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This study aims to demonstrate how pressures (incentives) in the audit environment can lower audit quality because of a breakdown between professionally skeptical (PS) judgment (risk assessment) and PS action (testing).

The authors used a Qualtrics-based experiment with attitude change as a proxy measure of cognitive dissonance (CD). The authors analyze the results using a one-way independent between-group ANOVA with post hoc tests and t-tests.

The authors find that auditors experience CD when they fail to take appropriate high PS action (audit tests) that are in line with high PS judgment (risk assessments). The motivational force to reduce CD drives auditors to revise their assessments upward (rank higher), lower diagnostic audit tests (PS actions) and lower risk assessments (PS judgments). This leads to lower overall professional skepticism, and hence lower audit quality.

This investigation provides an empirical investigation of Nelson’s (2009) model of professional skepticism and demonstrates a specific mechanism for how incentives in the audit environment lower audit quality. Based on the findings, treatments to enhance audit quality can benefit by strengthening the critical link between PS judgments (risk assessments) and PS actions (audit tests).

The purpose of this study is to explore the social and collective foundations of the auditor’s judgment and specifically highlights that the dialogical dimension of auditors’ judgment is founded on both their interactions with their auditees and their interactions with their colleagues.

This qualitative study is based on interviews with 22 audit partners, conducted between March 2013 and October 2016, in France.

The research points out the complexity of auditor judgment. Confronted with issues such as equivocal and ambiguous circumstances, auditors must question the relevance of the meanings elaborated to act according to the situation (self-criticism or doubt) and must be wise and not be overconfident toward the information provided by the manager (wisdom). Last but not least, the findings also suggest that contrary advice helps auditors to improve an alternative point of view and hence reach a consensus.

The research uses a K. Weick sensemaking approach and contributes theoretically to gaining deeper understanding of the social dimension in audit judgment, by showing that professional judgment is an interactive and social practice.

This study aims to examine the association between Iranian auditors' narcissism and the auditors' professional skepticism.

The authors' sample is comprised of 355 professional auditors working in the private and public sectors in Iranian firms in 2022. The authors use cross-sectional multivariate regression as the main methodology, along with the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

The authors find that a higher level of narcissism leads to a greater level of professional skepticism among auditors, which ultimately can enhance the quality of the audit process. The results provided via the robustness tests also supported this finding.

The authors' findings further the understanding of the role of narcissistic personality traits in improving professional skepticism among auditors of an Islamic and emerging country. In addition, audit firms and audit partners can also consider the findings of this study and enhance the effectiveness of audit processes by assigning appropriate employees with certain personalities to specific tasks.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct linkage between professional scepticism and auditor independence.

The study reviews the extant literature on professional scepticism, auditor independence, conflict of interest and unconscious bias.

Auditor independence is a fundamental antecedent to professional scepticism. However, auditor independence is impossible due to the auditor–client structure and conscious and unconscious personal bias. The threats to auditor independence are powerful incentives that reduce professional scepticism, making it difficult to exercise professional scepticism while making professional judgement.

An understanding of the direct link between professional scepticism and auditor independence is necessary to appreciate the context and meaning of professional scepticism in relation to the greater body of literature and ongoing concerns of audit regulators. This paper, which conceptualises the linkage between professional scepticism and auditor independence, provides a platform for future research to be conducted to examine the validity of the discussions and how a discourse in a moral framework embedded within accounting education may assist in improving auditor independence and professional scepticism.

It is insufficient for audit regulators to assess professional scepticism by audit outputs. Threats to independence should be brought into the assessment. To ensure auditor independence is not compromised, auditors should be made aware of the ethical dimensions of their decisions and reminded constantly to monitor virtue ethics behaviours.

This paper brings into mainstream accounting and auditing literature and research a psychological perspective of auditor independence in the discussion of professional scepticism that is seldom examined.

The purpose of this study is to present the results of an experiment that examines the effects of client management’s increased disclosure of related party transactions (RPTs) on auditors’ judgments of financial reports that contain RPTs.

This study used a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment to investigate auditors’ judgments in response to questionable RPTs in a Chinese context.

The results show that the auditor participants assessed a lower likelihood that the client’s financial statements were intentionally misstated and that they were less likely to request additional evidence when the client management chose to disclose more, as opposed to less, detailed RPT information in their disclosure. Moreover, there was a significant interaction between disclosure level and client incentive to manipulate earnings on the likelihood of the auditor requesting additional evidence.

This study should be of interest to regulatory agencies that have expressed concerns over auditing practices related to RPTs.

The findings from this study help to provide a more in-depth understanding of disclosure literature by investigating voluntary RPT disclosure and the moderation role of clients’ incentives to manipulate earnings.

