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Curriculum design is often a challenge. It is particularly so when the subject is sustainability, which is an aspirational but contested concept, draws on a range of disciplinary insights and is relatively new to university curricula. There is no single “right way”, or even agreement across the disciplines that inform the collective enterprise about general approaches to sustainability curricula. The likely content is ill‐defined and spans departmental units and budget areas in most traditional universities. Like other societal and institutional attempts at realising sustainability, curriculum design for sustainability is beset by difficulty, yet an essential intellectual activity. This paper aims to focus on these issues.

The paper compares actual curriculum development processes for “sustainability” in two very different Australian universities, as studied using participant observation and qualitative interviews.

The paper draws out some of the common challenges of interdisciplinary curriculum design for sustainability, and identifies four principles transferrable to other institutional adaptation settings. It argues that curriculum design is an opportunity to develop collegiality, and further advance the problem area under discussion.

Case study research is often difficult to generalise to other settings. The opportunity to observe two sustainability curriculum design processes, operating in parallel, provides transferrable insights.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the change in management accounting and control systems (MACSs) within two large public manufacturing companies in Libya so-called Trucks and Buses Company (TBC) and National Trailers Company (NTC).

The paper is based on semi-structured interviews, an analysis of documents and observations. It draws on New Institutional Sociology (NIS) perspective (DiMaggio and Powell’s 1983) as theoretical framework to provide explanations regarding how the MACS in the two companies were shaped by various factors.

The main factors identified in shaping the operations of the MACS were the need to comply with the political pressures, the Libyan Government’s laws and regulations, the instructions imposed by the management committee in both companies, leading organizations’ pressures (ISO), customer satisfaction (coercive isomorphism), the influence of professional associations (normative isomorphism) and the need to imitate efficient organizations in order to be more legitimate and successful (mimetic isomorphism).

The findings of the study have implications for understanding the operations of MACS in developing countries. Future research could focus on alternative theoretical perspectives for the investigation of the process of change in MACS such as structuration theory, agency theory and actor-network theory.

The proposed theoretical framework provides insights into the process of change by focusing on the interplay between the institutional forces, market forces and intra – organizational power relationships to overcome the criticism of NIS that it downplays the role of market forces and intra – organizational power relations.

The extant literature has established that industry-specialist auditors gain performance-enhancing industry-specific sub-specialty knowledge (e.g., Solomon, Shields, & Whittington, 1999) via training and on the job experience. This knowledge has been shown to allow specialists to outperform non-specialists on a range of industry-specific tasks. The current study extends this line of research by comparing and contrasting the relative performance gains enjoyed by industry-specialist auditors in two different industry settings, one regulated and the other unregulated. When specializing in regulated industries, auditors gain very detailed industry-specific knowledge which is not the case for specialists in unregulated industries (Dunn & Mayhew, 2004). By comparing industry-specialists to non-specialists with matching industry-based experience, this study measures the relative benefits of specialization in different industry settings, rather than the benefits of specialization per se, which has been well established in the literature. This study finds that the performance gains made by regulated industry-specialists significantly outweigh those made by unregulated industry-specialists on industry-specific tasks. The implications of these results for future research and practice are explored in the body of the chapter.

In this study 43 auditors of varying rank (staff/assistant, senior/supervisors, and managers/partners) and expertise level (candidates for specialty, competent specialists, and expert specialists) assessed the degree to which they believed themselves and their colleagues possessed detailed expert attributes. Definitions of 11 attributes that were found by Abdolmohammadi, Searfoss, and Shanteau (2004) to be extremely or very important to expertise in audit specialty were provided to the subjects for their assessment. As hypothesized, the possession of many attributes that can be classified as trainable and developable differed by professional rank. However, innate attributes of intelligence and quick thinker did not differ by professional rank. Also, as hypothesized, systematic biases in assessment of possession of attributes of superiors and subordinates were observed, as well as evidence of inflated bias of self by some participants. Implications for accounting practice, education, and research are discussed.

This study contributes to the cognitive processes and expertise research in judgment and decision-making in auditing. It uses the levels-of-processing theory (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) to investigate the amount of auditor attention given to information during internal control documentation procedures, and the effect of this attention on internal control information acquisition and risk assessment. Based on levels-of-processing, the attention required to complete an internal control questionnaire (ICQ) is predicted to result in the acquisition of more internal control information than when a completed ICQ is reviewed. In addition, auditors who complete an ICQ should assess control risk more like experts’ than auditors, who review an ICQ completed by another individual. Results suggest that the audit seniors who completed an ICQ retained significantly more internal control information than audit seniors who reviewed an ICQ completed by another individual. This result held when separately examining the internal control strengths and weaknesses. In addition, audit seniors who completed an ICQ-assessed control risk at a level comparable to the control risk assessments of audit managers in the same firm.

This chapter discusses the benefits, limitations, and challenges in developing research projects that integrate a combination of archival, behavioral, and qualitative research methods. By demonstrating the inherent strengths and weaknesses of using a single method in isolation, this chapter aims to broaden our understanding of why and how research that examines various issues from the different perspectives is richer than employing any single method and enhances our understanding of a given accounting phenomenon. This chapter also discusses how investigating an issue through multiple research methods can help researchers improve the generalizability of findings and present a panoramic view of a particular phenomenon.

To investigate the nature of investment expertise and factors affecting the information processing and performance of investment experts, this paper hypothesizes normative characteristics of investment expertise and compares such characteristics with actual characteristics documented in prior literature on the investment expert. Based on collective evidence from these sources, a model of investment expertise is proposed.

Results support the existence of investment expertise in (1) the nature of knowledge, (2) problem solving and information search, and (3) performance. A variety of factors that could influence the information processing and performance of the investment expert, including personal, cognitive, and contextual elements, are also discussed in the paper and included in the proposed model of investment expertise.

The recently passed Statement Financial of Accounting Standard (SFAS) 123R mandates that stock-option compensation costs be recognized in the income statement. This supersedes SFAS 148 and the earlier SFAS 123 which required only disclosure in the notes to the financial statements. The motivation of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) was to increase transparency in reporting of financial statements. The objective of this chapter is to test whether sophisticated users’ perceptions and judgments are affected by the different reporting format that has been mandated by SFAS 123R. Members of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) were used as the participants in this study. The study finds a (1) higher perceived risk, (2) lower expected accounting return, (3) more pessimistic overall perception, (4) more negative future stock price direction, and (5) lower stock price valuation by sophisticated users in the presence of recognition versus disclosure. These findings support the stance of the FASB and indicate that that information content is accentuated in the presence of recognition relative to disclosure.

This study provides evidence on the relationship between scale characteristics and participant responses for percentage-based scales (i.e., 101 points) in accounting research. A 4 × 1 between-subjects experiment examines how common labeling designs affect various statistical properties, including means, variance, normality of the distribution, and frequency of responses. The results indicate that labels on percentage-based scales have a significant impact on the distribution of participants' responses. Labeling only the endpoints is the lone condition that results in normally distributed data. Additional analyses suggest that labels on percentage-based scales influence participant responses in multiple ways. First, as the number of labels increases, participants may not adequately consider, and thus ultimately select, unlabeled points. Second, while participants seem to inherently interpret percentage-based scales in quartiles and deciles, labeling as such exacerbates this tendency. Finally, when more labels are present, participants seem to engage an anchoring heuristic when selecting their response. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that accounting researchers may benefit from labeling only the endpoints of percentage-based scales.