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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 paper aims to explore future and emerging information and communication technologies. It gives a general overview of the social consequences and ethical issues arising from technologies that can currently be reasonably expected. This overview is used to present recommendations and integrate these in a framework of responsible innovation.

The identification of emerging ICTs and their ethical consequences is based on the review and analysis if several different bodies of literature. The individual features of the ICTs and the ethical issues identified this way are then aggregated and analysed.

The paper outlines the 11 ICTs identified. Some of the shared features that are likely to have social relevance include an increase in natural interaction, the invisibility of technology, direct links between humans and technology, detailed models and data of humans and an increasing autonomy of technology that may lead to power over the user. Ethical issues include several current topics such as privacy, data protection, intellectual property and digital divides. New problems may include changes to the way humans are perceived and the role of humans and technology in society. This includes changing power structures and different ways of treating humans.

The paper presents a piece of foresight research which cannot claim exact knowledge of the future. However, by developing a detailed understanding of possible futures it provides an important basis for current decisions relating to future technology development and governance.

The paper spells out a range of recommendations for both policy makers and researchers/industry. These refer to the framework within which technology is developed and how such a framework could be designed to allow the development of ethical reflexivity.

The work described here is likely to influence EU policy on ICT research and technology research and innovation more broadly. This may have implications for the type of technologies funded and broad implications for the social use of emerging technologies.

The paper presents a novel and important broad view of the future of ICTs that is required in order to inform current policy decisions.

This study aims to investigate the ethical issues related to the internet of Things (IoT) deployment in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from an individual employee's perspective. To provide researchers and practitioners with concrete tools for examining these matters, an ethical framework dedicated to IoT is introduced.

First, the applicability of Mason's original privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility (PAPA) framework is studied in the IoT context. Second, issue category additions are proposed based on the identified coverage limitations of PAPA.

While the original PAPA framework can be utilised as a generic ethical evaluation tool, it lacks coverage of several IoT-specific issue areas. To thoroughly address the ethical risks associated with IoT, two additional categories are introduced.

The new framework requires further validation to ensure its applicability and to identify potential modification requirements in continuously evolving IoT ecosystems.

Considering the lack of ethical IoT frameworks, this study provides organisations with a practical framework for analysing the ethical issues in IoT deployment.

Ethical standards for IoT have not been sufficiently addressed in the current literature and frameworks, making the ethical considerations dependent on subjective stances. Thus, there is an acute demand for a practical framework that outlines the general ethical standards, helping its users to thoroughly address the potential ethical issues.

While the use of IoT keeps growing in SMEs, there is an apparent lack of ethical guidelines. This study contributes to the gap by introducing a preliminary framework for both practical use and further theoretical development.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on ethical issues and reasoning in expert reports concerning healthcare governance, commissioned by the Swedish healthcare system.

An in-depth analysis of ethical issues and reasoning in 36 commissioned expert reports was performed. Twenty-seven interviews with commissioners and producers of the reports were also carried out and analysed.

Some ethical issues were identified in the reports. But ethical reasoning was rarely evident. The meaning of ethical concepts could be devalued and changed over time and thereby deviate from statutory ethical goals and values. Several ethical issues of great concern for the Swedish public healthcare were also absent.

The commissioner of expert reports needs to ensure that comprehensive ethical considerations and ethical analysis are integrated in the expert reports.

Based on an extensive data material this paper reveals an ethical void in expert reports on healthcare governance. By avoiding ethical issues there is a risk that the expert reports could bring about reforms and control models that have ethically undesirable consequences for people and society.

This paper aims to seek to develop and validate the scale for organizational decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues, which addresses the issue of framing the dependent variable in a dichotomous way in organizational ethical decision-making (EDM) models and complementing the inter-variable circular causality model within the purview of Islamic banking with Quranic orientations.

This study adopted both exploratory and confirmatory approaches. A total of 362 responses were collected from banking practitioners in the United Arab Emirates using a self-administered questionnaire. Content validity test (CVT) and factor analysis were used to refine measurement items and define as well as validate the scale, respectively. Further, the validated factors/scales were tested using the theoretical underpinning of the inter-variable circular causality model with Quranic orientations.

CVT refined the measurement items, and it enhanced the qualitative aspect of the proposed scale. Total three dimensions extracted, i.e. “awareness,” “attitude” and “standards” through exploratory factor analysis and evidence of validation of measurement scale/construct reported through confirmatory factor analysis. Further, a significant inter-variable circular causal relationship was found among the validated dimensions and analysed with an Islamic perspective.

Study constraints the population into a single industry and a single country. Future studies are suggested to use the newly developed scale/construct in decision-making models and obtain the overall model fit by considering population from diversified organizations and multi countries.

Comprehensibility of organizational behaviour has always been critical for the efficient functioning of organizations, especially where the situation involves ethical concerns. The proposed scale can be used as a tool to assess the organizational decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues, particularly where the studies intended to examine the determinants of organizational decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues through decision-making models.

While there is ample literature attempted to examine the organizational EDM, particularly on evaluating determinants of EDM, the majority of the studies have failed to frame the dependent variable of the EDM models adopted for the study in such a manner that is in line with the objective of the study. Although some of the literature suggest the theoretical aspects to address this issue, to date, no work has been done that attempted to develop and validate the scale for the theoretical aspects recommended and confirm with the inter-variable circular causality model. These serve as justification for undertaking this study.