The public trust in auditors’ judgments and reputation plays an important role in substantiating audit functions as value‐added services, which lend credibility to published financial reports. Recent numerous financial restatements by high profile companies coupled with bankruptcies of major companies caused by reported financial statement fraud have eroded public confidence in financial reports and related audit functions. Restoring the public confidence requires considerable efforts by legislators, regulators, standard‐setting bodies, the business community, and the accounting profession. This article suggests 12 ways that the accounting profession can rebuild public trust in financial reports and related audit functions.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

This paper aims to investigate an integrated, holistic assessment of the characteristics by which consumers judge non-sponsored product review video (PRV) source, message and medium components as credible, and how these are linked to personal values for a deeper understanding of multidimensional credibility assessments of PRVs.

Employing a means-end approach, the authors draw on credibility theory and the persuasion knowledge model to analyse data from 21 in-depth semi-structured laddering interviews.

First, the authors demonstrate distinctive contributions of the video modality towards PRV credibility assessments and the interplay between specific PRV characteristics, cognitive and socio-emotional consequences, and personal values in an ongoing process of credibility assessment. Second, high persuasion knowledge creates awareness of the potential phoniness of the market, revealing a dark side to PRV use even in non-sponsored PRV seemingly created and shared as an act of benevolent concern between consumers.

This paper focused on the credibility of non-sponsored PRVs, future studies might investigate motivations and attributes by which users judge sponsored reviews. Also, the roles of specific product categories and existing brand trust on PRVs credibility provide avenues for further research.

This research offers practical implications for reviewers and brand managers to leverage the unique informational values of video by focusing on the interplay between credibility attributes and customer values.

This work advances credibility theory in the PRV context by examining how non-sponsored PRVs are evaluated as credible, by highlighting consumer persuasion knowledge and scepticism and including the holistic effects of the interplay between source, message and video format characteristics and by linking these to consumers’ goals and values.

Understanding the factors that impact the audit quality of work performed by affiliated offshore entities has become imperative for US accounting firms. The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the role that cultural differences have on the trait professional skepticism mindset of future auditors in the USA and India.

The authors use the Hurtt (2010) Professional Skepticism Scale (HPSS) to evaluate the role that culture has on the trait professional skepticism mindset of a sample of future auditors in the USA and India.

The authors identify three distinct dimensions of trait professional skepticism embedded in the HPSS. The research finds no significant differences between USA and Indian auditing students on the evidential “trust but verify” dimension of trait professional skepticism; however, US students score higher on the behavioral “presumptive doubt” and self-reliance dimensions.

Given culture significantly influences trait professional skepticism, firms and regulators should be highly cognizant of the type of work that is being sent offshore. Firms using affiliated offshore entities should also ensure that robust integration practices are used to facilitate the level of professional skepticism necessary to perform a quality audit.

By identifying three separate dimensions in the HPSS, the research takes an important step in understanding the factors that impact the quality of audit procedures performed in a critical affiliated offshore entity for US-based accounting firms.

The Instagram site, teacherwhispers, was created as part of a qualitative research project that chronicled the stories and lived experience of preservice and graduate teachers. Since 2020, the purpose of the study was to identify themes connected to the participants' experiences of current trends in education. The intent was to situate the research as a critical interruption into the bigger political discourses surrounding education. The study sought to question why pedagogical practices are increasingly being positioned and located for political and economic reasons and to frame the questions of how we emerge as teachers in specific moments in time.

The methodology employed in the project was ethnographic and narrative-based, representing stories of teachers and teaching. Ethnography as embodiment contributes to an evocative portrayal of the participants' experiences. Teacher stories can be used to progress understandings of schools and schooling and play an important role in reflecting upon and learning from experience.

The selection of posts from teacherwhispers have brought into sharp focus the broad range of difficulties and rewards that are inherent in teaching. The site has been a microcosm of current issues in education. As a problematic and uncomfortable site of public pedagogy, it has been a site for sharing the realities, specificities and challenges of situatedness. The places where teachers work within their respective communities are highly diverse and can be a source of pressure both professionally and personally. Consequently, in the analysis of teacherwhispers, generalisations have been avoided.

As a repository of data for research, a public online site has its challenges; research is meant to be generalisable but in teaching each setting is unique and generalisations can be problematic. Sites of public pedagogy for teachers tend to be kaleidoscopic representations: diverse locations, groups, interests and disciplines. They are a stark reminder to be sceptical of accepting the statement, “research tells us” without questioning the positioning and biases that are inherently at play.

Practical elements of the project have included navigating a public online space for the dissemination of data.

Created in the spirit of problematising the methodology of public pedagogy, the online space at the centre of this project eventuated into something of a definition of what can be problematic in defining teachers' spaces of connection. The site was a place where opinions were expressed in confidentiality and that problematised methodology by putting into question what that methodology may be in a public sphere. What came forth as a result of putting methodology at the centre, rather than a definite answer, was unpredictability.

The online space has been an original place to display unanalysed data. The willingness to tell stories through an intermediary was juxtaposed by the public readership's unwillingness to engage with the stories, which would have meant exposing their identity. The online space is one that is increasingly relevant in public sharing and communications relating to communities of practice. This research is a critical interruption to the bigger political discourses in education. It questions why pedagogical practices are increasingly politicised. The project has been significant in mapping the stories of emerging educators at a time of unprecedented pedagogical change.