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The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the recent literature on internal audit independence and objectivity and discuss opportunities for future research. The topics examined are the organizational status of internal audit, the internal auditor's dual role as a provider of assurance and consulting activities, internal audit's involvement in risk management, outsourcing and co‐sourcing of internal audit activities, and the use of internal audit as a training ground for managers.

The approach used in this paper is a review of the literature followed by an identification of further research opportunities.

The paper summarizes the existing body of knowledge relating to internal audit independence and objectivity and identifies gaps in the literature where further research is needed.

The paper provides researchers with a useful summary of the literature on internal audit independence and objectivity and stimulates them to engage in further research in the area.

This study examines the effects of incentive compensation and guanxi, a type of informal personal relationship between people, on the objectivity of Chinese internal auditors. Given that the objectivity of internal auditors is essential for promoting financial reporting quality, it is important to investigate the effectiveness of internal audit functions, especially in emerging markets where the corporate governance mechanisms designed to promote objectivity are less mature.

The research employs a 2 × 2 between participants experiment with 116 graduate accounting student participants.

After controlling for internal auditors’ ethicality, we find that close-guanxi between management and internal auditors and incentive compensation in the form of bonuses based upon meeting earnings targets both have the capacity to impair the objectivity of Chinese internal auditors. Participants were more tolerant of management’s attempts to manage earnings when there was close guanxi or bonus compensation. Further, compensation structure only influenced internal auditors’ support of management when guanxi was distant, but when there was close guanxi between internal auditors and management, internal auditors were unlikely to challenge management regardless of the compensation structure.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether transformational leadership affects auditor objectivity.

The investigation is based on a field survey of 198 practicing auditors employed by audit firms operating in Sweden.

This study finds that transformational client leadership negatively affects auditor objectivity and that the effect is only partially mediated by client identification. Given these results, suggesting that auditors are susceptible to influence by their clients’ perceived exercise of transformational leadership, leadership theory appears relevant to the discussion of auditor objectivity in the accounting literature.

Previous accounting research has applied the social identity theory framework and found that client identification impairs auditor objectivity. However, the effect of transformational client leadership on auditor objectivity, which reflects an intense auditor-client relationship, has been neglected before this study.

This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.

This paper takes a broad introductory look at the notion of objectivity within the western philosophic tradition of liberal individualism and exposes how this is related to, or sets the stage for, the creation of learning objects as a concept. Objectivity is predicated on ideas such as the removal of context and the ability to transcend social, cultural and discursive position. Learning objects have often been conceptualised as outside of context as well. This paper presents some of the criticisms of this approach in transcending context and suggests that this conceptualisation may prove problematic in the successful execution, creation and distribution of learning objects.

The purpose of this article is to chronicle the publication events in the 1980s and 1990s that framed the development of the series of controversies in marketing that are known as the “philosophy debates”.

The article uses a participant’s retrospective approach.

The article finds that seven publication events are key to understanding marketing’s philosophy debates. The seven are the publication of the “little green book” by Grid, Inc. in 1976; the philosophy of science panel discussion held at the Winter American Marketing Association Educators’ Conference in 1982; the special issue of the Journal of Marketing on marketing theory in 1983; three articles on the “critical relativist perspective” by the Journal of Consumer Research in 1986 and 1988; the “blue book” by South-Western in 1991; a trilogy of articles on truth, positivism and objectivity in the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Consumer Research in 1990-1993; and an article on “rethinking marketing” in the European Journal of Marketing in 1994.

Chronicling the key publication events enables readers to understand what the debates were about and provides readers a starting point for further investigating the issues in the debates.

Practising internal and external auditors regularly find that crucial concepts governing how they operate are the twin terms of independence and objectivity. Part of the problem is that the two terms are often equated. The impact can be conflict with the auditee, misunderstanding with other stakeholders, impairment of efficiency and effectiveness, and role conflict within the internal audit department. The Institute of Internal Auditors is reviewing some of the cherished notions of internal audit in the light of pressures and developments in the business environment. It has already produced a new definition of internal auditing, which, as before, includes the terms independence and objectivity. Consistently, it decided to re‐evaluate these two terms, and established an international research team. This was the briefing submission from the UK, which was highly influential in determining the final product, not yet in the public domain. It considers professional statements and standards, research and developments in both internal and external auditing.

People express subjectivity and objectivity in everyday communication, yet little is known about how such linguistic content affects persuasion in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). Drawing on the congruity theory and the selectivity model, the present study proposes that the effectiveness of subjectivity/objectivity expressions in an online review is contingent on whether the consumption experience is primarily hedonic or utilitarian, and whether the decision maker is a male or female. Furthermore, this study aims to examine the psychological mechanism that underlies the proposed effects.

This research used an experimental design to test the hypotheses. Four versions of online review stimuli were created. Participants were asked to read the online reviews and to complete a survey.

The findings indicate that expressing subjectivity (vs objectivity) in online reviews effectively boosts men’s purchase intention in the hedonic context and women’s purchase intention in the utilitarian context. Furthermore, the mediation analysis reveals that perceived relevance of the review is the psychological mechanism explaining the joint effects of linguistic style, consumption type and gender on purchase intention.

This research is the first to examine expressing subjectivity (vs objectivity) as a persuasion strategy in online reviews. Findings of this research add to the growing literature on linguistic effects in eWOM. Furthermore, this research deepens the understanding of conversational norms for hedonic vs utilitarian consumption in consumer-generated content and gender differences in processing online reviews.

This research aims to explore whether recent audit reforms have improved auditor objectivity when performing non-audit services.

In two separate experiments, the authors tested whether external and internal auditors' inventory obsolescence judgments are influenced by their client's (or company's) role as the buyer or seller in an acquisition setting.

External auditors assessed the likelihood of inventory obsolescence objectively, regardless of their consulting role in the acquisition setting. Internal auditors assessed the likelihood of inventory obsolescence as higher when consulting for the buyer than when consulting for the seller, consistent with the supposition that the buyer would prefer to write-down inventory and negotiate a lower purchase price, whereas the seller would prefer the inventory not be written down.

From a regulatory perspective, external auditors may be relying too much on the work of internal auditors if internal auditors' lack of objectivity as consultants extends to their assurance role.

This paper extends prior research in the area of internal and external auditor objectivity and is the first paper to include both subject groups in the same experiment. It also addresses the current policy issues that may have a significant effect on audit quality and auditor liability.

Examines the role of professional associations, governmental agencies, and international accounting and auditing bodies in promulgating standards to foster auditor independence domestically and abroad. Focuses specifically on the role played by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Government Accounting Office. Also looks at other professional associations in banking, industry, and manufacturing sectors dealing with sensitive issues of auditors′ involvement in such matters as management advisory services, operating responsibilities, outsourcing, opinion shopping, auditor rotation, and other conflicts of interest which may impair auditor independence.