Ranking North American accounting scholars publishing accounting education papers: 1966–2011

This paper ranks accounting’s education authors who teach at institutions located in the United States and Canada. During the 46-year period from 1966 through 2011 that we examined, 13 journals published accounting education papers; the publication period for each journal varies. The data indicate that only 31.4% of accounting’s 4855 doctoral faculty who teach at schools in North America have one or more publications in these 13 journals. For those doctorates still teaching, the research provides rankings of authors by doctoral year and for four periods: 2002–2011 (most recent 10 years), 1992–2001 (next 10-year period), 1966–1991 (last 26 years), and for the entire 46-year period. To acknowledge the contributions of retired and deceased authors, the research lists those authors who would have been included on the overall list had they still been actively teaching. While Urbancic (2009) and Brigham Young University (BYU) provide rankings of authors in accounting education, these rankings are limited in the scope of the journals included – Urbancic includes only six accounting education journals, while BYU includes only Issues in Accounting Education. We found that Urbancic’s (BYU’s) 10-year (20-year) data had a Spearman’s rho of −0.84 (0.39) with our rankings. We believe that data presented herein provides a more comprehensive ranking of accounting’s authors in the area of education.     

Ranking accounting authors and departments in accounting education: different methodologies – significantly different results

This research tests whether Holderness Jr., D. K., Myers, N., Summers, S. L., & Wood, D. A. [(2014). Accounting education research: Ranking institutions and individual scholars. Issues in Accounting Education, 29(1), 87–115] accounting-education rankings are sensitive to a change in the set of journals used. It provides updated rankings for accounting-education authors from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States using a sample that included the publications in 13 accounting-education journals. Our analysis indicated that Holderness et al.’s rankings of authors and departments were significantly different from our rankings. This research provides rankings of the top 50 authors and departments for three periods: from 2010 to 2015, from 2004 to 2015, and from 1992 to 2015. We provide data indicating the distribution of authors for these periods to assist authors not listed in the most prolific lists in determining their relative ranking. Finally, we provide data on the distribution of journal choices for accounting-education publications for the authors from each country.     

Changes in accounting education: preparing for the twenty-first century ∗

The Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) was formed in the USA to be a catalyst for change in accounting education. The AECC has called for fundamental changes in what is taught and how it is taught. The AECC has issued Position Number 1 that describes the desired objectives for accounting education and has made ten grants to four-year and graduate schools to stimulate curriculum changes.     

Ethics and accounting education in the UK — a professional approach?

Although the expectation of accountants is that they will always employ high ethical standards, empirical evidence suggests that individual accountants are, at best, no more ethically aware than average. This gap between expectation and reality could be the result of inadequate education. Universities cannot be relied upon to teach accounting ethics to prospective professional accountants principally because too few accountants have an accounting degree and because of the surface nature of accounting students' learning. The professional bodies pay only lip-service to ethics education in their syllabi and their treatment of ethics is thus both quantitatively and qualitatively inadequate. Accountants are consequently ill-prepared to face ethical dilemmas.     

Governance and compliance in accounting education in Vietnam – case of a public university

Prior research suggests that despite the mass development of higher education in Vietnam recently, the quality of higher education is declining. This study aims to understand the impact of the education reform on the quality of university accounting education by investigating the involvement of different stakeholders in accounting education within one leading university in Vietnam. The findings from the interviews of key stakeholders suggest that accounting education in Vietnam is driven by reduced state control, growing institutional autonomy and increasing external guidance. This has come at the expense of reduced academic self-governance as lecturers have discretion in curriculum delivery at the individual course level, but little input into the decision-making at the school or university level and minimal participation in the curriculum development process. The findings enable regulators and decision-makers to better understand the dynamics between stakeholders in accounting education to enhance accounting graduates’ competencies and outcomes.     

