Search results

The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics courses provided to Malaysian accounting students and their impact on ethical judgement‐making ability.

Third‐year accounting students from six Malaysian universities participated in a pre‐ and post‐ethics course study. The sample consisted of four universities which provide an ethics course (experiment group) and two universities which do not provide an ethics course (control group). Rest's Defining Issues Test instrument was employed and the p‐score was calculated. Univariate tests were used to compare levels of ethical judgement‐making ability.

Students who attended an ethics course improved significantly in their ethical judgement‐making ability compared to students who did not attend the course. Male students, non‐Muslim students and students in private universities benefit more from attending an ethics course compared to their female and Muslim students and those students in public universities.

The findings indicate that providing ethics courses reshapes the ethical thinking of future accountants and thus are likely to improve the local ethical climate amongst professionals in the field. Results indicate significant improvements in cognitive moral development, although many students continue to apply conventional (Stage 4) reasoning skills when dealing with issues. The research provides a positive signal to the accounting faculties indicating that their effort in inculcating ethical values is worthwhile and this endeavour has to continue.

This study involves a controlled field study of a unique group of Malaysian accounting students and applies Kohlberg's theory of moral development to demonstrate the effect of an ethics intervention. Particular attention was given to examining conventional (Stage 4) judgment‐making processes and how this appears to be influenced by religious affiliation and university type. This adds value to the ethics literature as there are only a few studies examining the merits of Stage 4 reasoning. Most importantly, it helps to fill a gap in the literature by providing both cross‐sectional and longitudinal data from multiple samples of ethics classes, using both experiment and control groups.

The task of this paper is to critique the ethics of an university entrepreneurship curriculum. For what purpose is entrepreneurship curriculum designed? Who decides what is to be included in an entrepreneurship curriculum? Ethics has a plurality and implies moral judgment informed by any individual’s values. In applying entrepreneurship education the rationale and justification of what is offered and why should be clear. The paper provides a synthesis conducted on an extant literature review on the ethics of an entrepreneurship curriculum, entrepreneurship education stakeholders, and stakeholder rights and obligations. An ethics enquiry framework is concluded that entrepreneurship education curriculum designers can apply to surface the assumptions underpinning the curriculum and assist educators to be clear and explicit about the intent and ambitions for an entrepreneurship education curriculum design. While this paper develops a framework, it has yet to be tested. Further research can examine specific sets of stakeholder expectations, variations in obligations among regulatory or institutional settings, explicitly examine the range of effects of an entrepreneurship curriculum, and report the usability and practical relevance of such an evaluative framework. Ethics in entrepreneurship education is under-researched and more particularly the ethics of the entrepreneurship curriculum appears to have rarely been questioned. Entrepreneurship education lays the foundation for the future actions of those who shape and socially structure entrepreneurship. Therefore, as educators, there is a greater responsibility for ensuring that the education provided meets certain expectations of and obligations to various stakeholder groups.

This paper aims to provide an objective and comprehensive evaluation of the understanding of the professional code of ethics of Indian Professional Management Accountants in Business (PMAIBs). It further delves into their individual, job and organizational characteristics as determinants of their understanding of the code.

This study relies on data from 247 responses to a survey-based questionnaire. Overall scores and sub-scores of the level of understanding of the code were calculated based on questions grounded in IESBA Code and ethical dilemmas. The drivers of these scores were then examined using one-way ANOVA, OLS, Probit and ordered probit regressions.

This study found considerable heterogeneity in Indian PMAIBs' understanding of their professional code of ethics and substantial scope for improvements. PMAIBs were stronger in Application, Resolution and Threats but weaker in Theory and Principles. Further, PMAIBs who had ranked themselves higher on code-familiarity, had higher moral maturity, hailed from western India and worked for foreign-listed, foreign-owned firms were found to have a higher level of understanding of the code. Highly educated elderly professionals and professionals with more responsibility areas exhibited a lower level of understanding of the code.

Insights from the study can help professional bodies, employers and academics identify and segment PMAIBs based on their ethics-training needs and customize interventions, which can benefit businesses and society through reduced corporate ethical failures. Considering the risk implications of Indian PMAIBs' inadequacies in understanding their code of ethics, the Indian professional accounting organization (ICAI-CMA) should mandate ethics in continuing professional development and expedite its long pending convergence with the IESBA code, a global benchmark for professional accountants.

This paper assesses the understanding of the professional code of ethics of PMAIBs, which is crucial yet amiss in the accounting ethics literature. While ethical decision-making is extensively researched, how well the professionals understand their code is yet unexplored. Research on PMAIBs, despite their unique ethical vulnerabilities and increasingly vital role in organizations, is still dormant. This study aims to fill these gaps by examining PMAIBs from India, an emerging economy under-represented in accounting ethics literature. India offers an important and rich setting for the study due to its large size, fast growth, deep integration with the global economy, high perceived corruption levels and poor ethical behavior of its firms.

This research aims to measure compliance in a tax experiment among students. The aim of the study is to investigate relationships between claimed behaviour in a questionnaire and actual behaviour in an experimental environment, together with different behaviours between males and females, and different age cohorts.

