Ethics in accounting education: What is really being done

Ethics In The Accounting Curriculum: What Is Really Being Covered?

“…We found that the average level of coverage of all ethics topics in a course was 9% of the course, or about 3.4 hours (or about one week). This is similar to 3.18 hours reported by McNair and Milam (1993) The strength and nature of support for integrating ethics remains an open question. Many respondents say they support integrating ethics, and this is supported by the fact that their schools offer no separate ethics courses.…”

Ethics Education and the Role of the Symbolic Market

“…That said, however, ethics is by no means seen as a key educational priority. On the surface this disconnect between values and action could be attributed to a number of factors, including a lack of time, materials, encouragement, training, or reward (cf., Loeb and Rockness, 1992;McNair and Milam, 1993). This disconnect could also be seen more broadly as a failure of will, or as a breakdown in these individualsÕ moral processes (Pojman, 2006).…”

“…The paper also focuses on accounting academics who completed their Ph.D. programs in the same social space (Bourdieu, 1989) as a top-tier journal editor, as Mitroff also implicates the fieldÕs research hierarchy in creating what is an essentially amoral (if not immoral) educational environment (see also Gunz and McCutcheon, 1998). While a number of studies have examined the views of business faculty on this subject (e.g., Alam, 1999;McNair and Milam, 1993), few have focused on these more symbolic-capital-rich (Bourdieu, 1989) members of this field, and none have attempted to gauge the views or understandings of this group using in-depth, qualitative interview techniques. Such techniques are warranted (Bampton and Maclagan, 2005) as they help record and decipher a key element in the future development of this social field, namely the meanings that social agents produce (Bourdieu, 1990).…”

Making a Difference with a Discrete Course on Accounting Ethics

“…Despite claims of increasing ethics education in the business and accounting curricula (Cohen and Pant, 1989;Dellaportas and Leung, 2001;Engle and Elam, 1985;Hoffman and Moore, 1982;Karnes and Sterner, 1988;McNair and Milam, 1993), curriculum change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary (Pizzolatto and Bevill, 1996). In accounting, ethics is commonly taught in auditing courses, and is often code-bound and concerned with rule-conformance rather than the underlying ethical issues (Cooke et al, 1987(Cooke et al, -1988Kerr and Smith 1995;Langenderfer and Rockness, 1989;Puxty et al, 1994;Wyer, 1987).…”