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Student populations in higher education in the United States have become increasingly diverse as a result of demographic changes. As a result, educators need an understanding of the background and characteristics of these demographic subgroups in order to improve the quality of their education. Students’ approaches to learning affect their quality of learning and are influenced by their perceptions of the learning environment and assessment. The present study extends prior research by examining the approaches to learning, assessment preferences, and the relationship between approaches to learning and assessment preferences of intermediate accounting students enrolled in a public university in the United States with a diverse student population. Students with higher deep approaches to learning had higher preferences for assessment involving higher-order thinking tasks, integrated assessment, and nonconventional assessment. Students with higher surface approaches to learning had lower preferences for assessment involving higher-order thinking tasks. The differences in these relationships for subgroups of students defined by citizenship, age, gender, and race are presented. The implications of the results for teaching and learning in accounting education are discussed.

In crafting Auditing Standard No.3 (AS3), a primary objective of the PCAOB was to reduce auditors' exposure to litigation by raising the standard of care for audit documentation. We examine whether the increased documentation requirements of AS3 affect legal professionals' perceptions of audit quality and auditor responsibility in the event of an audit failure. Our experiment consists of a 3 × 2 between-participants design with law students serving as proxies for legal professionals. The results of our experiment indicate that when an audit procedure, namely the investigation of inconsistent evidence, is not required to be documented, legal professionals perceive the performance of the work itself but not its documentation to significantly increase audit quality and reduce the auditor's responsibility for an audit failure. When documentation of the procedure is required, as per AS3, legal professionals perceive enhanced audit quality and reduced auditor responsibility only if the performance of the work is documented.

Group members often reason egocentrically, both when allocating responsibility for collective endeavors and when assessing the fairness of group outcomes. These self-centered judgments are reduced when participants consider their other group members individually or actively adopt their perspectives. However, reducing an egocentric focus through perspective taking may also invoke cynical theories about how others will behave, particularly in competitive contexts. Expecting more selfish behavior from other group members may result in more self-interested behavior from the perspective takers themselves. This suggests that one common approach to conflict resolution between and within groups can have unfortunate consequences on actual behavior.

Moving beyond the question of whether large corporations are truly addressing sustainability, some scholars have explored the degree to which CSR activities are purely symbolic or substantive in nature. Most of the studies have focused on external stakeholder pressures. The aim of this chapter is to extend this line of inquiry by theorizing that the dynamics among internal stakeholders also shapes CSR conduct.

This theoretical contribution borrows from research on socially responsible indices, behavioral corporate governance theory in CSR and from recent research that has leveraged attribution theory to better understand reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR).

Our chapter proposes that firms adhering to substantive CSR practice are less likely to be punished by external stakeholders than otherwise. From an internal stakeholder viewpoint, it suggests there is a positive relationship between the number of board ties to reputable universities/nonprofit organizations and substantive CSR practices; and a negative relationship between managerial discretion and substantive CSR practices.

This chapter can have social applicability as it deals with stakeholders’ role in pressuring the modern organization to engage in substantive CSR.

As aforementioned, most studies explore the relationship between CSR compliance and external stakeholder pressures. In contrast, the relationship between internal stakeholder dynamics and CSR compliances is still not well understood. Hence, the incorporating of these dynamics provides theoretical insights for the CSR, sustainability, and corporate governance arenas.

This chapter explores how Cypriot lecturers perceive and experience fear while being at work. Drawing on the lens of interpretive inquiry, data were collected through interviews with 19 lecturers. Analysis focused on experiences of workplace fear offering rich insights into characteristics of fear, eliciting events, and coping ways. Findings help to unveil the specific events that lead to fear in the Cypriot universities, and the ways lecturers manage their fearful experiences. The study contributes to the study of discrete emotions, by empirically examining fear’s own storyline through the workers’ own perspectives, within a specific context.

Using attribution theory as a basis, this study increases the understanding of the tax preparer/client relationship by examining how tax return outcomes affect the level of responsibility that clients and nonclients place on tax preparers. This study also examines the impact of tax return outcomes on the continued use of the preparer. Attribution theory maintains that whether an event has a positive or negative outcome and whether an individual is directly involved in the event (i.e., an actor) or is an impartial third party (i.e., an observer) will affect where the individual places the responsibility (or cause) for the event. This study examines actors/clients' and observers/nonclients' responsibility assessments related to a tax deduction taken for positive (no IRS audit), negative (IRS audit with penalty and interest assessments), and mixed (IRS audit but the client's tax position is upheld) tax return outcomes. These responsibility assessments are examined across the taxpayers' initial beliefs concerning the tax deduction. The results are consistent with attribution theory. Actors/clients assigned more responsibility for the IRS audit to the tax preparer than did the observers/nonclients. For the no IRS audit situations, the actors/clients felt that they were more responsible for the positive outcome while the observers/nonclients gave the credit to an external factor, the tax preparer. In the mixed outcome situations, both the actors/clients and the observers/nonclients placed responsibility on the tax preparer. Overall, these results indicate that clients blame tax preparers for any tax return that is audited. This conclusion is further strengthened by the finding that in any situation where the client's return was audited, even with a positive audit outcome, both the actors and the observers were significantly less likely to retain the preparer in the future. The study also found that subjects' initial beliefs concerning whether to take an ambiguous tax deduction were not significant in the subjects' assignment of responsibility for the tax return outcomes in situations where an IRS audit occurred.

It is reasonable to assume the existence of a new “dynamic” that influences how to measure reference services in libraries and how we evaluate the reference librarians who provide those services. Traditional, face-to-face delivery of reference services is reported to be declining, and there is myriad evidence, albeit largely uncollated and little evaluated, which suggests reference librarians are delivering significant and increasing amounts of the services they render in network environments. These trends raise questions, in turn, about how well we understand the current state of affairs in reference services, particularly where the management and evaluation of reference services in network environments are concerned.

The purpose of this study is to investigate relevant circumstances and conditions bearing – directly and indirectly – on changes in the nature, form, substance, and effects of reference services – through the reference librarian experience. Specifically, this attitudinal study will account for and assess changes in reference services (in the context of a medium-sized private university with a national reputation for successfully integrating information technologies into the educational process), with the further aim of developing an understanding of how to capture statistics and evaluate reference services and personnel in this dynamic environment. Reference librarians at a second mid-sized public university library were also interviewed for comparative data analysis in this study. Select portions of this paper have appeared in other publications in shorter, focused, introductory articles.