Using “EDGAR” in accounting education: an example from an advanced auditing course

This paper discusses the use of the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) electronic filing system called EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) in an advanced auditing course. EDGAR is used to supplement the study of the operations and functions of the SEC. Students are required to access EDGAR through the Internet and to obtain reports of various companies for discussion in class. Focus is on the role of the auditor in reporting on client information contained in the reports. The purpose of the exercise is to help make students aware of the power and magnitude of the Internet as an information resource.     

On the convergence of management accounting and financial accounting – the role of information technology in accounting change

In this article we theorize and conceptualize the recent convergence of management accounting (MA) and financial accounting (FA) with the advancements in information technology (IT), and explicate not only how this convergence is manifested in the technical and technological domain, but also how it is reflected in their convergence at the behavioral and organizational level.Drawing on the analytical model by Hemmer and Labro (2008), in which the forward-looking perspective of FA leads to forward-looking MA, we build a conceptual framing to analyze this convergence. According to this framing, information technology (IT) serves as a facilitator, catalyst, motivator, or even an enabler for the convergence of MA and FA. We further argue that convergence is a much broader phenomenon than claimed by Hemmer and Labro. It firstly covers the technical and technological domain, including the intentional integration of information systems and software, as well as the intentional combination of methods or standards, extending thereafter to the behavioral and organizational domain with the (un)intentional alignment regarding both functions and processes as well as the (un)intentional convergence regarding both work and roles. The applicability of this conceptual framing is illustrated with a set of examples.We present illustrations of the manifestations and outcomes of convergence in both the technical and technological domain (related to accounting standards, discretionary reporting, performance measurement, transfer pricing, competitor, customer and contractor analysis, due diligence in M&As), and the behavioral and organizational manifestation domain (related to accounting processes, work and the role of accountants, incentive systems, accounting and control in multinational companies, the control of business networks, the board of directors and venture capitalists). Based on our observations, we conclude that the forward-looking FA elements are often intertwined with MA, and vice versa, and that convergence in the technical and technological domain appears to precede convergence in the behavioral and organizational domain. In most of our observations, IT plays an important or even crucial role in this convergence process. In the light of these convergence observations, we open several avenues for further research.     

Do accounting measurement regimes matter? A discussion of mark-to-market accounting and liquidity pricing

Using a model with banking and insurance sectors, Allen and Carletti show that marking-to-market interacts with liquidity pricing to exacerbate the likelihood of financial contagion between the two sectors. In this discussion, I lay out the main ingredients of their model and explain how they interact with liquidity pricing to generate financial contagion. I then discuss some limitations of their model and propose an interesting extension.     

Educating digital natives for the future: accounting educators’ evaluation of the accounting curriculum

The global digital revolution has irrevocably transformed societies and industries. The accounting profession is predicted to experience a significant change in the future, due to technological developments. Practices will be automated and related positions obsolete, thus accounting graduates need to be educated for new and different tasks and positions. The current study focussed on these expected changes and how accounting profession, practice and, consequently, education will be affected and adjusted to these new technologies in an evaluation approach. A qualitative methodology was employed, investigating accounting educators’ perceptions of these developments. Semi-structured interview data and online accessible empirical data, such as podcasts, were analysed in two coding cycles. The findings illustrate that while significant changes are expected, participants’ opinions vary regarding the necessity of adjusting the accounting curriculum. Supportive changes include amending respective courses to emphasise classic skills, such as problem-solving, and contemporary skills, such as new technologies, to illustrate developments practically.     

Has goodwill accounting gone bad?

Prior to SFAS 142, goodwill was subject to periodic amortization and a recoverability-based impairment test. SFAS 142 eliminates periodic amortization and imposes a fair-value-based impairment test. We examine the impact of this standard on the accounting for and valuation of goodwill. Our results indicate that the new standard has resulted in relatively inflated goodwill balances and untimely impairments. We also find that investors do not appear to fully anticipate the untimely nature of post-SFAS 142 goodwill impairments. Overall, our results suggest that, in practice, some managers have exploited the discretion afforded by SFAS 142 to delay goodwill impairments, thus temporarily inflating earnings and stock prices.     

Can ethics be taught in accounting?

