron accounting irregularities became public, a Wall Street Journal article attributed a 250-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to concerns over widespread accounting misconduct (Browning & Weil, 2002). These same concerns were cited as a significant factor for the downward trends in the equity markets almost a year later (Browning & Dugan, 2002). The business media has offered numerous opinions such as these as to how investor confidence in audited financial statements has declined. However, a review of the literature found no corresponding empirical study conducted subsequent to the Enron and WorldCom revelations. Accordingly, this study examines the extent to which individual investors’ perceive that their attitudes involving the quality and usefulness of the information in audited financial statements have changed as a result of these events. The results indicate that investors perceive that a notable decrease of confidence in various dimensions of the quality and usefulness of this information has occurred. The findings indicate that accounting regulators and other parties should undertake actions to help restore investor confidence.