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Using experimental scenarios, the current study suggest that the management accountants’ professional attributes social obligation, professional autonomy, professional affiliation, and professional dedication are associated with three ethical rationales that have been identified as playing important roles in ethical judgment, the perception of the ethicality of an action; moral equity, contractualism, and relativism. Understanding these issues will assist in determining the management accounting professional attributes that should be fostered in encouraging the ethical judgments of management accountants since research indicates that the moral equity and contractualism rationales are consistent with individuals at the post-conventional stage of ethical development and more ethical judgments while the relativism rationale is consistent with the conventional stage of moral development and less ethical judgments.

In 2001, Ellis and Griffith used a multidimensional ethics scale including three subdimensions of moral equality, relativism and contractualism to examine the ethicality of IT scenarios. In the 20 plus years to follow, there has been an exponential growth in uses and users of technology. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to ascertain if the multi-item ethics measure remains valid in spite of the technological advances and progression of communication made possible through technology.

The survey consisted of technology-related ethical situations, an ethical judgment scale, an engagement scale and demographical questions. The sample size was 366, consisting of mainly white, upperclassman, American-native males having proficient experience with computers and spending an average of 20 h or less a week on a computer.

The findings reveal that both moral equity and relativism have a positive relationship with engagement across all tested scenarios, while contractualism has a positive relationship in four scenarios. Furthermore, a significant difference between the means of gender exists in four of the six scenarios. These findings indicate that indeed college students can not only recognize, but also make an ethical decision to not engage in unethical behavior and reconfirm that using a multidimensional ethics scale is warranted.

This study is not without limitations. First, the data is cross-sectional and causal inferences are not warranted. Second, the sample consisted of students and may not be generalizable to employees. Therefore, future research may sample employees in a technology organization to provide greater insight into ethical judgment and engagement in such scenarios. Another limitation of this study is that the scenarios were generated from students discussing their concerns regarding various ethical judgment situations they anticipate encountering in the near future with technology. Although this method of developing scenarios addresses current concerns of students, some of the scenarios do not directly apply to the workplace and may appear to be limited in their applicability. Therefore, future studies should consider developing scenarios that reflect more practical situations that occur in the workplace in general and through work-life blending.

One of the implications of these findings is that universities and business schools who embed ethics courses in the curriculum need to incorporate moral reasoning in ethics courses, as moral reasoning is an essential component of ethical decision-making and is shown to have a positive relationship with engagement in this study. By providing students with instruction on moral reasoning, universities can equip them with the skills to make ethical decisions that align with the values of their future employers and ameliorate their engagement levels. Continuing professional education in these ethical issues areas helps bridge college edification with practical career application, and ensures that as technologies and situations change, future business professionals are equipped to navigate changing environments and ethical scenarios.

With a brighter spotlight shining on employee ethical behavior both in and out of the workplace (Parker et al., 2019), the ability to make moral choices is vital. This study’s findings indicate that an increased focus on ethics education in universities is effective in helping future business professionals recognize and avoid ethical lapses. Therefore, it may be worthwhile for organizations to invest in ethics training programs to promote ethical decision-making skills among employees. By doing so, organizations may create a culture that values ethical behavior and provides employees with the tools and knowledge necessary to make informed and ethical decisions.

This study highlights the importance of ethics education and training programs and underscores the need for organizations to foster a culture of ethical behavior. Additionally, the study’s findings regarding gender differences call for greater efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace, particularly in leadership positions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore epistemic conditions to make a comparative anthropology on contract thinking, regarding what could be defined as normative principles of democracy in organisations. Also to examine the influence of seminal works to contract thinking today, i.e. Psychological contract (Denise M. Rousseau) and Social contract (Jean‐Jacques Rousseau).

Use of a Seven normative criteria comparative framework discriminating forms of democratic contracts today.

The paper presents a grid to assess later works on psychological contracts; and criteria defining a “democratic contractualism”.

The paper assesses the initial theory of psychological contracts and its reception from 1995 to 2005.

The paper strengthens the psychological contracts' framework with historical and external comparisons.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of product harm, consumers' product knowledge and firms' negative information disclosure on ethical evaluation of a firm, especially, the moderating effects of product knowledge and negative information disclosure.

A 3×2×2 between‐subject design with three levels of product harm, two levels of product knowledge, and two treatments of negative information was used in this study. The experimental product is diet food.

The findings reveal that the level of product harm affects consumers' ethical evaluation. Furthermore, the individual's ethical evaluation will influence his or her purchase intention. The main effect of subjective knowledge is significant while its moderating effect is not significant. It is also found that the negative information disclosure will lower consumer's ethical evaluation of a firm, and the effect of product harm on ethical evaluation will be stronger for harmful products than for harmless products when the negative information is disclosed.