This paper extends the work of accounting educators and researchers who have sought to develop and implement effective ethics interventions in the accounting curriculum. Its purpose is to assess the influence of ethics interventions, integrated into a one-semester introductory auditing course at both the undergraduate and graduate level, on the moral development and ethical behavior of accounting students. Ethics interventions were based on the review and discussion of ethics cases following a well known pedagogical framework over the first 10 weeks of one academic semester. The effectiveness of these interventions was tested two ways. First, using the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and a pre/post-test research design, the moral development of accounting seniors and graduate students in four separate auditing classes was assessed. Second, students' unethical behavior, defined as excessive “free-riding” on an economic-choice experiment based on the Prisoners' Dilemma, was observed by the researcher. In summary, results of this study show that ethics interventions did not cause accounting students' level of ethical reasoning to develop (increase) and did not curtail students' free-riding behavior. Findings also provide evidence of an association between ethical reasoning and students' economic choices, where students with relatively low and high levels of ethical reasoning were most likely to engage in free-riding. The implications of these findings are discussed in the last section of the paper.     

Alternative management accounting research—whence and whither

This paper reviews alternative management accounting research in AOS from 1976 until 1999. We highlight seven different research perspectives that have flourished under this label: a non-rational design school; naturalistic research; the radical alternative; institutional theory; structuration theory; a Foucauldian approach; and a Latourian approach. It is contended that these different approaches have assumed an important role in raising a number of significant and interesting disciplinary insights. As a form of collective non-positivist enterprise, alternative management accounting research has demonstrated: the many different rationalities of management accounting practice; the variety of ways in which management accounting practice is enacted and given meaning; the potency of management accounting technologies; the unpredictable, non-linear and socially-embedded nature of management accounting change; and the ways in which management accounting practice is both constrained and enabled by the bodily habitudes of its exponents. In conclusion, we consider how alternative management accounting research may sustain its distinct contributions in the future.     

The first course in accounting: students’ perceptions and their effect on the decision to major in accounting

Little empirical evidence exists regarding students’ perceptions of the first course in accounting and the effect of these perceptions on deciding whether or not to major in accounting. The purpose of this study is to begin examining student perceptions regarding the first accounting course and how those perceptions relate to selection of accounting as a major. The study separately examines initial perceptions and changes in perceptions over the semester for intended accounting and non-accounting majors, and assesses the association of individual accounting instructors with changed student perceptions. We then examine the relationship between perceptual changes, final grades, and individual instructors on decisions to major in accounting. Responses from 331 introductory financial accounting students from two universities indicate that while intended accounting majors perceived the course more favorably than non-accounting majors at the beginning and end of the semester, both groups exhibited relatively positive attitudes toward the course. However, these attitudes were similarly less favorable by the end of the course for both groups. We also found evidence of the important role individual instructors play regarding changing student perceptions and selection of accounting as a major. The analyses for selection of accounting as a major indicate that the decision depended on initially intending to major in accounting, performance in the first course, and individual instructors, but not on changes in perception regarding the first course.     

Theme: Whole of government accounting— international trends

This article reconstructs the literature on corporate turnaround in terms of its recurring features. It then tests these against the experience of four very different cases of the turnaround or attempted turnaround of public and non-profit organizations. It concludes that while some concepts from the corporate literature usefully highlight important aspects, other critical complicating features of what is needed to achieve a turnaround in public and non-profit contexts would be overlooked or poorly treated if the situation were considered simply in these terms. These complicating features deserve the attention both of practitioners and researchers.     

