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This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

According to the SEC, the proposed roadmap for adopting principles-based International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is still a priority. The adoption of IFRS will ultimately demand greater emphasis on practitioner judgment (Mintz, 2010). This chapter focuses on the need for building the judgment skills of the practitioner. Our methodology follows a three-step process. We start with accounting standards, reviewing similarities and differences between “rules-based” and “principles-based” standards and conclude that, while applying any standard requires judgment, applying principles-based standards requires more judgment. We then focus on preparer incentives that can influence this requisite judgment. We use the “fraud triangle” to analyze the influence of incentives on judgment under each standards setting approach. Our third and most important step involves equipping practitioners to make judgments in the presence of incentives. We present and discuss a model that considers economic, social (legal), and ethical dimensions for making principled judgments in the presence of incentives and advocate-improved education for accountants in implementing that model.

This chapter examines the association between corporate governance and environmental performance. The purpose of governance mechanisms is to build trust by ensuring that corporate responsibilities, including environmental responsibilities, are met. We obtain corporate governance data from the Investor Responsibility Research Center, Inc’s (IRRC’s) governance and director database and additional corporate governance and environmental performance data from Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini’s (KLD’s) database. Our analyses document a significant positive association between corporate governance and environmental performance. Moreover, we find that corporate governance is positively related to environmental strengths, and negatively related to environmental concerns. Our findings contribute to and extend our understanding of the relationship between governance and performance and have important implications for policy makers, managers, investors, and others.

Stuebs et al. (2021, p. 38) note that soft skills “are essential for accountants to carry out their moral agency role in society.” Indeed, calls for aspiring accounting professionals to have well-developed soft skills have been ongoing for decades (American Accounting Association [Bedford] Committee on Future Structure, Content, and Scope of Accounting Education, 1986; Accounting Education Change Commission, 1990; Albrecht & Sack, 2000; Big 8 White Paper, 1989; Lawson et al., 2014; Pathways Commission, 2012). Despite these calls, the development of accounting students’ soft skills remains elusive (Fogarty, 2019; Rebele & St. Pierre, 2019). Perhaps this is not surprising as a commonly accepted, profession-specific definition of the term is lacking, as is consensus about the corresponding capabilities comprising accounting professionals’ soft skills. Instead, those in the accounting profession have treated the term soft skills much the way Justice Potter Stewart famously described hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio 1964, p. 197). The problem, of course, is that such a description is individualistic and can lead to conflicts and inconsistencies not only in identifying the phenomenon (Baskin, 2018; Goldberg, 2010) but, more importantly, particularly in the case of soft skills, in taking steps to foster its development and measuring changes in it. Thus, understanding the term soft skills and its fundamental capabilities is a necessary prerequisite to the development of the soft skills deemed critical for future accounting professionals. In this chapter, the authors advance that understanding by developing an accounting-specific definition for soft skills and identifying a set of capabilities that comprise soft skills applicable to accounting professionals. The authors also discuss the implications of the work and conclude by recommending soft skills in accounting be referred to as professional competencies.

The authors sought to examine how hegemonic masculinity and sexism functioned in a storied, historic corporation, a test of MAnne's (2017) claim that misogyny is a structural phenomenon rather than being about anger and hatred of individual men.

This study was an archaeological excavation of discourse in a well-documented employment relationship. The researchers were informed by feminist poststructuralism and drew on critical discourse analysis of labour arbitration and media from the case of a woman, twice wrongfully dismissed.

The authors concluded that the employer was the site of hegemonic masculinity, which led to a train conductor being repeatedly targeted and demeaned in a bad faith and discriminatory manner for disrupting the conductor’s employer's patriarchal strictures. The authors found that misogyny shaped the conductors’s experience as a repeated pattern of abuse, a gendered feature of a patriarchal organisation, and a coercive matter of maintaining the conductor’s subordination. The authors also found that the male arbitrator in the conductor’s second dismissal arbitration became complicit in misogyny by penalising the conductor for acts of resistance, giving the employer what the employer wanted, to purge the conductor for violating the patriarchal norms.

The authors traced how a historic corporation demonstrated vulnerability to the resistance of a lone female worker, who faced discriminatory, disturbing and bad faith managerial behaviour in the creation of the conductor’s own meaning and resistant identity. The authors concluded that evidence of the regulation of employee relations, such as the decisions of arbitrators, can reveal the processes and outcomes of work under hegemonic masculinity, sexism and misogyny.

The accounting academy is facing two critical challenges: an increasing disconnect between academia and practice and a growing shortage of faculty. Recently, the Pathways Commission proposed that accounting programs more fully embrace professionally oriented faculty. This proposal is attractive because it would increase faculty numbers and bring a stronger practice orientation to the academy. Although there may be benefits associated with this proposal, there may also be significant unintended consequences. In this paper, we use two analogs from the NFL to highlight the risks in relying on practice-oriented faculty to solve our problems. We offer a series of reflection questions to promote further conversations on the Pathways Commission’s proposal.

The purpose of this chapter is to serve as a resource for accounting faculty seeking tax-related cases to include in their courses. This annotated bibliography provides a table and discussion of 50 educational tax cases published in six major accounting journals from 2003 to 2021. Cases are classified and discussed by recommended course placement. In addition, the authors make observations about trends in case content and format. This chapter complements the Fogarty (2022) review and commentary on tax cases published in this volume.

This paper aims to examine the effect employee performance has on subsequent corporate cash holdings.

The authors utilize panel data estimation, including an instrumental variable approach, to identify the relation between employee performance and subsequent corporate cash holdings. These panel data consist of 11,087 firm-year observations over the period 1992 to 2015.

The authors document a positive and statistically significant relation between firm employee performance and subsequent cash balances. A one standard deviation increase in employee performance is associated with an increase in cash holdings ranging from 1 to 2 percent. The findings support the view that firms seek to accommodate the preferences of better performing employees, thereby requiring greater levels of cash. This positive relation is most evident among firms with low bond ratings and firms with low managerial ability – characteristics that are indicative of a firm's ability to access capital markets.

Better corporate governance of the firm is commonly associated with lower levels of cash. The findings of this paper, however, suggest that holding greater levels of cash may be a consequence of corporate efforts to accommodate the needs of their employees. The predictive content of employee performance is orthogonal to existing determinants of corporate cash holdings shown in the literature. Furthermore, this paper shows the potential for firm cash balances to be an alternative and transparent measure that signals better employee performance and more socially responsible firm behavior.