Marketers might need to be especially responsive if their practices result in a diminished reputation for their firms and lost sales. Exploiting the vulnerability of consumers or worsening their situation by marketing harmful products might be evaluated as unethical under principles of justice. It is suggested that marketers include increased disclosures of actual product harm levels relative to industry norms.

Consumers' product knowledge and firms' negative information disclosure are integrated into the model, exploring the effect of product harm on consumer's ethical evaluation of a firm and their moderating effects are discussed.

To build public trust in the accounting profession, previous research studies have stressed the need for ethics education. This present research aims to investigate the effects of teaching ethics using the ethics education toolkit (EET) developed by the International Accounting Education Standards Board on accounting students’ moral judgment.

An experimental design was used to determine the effects of teaching ethics using the EET on moral judgment. Data were obtained using the multidimensional ethics scale questionnaire and analysed with multiple linear regression. Factor analysis was performed to obtain the four moral philosophies defined in the literature.

The results confirm that use of the EET improves the moral judgment of accounting students. The influence of utilitarianism and relativism on moral judgment was reduced, while the students’ ability to recognise violating an unwritten contract as an unethical act was improved. Contrary to expectations, the influence of justice on moral judgment decreased.

The study may benefit academics by showing positive outcomes of EET use. The EET is a well-developed teaching tool, also suitable for educators insufficiently qualified to develop their own ethics courses or facing time constraints.

The EET was developed to support implementation of ethics education in programmes for professional accountants. By investigating the applicability and effects of the tool in higher education, this study aims to develop moral judgment in accounting students before they enter the accounting profession.

This article's purpose is to analyse the current transformations of public action in two main respects: on the one side the relationships between individuals and institutions and their recent evolutions, on the other, the new contractual or market‐like ways of designing and implementing public action. This twofold transformation and the extent to which it represents a deep‐seated revolution or a more limited recalibration of the public realm are to be investigated against the case of Swiss active labour market policies.

This issue is examined through the design of a theoretical and normative typology, which is then applied to the case of active labour market policies in Switzerland, based on an in‐depth empirical investigation (more than 50 interviews with field actors).

The emergence of new modes of governance coincides with the promotion of market solutions to unemployment, thus leading to a conception of welfare and its individual beneficiaries as subordinate to labour market requirements.

The empirical part of this paper focuses on one specific case, the Swiss ALMPs. Further research is needed for a more general assessment of the issue.

One key element of the approach is the link made between substantial and procedural issues related to recent evolutions in the field of social integration policies. In the authors' view substantial and organisational aspects of the political process should be studied jointly.

Activation policies in most Western countries have discovered the private tool of contract and in a short period of time the contract has penetrated the whole domain. Among the forerunner countries contracts in different forms, collective as well as individual, have become the central steering instrument. The purpose of this article is to shed some light on what this change can and does entail for the individual job seeker on benefit. Job seekers are no longer expected to passive undergo treatment but expected to contribute actively to one's own return into the labour market. The main rationale behind this shift is the idea that working with contracts increases the level of involvement and, therefore improves results over time: results in terms of better motivated clients, more focused policymakers, providers and frontline workers delivering client‐orientated services.

Using qualitative research the article maps the different types of contracts using empirical material from eight countries.

The findings are presented in the form of the practical potentials and pittfalls of contracts for the individual.

A major added value is the multidisciplinary approach used by the authors; the phenomenon of contracts is analysed from a social science and a legal point of view.

The paper seeks to explore the implications of a critical approach to theory and method in the study of social enterprises and social entrepreneurship.

The paper presents a re‐reading of the findings in a major case‐study based research programme. The author reflexively re‐evaluates the findings and compares them to different theoretical traditions to identify whether these theoretical lenses shed further insight on the raw findings.

The analysis indicates that the theoretical perspectives of “contractualism”, “managerialism” and “agencification” are good explanatory frameworks for the data produced in the research but so too are “militant decency”, “social movements” and “post‐liberal” theories. As well as illustrating the limits of knowledge, the exercise also indicates that the apparent weakness and failure identified in the case studies are evidence of a “recalcitrance and resistance” that is essential to the emerging identity of the social enterprises.

The paper highlights the importance of being honest to the complexity and ambiguity of data produced in field research and that some important findings can be missed when “outlier” data are ignored. The re‐evaluation of data on this basis also indicates that weakness and failure in social enterprises should not be avoided and worked out of the system. Rather, operating in the context of weakness, failure, recalcitrance and passivity are the grit in the pearl that make social enterprise so valuable.

The paper contributes, in its critical theory approach, to method and analysis in the field of social enterprise research. The paper indicates that no single theoretical structure fully explains social enterprise and that existing critical management theories shed significant new light on the field. The paper, in applying an experimental approach to theory, also highlights the small amount of work that has been done in the field on failure, doubt, weakness and humility.