An accounting revolution? The financialisation of standard setting

This paper analyses the political-economic content of the recent ‘revolutionary’ shift in financial accounting rules for listed companies, specifically the rise of IFRS and fair value. It connects this shift to the socio-economic changes that are currently being discussed in the literature on financialisation, e.g. the rise of shareholder value and the proprietary view of the firm. Two ideal-typical accounting systems are constructed on the basis of normative accounting theory and extant standards – historical cost accounting (HCA) and fair value accounting (FVA). The ‘accounting revolution’ of the past 10–15 years can be understood as a qualitative shift from HCA to FVA. It is further argued that these ideal-typical systems are related to different circuits or forms of capital – productive and money capital respectively – and to the particular perspective that these afford on the, capitalist firm. Inasmuch as financialisation is related to the circuit of money capital one can make sense of the rise to prominence of FVA, which represents the dominance of a financial view of the firm in the field of financial accounting. Throughout this paper, however, the limits to financialisation are also highlighted and traced back to the ineradicable manifestation of the circuit of productive capital.     

Market efficiency and accounting research: a discussion of ‘capital market research in accounting’ by S.P. Kothari

Much of capital market research in accounting over the past 20 years has assumed that the price adjustment process to information is instantaneous and/or trivial. This assumption has had an enormous influence on the way we select research topics, design empirical tests, and interpret research findings. In this discussion, I argue that price discovery is a complex process, deserving of more attention. I highlight significant problems associated with a naı̈ve view of market efficiency, and advocate a more general model involving noise traders. Finally, I discuss the implications of recent evidence against market efficiency for future research.     

Why are first‐year accounting studies inclusive?

This study is motivated by the increasing diversity among first‐year accounting students and the increasing number of first‐year accounting students whose majors are not in accounting related areas in UK universities. The main contribution of this study is that it uses student data over four consecutive academic years from a first‐year accounting course at a UK university to provide empirical evidence in support of the theoretical framework proposed by Rankin et al. (2003). Our results show the effects of metacognitive knowledge and content knowledge on academic performance as well as highlighting the inclusiveness of the first‐year accounting course. For instance, regardless of the choices of secondary subjects, students who have good prior academic achievement are the best performers on the first‐year accounting course. The influence of content knowledge on academic performance is strongly felt when the assessments of the course changed from a 100 per cent final exam to a combination of mid‐term coursework and a final exam. The results suggest that well‐designed mid‐term coursework is academically beneficial to accounting students, especially non‐native English‐speaking students.     

Is mark-to-market accounting destabilizing? Analysis and implications for policy

Fundamental economic principles provide a rationale for requiring financial institutions to use mark-to-market, or fair value, accounting for financial reporting. The recent turmoil in financial markets, however, has raised questions about whether fair value accounting is exacerbating the problems. In this paper, we review the history and practice of fair value accounting, and summarize the literature on the channels through which it can adversely affect the real economy. We propose a new model to study the interaction of accounting rules with regulatory capital requirements, and show that even when market prices always reflect fundamental values, the interaction of fair value accounting rules and a simple capital requirement can create inefficiencies that are absent when capital is measured by adjusted book value. These distortions can be avoided, however, by redefining capital requirements to be procyclical rather than by abandoning fair value accounting and the other benefits that it provides.     

Are accounting academics culturally intelligent?: An empirical investigation

Cultural diversity within accounting university classrooms creates a number of educational challenges that have been little investigated. This study draws on the theoretical framework of cultural intelligence (CQ), which is new to accounting research, to enhance understanding of the intercultural capabilities of accounting academics. CQ is comprised of four interrelated capabilities: metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural. The previously validated cultural intelligence scale (CQS) survey was used to identify CQ levels and results were compared to demographic variables and other factors in order to explain differences. The results indicate that accounting academics display levels of CQ at the lower end of comparable studies on other professionals. Results also show that academics who have lived abroad for longer than one year and who have taught transnationally in Southeast Asia are likely to possess significantly higher levels of total CQ. Female accounting academics are more likely to possess higher levels of behavioural CQ indicating a propensity to more easily adapt their behaviour in culturally diverse situations. This paper contributes to the growing literature on CQ by increasing our understanding of the antecedents that influence CQ levels in the area of international experience, through the examination of the potential impact of overseas teaching experiences and overseas residency. Furthermore, this study introduces and examines new measures capturing the breadth and depth of international experience; that of long-term overseas residency and cultural distance.