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Accounting educators and practitioners believe that ethics instruction should be incorporated into the accounting curriculum. Methods of incorporation include integrating ethics into existing accounting courses or offering a stand-alone ethics course. There are, however, obstacles to meaningful implementation. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how the two featured chapters in this special section provide examples of two intriguing accounting ethics courses. This chapter outlines the “who” (i.e., who should teach ethics), “what,” and “how” of teaching ethics gleaned from prior literature to lay the foundation for the current chapters and future research. Ultimately, the chapter summarizes “best practice” articles about designing a theme-based ethics course in accounting. Each course: (1) is taught by accounting faculty (i.e., who); (2) includes topics and material likely to resonate with students (i.e., what); (3) is a unique stand-alone course structured in a meaningful manner (i.e., how). Faculty and administrators should find this chapter helpful as it provides materials and guidance that speak directly to the obstacles of ethics course implementation.

This paper explores the contribution of the AAA Symposium on Ethics Research in Accounting to fostering accounting ethics research. For a 17-year period, the contributors, their schools of affiliation, and their research topics were analyzed to determine the extent of and trends in accounting ethics research. The research rankings of the contributing authors were examined in business ethics journals, top-40 accounting journals, and accounting education journals. Institutional rankings identify supportive places to do accounting ethics research. The impact of significant accounting scandals such as Enron and Madoff was examined and a financial scandal “bump” in paper presentations was found. Authors affiliated with Texas schools had papers following the state requirement of an ethics accounting course. A large amount of ethics education-related research was also presented at the Ethics Symposia. Overall the study results indicate that the Symposium with its AAA affiliation is a high-quality venue for paper presentation.

This research is a 6-year extension of Bernardi's (2005) initial ranking of the top ethics authors in accounting; it also represents a broadening of the scope of the original data into accounting's top-40 journals. While Bernardi only considered publications in business-ethics journals in his initial ranking, we developed a methodology to identify ethics articles in accounting's top-40 journals. The purpose of this research is to provide a more complete list of accounting's ethics authors for use by authors, administrators, and other stakeholders. In this study, 26 business-ethics and accounting's top-40 journals were analyzed for a 23-year period between 1986 through 2008. Our data indicate that 16.8 percent of the 4,680 colleagues with either a PhD or DBA who teach accounting at North American institutions had authored/coauthored one ethics article and only 6.3 percent had authored/coauthored more than one ethics article in the 66 journals we examined. Consequently, 83.2 percent of the PhDs and DBAs in accounting had not authored/coauthored even one ethics article.

This study examines the perceptions of accounting faculties toward ethics education, the extent of ethics coverage and reasons why ethics should (or should not) be taught in Japanese tertiary schools. Data for this research was collected from faculties that primarily teach accounting in Japanese tertiary schools in 2009. The results indicate that over 90% of accounting faculties believe that ethics should be taught within the accounting curriculum. In terms of how ethics should be delivered survey participants believed in a more holistic approach, which would encompass the benefits of teaching it as both a stand-alone course and integrating it with other relevant courses. This outcome is in direct contrast to the results obtained from previous studies undertaken outside of Japan. Of particular interest was the fact that the current survey revealed that only 55.2% of respondents actually intend to incorporate ethics into their accounting courses in the foreseeable future. This research successfully adds value to the shortage of literature existing on the perceptions of ethics education among Japanese accounting faculties.