This study investigates the role of advantageous comparisons and professional commitment in earning management rationalization. Our study adopted a laboratory between-subject experimental design with 139 accounting students. The results show that advantageous comparisons and professional commitment affect the rationalization of earning management actions. Moreover, compared to participants with high levels of professional commitment, those with low levels of professional commitment view earning management as a more appropriate action when they are engaged in earning management and viewing the egregious example of (...) that action. This finding is important because it explains how personal psychological factors affect the ethical cognitive processes of accountants. This study complements the lack of previous studies and argues that the propensity to compare acts of delinquency depends on an individual's commitment to their profession. We also emphasize the importance of investigating this issue outside of the US context. The results of this study may be helpful to managers, practitioners, academics, and accounting researchers with a better understanding of the potential impact of exposure to earning management practices and an individual’s professional commitment to earning management behaviour. Further, based on this study, all stakeholders may be better positioned to suggest possible remedies and mitigate these behaviours. (shrink)

The attention being paid to ethics education in accounting has been increasing, especially after the corporate accounting scandals at the turn of the century. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing research in the field of ethics education in accounting. To synthesize past research, a bibliometric analysis that references 134 primary studies is performed and three bibliometric methods are applied. First, we visualize the historical evolution of ethics education in accounting research through historiography. Second, we use bibliographic coupling (...) to identify clusters of ethics education in accounting research before, during, and after major corporate scandals. Third, we perform a co-word analysis to connect the identified patterns into a map of a contextual space. The results reveal, in each decade, not only an increasing academic focus on this field of research, but also an increasing number of different research clusters. While the clusters Factors affecting moral judgement, Perception of ethics, and Lack of ethics topics in the last research period develop further from the respective clusters in the previous periods, Accounting beyond technical skills, Integration of ethics in accounting education, Use of developed ethics frameworks, and Professional values on the contrary develop anew in the last decade, as a consequence of a growing demand for teaching ethics. Overall, the paper presents the development patterns of ethics education in accounting research and sets up a research agenda that encourages future research. (shrink)

This paper explores the practices of auditors in a non-Western cultural environment. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics framework and narrative interviews with twenty Tunisian auditors, we investigate how auditors reconcile their duty to independence with the expectations of a kinship economy. Additionally, we explore how institutions—such as professional oversight bodies—play into this reconciliation. We find that, although auditors may pursue a telos at odds with international auditing standards, the purpose that these auditors serve is congruent with their moral tradition. (...) That is, rather than positioning themselves as objective arbiters of financial reporting, these auditors position themselves as guardians of their auditees. While this revised position engenders conduct that may appear to violate their independence, our auditors’ practices are congruent with the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty, as they conceive of them in the context of a Tunisian moral tradition. This study makes two main contributions to the literature. First, we provide empirical evidence into the ways in which auditors redefine independence in the context of a kinship economy. Second, we demonstrate that, when auditing local firms, auditors apply a version of professionalism that emphasizes community-oriented care over objectivity. (shrink)

The growing interest in sustainable development in all sectors of the economy has fostered a noteworthy shift toward responsible management education. This emerging view underscores that business schools provide students with more than just managerial knowledge as they also develop students toward responsible management. Based on socialization theory, we show how this development occurs by studying RME as a process that relates to students’ values, attitudes and behavioral intentions. With data from a large international survey of business students from 21 (...) countries, our findings show that RME facilitates students’ self-transcendence, the development of conservation values and positive attitudes toward corporate social responsibility. Further, RME is positively related to students’ CSR behavioral intentions through the mediating role of values and attitudes. In sum, this study extends socialization theory to the higher education domain to show that business schools can affect students’ prosocial, ethical values and intentions, with implications for responsible management and RME. (shrink)