Concerns the stances that Indian and UK managers take towards ethical issues at work. This topic is part of the broader cross‐cultural research agenda on managerial values. Makes a contribution to the subjects of business ethics and corporate citizenship. The responses of samples of Indian and UK managers to ethical issues were classified, using a research instrument called Redundancy, by eight ethical stances that are defined in a conceptual framework presented. The results are used to clarify issues that arise from the literature about Indian and UK managers’ values. The tentative findings are that Indian managers’ ethical stances were similar to those of Western managers but that, compared with the UK respondents, they were more likely to experience ethical tension between their personal, espoused, stances and those they took at work. The preference for a pragmatic, ethical puzzle, approach to issues, that was reported by both Indian and UK samples, is seen as a problem in developing good corporate citizenship. Presents an agenda for future research.

Moral intensity is the degree of feeling we have about the consequences of moral choices, similar, for example, to those perceived for crimes, from petty larceny to murder. Moral intensity is thought to increase moral sensitivity and judgment. Because the accounting professions require members to respond to accounting fraud with more sensitivity and intensity, we examine this response in 220 professional accountants (mostly Certified Public Accountants) under a controlled experiment using two different cases. We examine the first three parts of the Rest (1986) model including ethical evaluation, judgment, and intention to act. We measure moral intensity in the accountant’s perception of overall harm and societal pressure. As in prior research, we find that the degree of moral intensity may be contextual. We find that the ethical evaluations may become affected by perceived overall harm, and whistleblowing intentions by perceived societal pressure. However, in both cases, the professional’s judgments are most affected by moral intensity. Consistent with prior research, whistleblowing intentions may involve many other mitigating variables, such as audit reporting or non-audit reporting limited by codes of conduct. These findings relate to the increasing attention paid by the SEC to finding accounting fraud.

This manuscript makes three important contributions to the existing literature. First, there are few studies in this area and Jones (1991) identifies that moral intensity is issue contingent; therefore, replication studies using different scenarios are needed. Second, Bailey, Scott, and Thoma (2010) have suggested that accounting ethics research has focused too narrowly on Component II of Rest’s Four-Component Model. None of the previous studies looked at all three steps in Rest’s Model; therefore, our manuscript provides an important contribution over the other previous studies. Third, our sample uses professionals and not students as surrogates for professionals.

This paper aims to critically reassess established approaches to the teaching and analysis of computer ethics, and to propose a revised methodology, drawing on the practical experience of teaching undergraduates in a culturally diverse, international learning environment.

Theoretical in scope, reviewing concepts and methods in the existing literature and developing an alternative inter-disciplinary and multi-dimensional framework.

Ethical analysis can benefit from broader, inter-disciplinary perspectives that take into account the social and economic context in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are designed, deployed and used, and the complex forces that drive their development. A richer analysis of this context enables a better understanding of the specific properties and applications of ICTs which, in turn, foreground particular ethical issues. This can result in a more self-reflexive and rounded appreciation of the ethical, legal and professional issues invoked by ICTs.

The paper develops a revised, flexible methodology for doing ethics which can be applied to any case study or domain of application. It outlines some of the key questions and major ethical principles that are generated by ICTs. The paper has pedagogical value for both teachers and students of computer ethics, but has relevance also for information technology professionals and practitioners.

Commentators have claimed that business schools encourage unethical behavior by using economic theory as a basis for education. We examine claims that exposure to agency theory acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing ethical behavior among business students. We experimentally test whether economics coursework or a manipulated competitive vs. cooperative frame affects measured ethical behavior in simulated decision settings. We measure ethical behavior using established tasks. We also measure ethical recognition to test whether agency theory reduces recognition of ethical issues. Exposure to agency theory in either prior classwork or the experiment increased wealth-increasing unethical behavior. We found no effect on unethical behavior that does not affect wealth. We found no effect of exposure to agency theory on ethical recognition. Usual laboratory experiment limitations apply. Future research can examine why agency theory reduces ethical behavior. Educators ought to consider unintended consequences of the language and assumptions of theories that underlie education. Students may assume descriptions of how people behave as prescriptions for how people ought to behave. This study contributes to the literature on economic education and ethics. We found no prior experimental studies of the effect of economics education on ethical behavior.

The purpose of this study is to analyze newspaper coverage of ethical issues in the pharmaceutical industry.

The top five US newspapers were audited over two years and yielded 376 articles, which appeared as front‐page stories or editorials. First, headlines were analyzed and categorized as positive, negative, or neutral toward the industry. Next, the full‐text of each article was analyzed and ethical issues in each article were categorized. Then, articles were evaluated to determine whether the opposing point of view was included. Finally, comparisons were made between the identified issues and the issues cited by PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry's trade association.

Analysis of the ethical issues revealed different results for the two years. In 2004, the most common issues covered were drug pricing, data disclosure and importation/reimportation. In 2005, drug safety was the number one issue, due to Vioxx^® with drug pricing a distant second. Headlines were negative 57.1 percent in 2004 and 43.9 percent in 2005. Full‐text articles were negative 69.5 percent in 2004 and 60.1 percent in 2005. The opposing point of view was included 77.7 percent in 2004 and increased to 82.7 percent in 2005. Ethical issues cited by PhRMA, (e.g. drug pricing), received heavy coverage but several identified issues were not on PhRMA's list, notably drug safety.

Pharmaceutical companies need to take action to address the negative impression about them.

This research establishes a practical methodology to evaluate newspaper coverage of ethical issues involving the pharmaceutical industry.