A total of 630 undergraduate Commerce students at a New Zealand university completed a questionnaire on attitudes towards the tax system. The students subsequently participated in a simulation experiment requiring responses to hypothetical tax evasion decisions. Individual reward payments were contingent on the outcome of these tax evasion decisions. Questionnaire responses, which captured intended behaviour, were compared with actual behaviour in the experiment.

The study finds more compliant behaviour among older students and students who have been at university longer. It also finds female students demonstrate more ethical responses in their behaviour than male students. In contrast to extant literature, it finds a positive relationship between students indicating a preference for compliant behaviour in the questionnaire, and behaviour in the experiment. This leads support for the use of Defining Issues Tests (or similar instruments that capture moral development intentions) in ethics education research, and challenges recent studies that find a gap between intended and actual behaviour.

As with all experimental research, the design is necessarily an artificial representation of the real world. Thus, the ability to generalise from this research is restricted.

Much of the research into the influence of ethics education on accounting students focuses on student claims of how they would respond in a hypothetical situation as measured by a Defining Issues Test or similar instrument, in order to provide a measure of ethical development. In contrast, this study adopts a behavioural approach. The findings indicate that Defining Issues Tests are likely to be an appropriate tool for ethics education research.

Rest posited that to behave morally, an individual must have performed at least four basic psychological processes: moral sensitivity; moral judgment; moral motivation; and moral character. Though much ethics research in accounting has been focused on component two, ethical judgment, less research has been undertaken on the other three components. The purpose of this study is to focus on component one, ethical sensitivity, of Rest's four‐component model.

A sample of 156 accounting undergraduates was employed to investigate the ethical sensitivity of accounting students and the effects of their ethical reasoning and personal factors on their ethical sensitivity.

Results of this study show that accounting students vary in their ability to detect the presence of ethical issues in a professional scenario. There is no significant relationship between accounting students' ethical sensitivity and their ethical reasoning (P‐score). Accounting students characterized as “internals” are more likely to show an ability to recognize ethical issues than those characterized as “externals.” The results also indicate that an accounting ethics intervention may have positive effect on accounting students' ethical sensitivity development. Hence, an individual who possesses the ability to determine what is ethically right or wrong (high ethical reasoning) may fail to behave ethically due to a deficiency in identifying ethical issues (low ethical sensitivity) in a situation.

Whilst much research has concentrated on ethical reasoning and ethics education to enhance the ethical conduct of accountants, it is important that the profession and researchers also direct their attention and efforts to cultivating the ethical sensitivity of accountants. The findings of this study provide additional evidence to support Rest's theory of a more comprehensive cognitive model of ethical decision‐making and suggest a more balanced research effort in evaluating the ethical development of individuals.

‘Black Africans’ in England are disproportionately and highly affected by the heterosexually contracted HIV epidemic. Policy and practice frameworks have advocated ethnic matching in HIV prevention. We explore how self‐identifying ‘black African’ workers in London were co‐producers of ‘black African’ identities to target in preventative HIV interventions. Drawing on a focused literature review and 12 in‐depth interviews with workers, the paper identifies themes associated with co‐production of an African identify by workers. The historical inclusion of the category ‘black African’ in the 1991 census coincided with the emergence of Africans as at higher HIV ‘risk’. In co‐producing an African public, the workers projected their heterosexual and Christian affiliations on to the targeted population, perceiving themselves as ‘insiders’ knowledgeable about rumours that had historically co‐produced African identities. Fear of those in authority galvanised the formation of African‐led agencies, offering entry points for HIV prevention to Africans. By projecting aspects of their complex ‘selves’ on to the ‘other’, encounters in public spaces were deemed ‘opportunities’ for outreach interventions. The ethics of ‘cold calling’, confidentiality and informed consent were taken as ‘given’ in these socially produced ‘private’ spaces located in ‘public’ venues. In following HIV prevention frameworks as advocated by Pulle et al (2004), the workers endorsed yet problematised the notion of ethnic matching.

Undergraduate accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia is a unique case. The program includes 147 credit hours of which 28 credit hours are religious courses. This study aims to examine the effect of teaching these religious courses on students’ ethical perceptions and decisions.

A survey was conducted for a sample of accounting students at Umm Al-Qura University. The sample was divided into two groups; the first group includes students who did not study religious courses, while the second group includes students who study religious courses. The questionnaire contained three groups of questions that aimed to explore students’ perceptions of ethics in general, students’ perceptions of business ethics and explored their ethical attitudes regarding some accounting decisions that involve ethical dilemmas. Independent two-sample t-test and multiple regression analysis were used to determine whether the responses of the two groups were significantly different.

The findings of the study revealed that teaching religious courses led to an improvement in students’ perception of business ethics and an improvement in students’ ethical decision-making. However, the results of the independent sample t-test showed that this improvement was not significant. The results of the study also revealed that male students tend to make less ethical decisions than female students.

The findings offer an indication for those responsible for managing the accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University to start developing the program so that some of the general religious courses are replaced with specialized courses in accounting ethics that focus directly on ethical dilemmas faced by the accountant when practicing the accounting profession.

This study contributes to the current literature related to examining the effect of teaching ethics courses on the ethical perception of accounting students by focusing on accounting students in Saudi Arabia as a context that has not been examined before.