The Ideological Mentality of an Accounting Student at a Crossroads (The Case of Bahrain)

Abstract

The accounting teaching process at the University of Bahrain (UoB) reflects competition of three sources of ideological influences with each having two main tendencies: the ethicallybased goal, i.e. profit/wealth maximization vis-à-vis social welfare and the ethically-based teaching approach to beliefs, i.e. indoctrination vis-à-vis education. The three sources are the Bahrain cultural values dominated by Islamic Shari'a and Arabic system of values with a tendency toward social welfare goal and indoctrination, the traditional school of accounting ethics permeated by Milton Friedman's single social responsibility doctrine restricted solely within achieving cash profit/wealth maximization with a tendency toward indoctrination and the non-traditional school of accounting ethics dominated by a belief in true social responsibility with a tendency toward education. Though an empirical investigation based on four samples of accounting students at UoB, this paper tries to demonstrate that the three sources of ideological influence compete to dominate the mentality of an accounting student. Although the empirical investigation shows that the traditional school of accounting ethics slightly has an upper hand over both the Bahrain cultural values and the non-traditional school of accounting ethics, the ideological mentality of an accounting student is really at a crossroads. This orientation in the teaching process must be encouraged since it makes accounting a vivid, lively and illuminating science of knowledge. The current teaching process at UoB allows both accounting indoctrination and accounting education to ideologize together 2 .