Teaching Ethical Decision Making: Adding a Structuration Dimension

This paper proposes that structuration theory provides a useful framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas. Traditional deontological and teleological approaches to case analysis focus on identification and resolution of ethical dilemmas through a prioritization of rights and/or consequences. These approaches can be complemented by structuration theory, which provides a framework for understanding how structural forces of meaning, power, and social norms influence, and are influenced by, the actions of individuals. We develop an approach for using structuration theory to analyze an ethical dilemma, and present handouts that can be used by students to apply this approach. We demonstrate the approach by applying it to a standard ethical dilemma. We believe that a structuration perspective can contribute to flstudents' understanding of ethical dilemmas by highlighting the dynamic and evolving nature of ethics, and their own roles in creating work and professional environments that promote ethical behavior.     

Ethical Audit Decisions: A Structuration Perspective

The public accounting profession has long relied on its reputation for integrity and veracity as justification for its professional status and monopoly privilege predicated on claims of acting in the public interest. If such status and privilege are to be justified and sustained, serious consideration of what constitutes ethical behavior, how such behavior is motivated as well as an explicit recognition of the rights and interests of affected parties constitutes an ethical imperative for the profession. Traditionally, work on ethics and auditing is quite narrow, failing to recognize the social context of individual actions, failing to identify the relevant constituencies of the profession, and failing to articulate processes through which the constituencies interests can be identified. Generally, the accounting literature has taken a cognitive perspective on ethical decision making which views the resolution of ethical dilemmas as primarily a function of the moral makeup of the actor responding within the context of the Code of Professional Conduct. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the theoretical base of ethical research, specifically within the area of professional accounting and more generally in the area of business. We propose the application of structuration theory in conjunction with stakeholder theory and a responsibility ethic. The application of stakeholder theory is a means for identifying affected constituencies. A responsibility ethic recognizes the situatedness of an individual within an ongoing professional community. Structuration theory provides a theoretical framework for articulating and investigating both the structures within which action is carried out as well as the interaction between the social structures and the actors. Taken together, the theories allow for an enhanced ability to define ethical behavior within a business context and to understand the contextual antecedents and consequences of ethical acts.     

Ethical Decision Making in the Public Accounting Profession: An Extension of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior

The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of the factors that influence ethical behavioral intentions of public accountants. Recent scandals have dominated the news and have caused legislators, regulators and the public to question the role of the accounting profession. Legislative changes have brought about major structural changes in the profession and continued scrutiny will surely lead to further changes. Thus, developing an understanding of the personal and contextual factors that influence ethical decisions is critical. An extension of the theory of planned behavior [Ajzen, I.: 1985, Action Control-From Cognition to Behavior (Springer, Heidelberg)], the model used in this study examined the influence of personal, social and organizational factors on ethical intentions. Specifically, the individual level model tested direct effects of attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, moral sensitivity and ethical climate. Professionals from five accounting firms completed a survey that measured responses to ethical dilemmas related to the public accounting domain. To minimize the potential impact of common method bias, the survey instrument was administered in two phases. Hypotheses were evaluated using a structural modeling technique, partial least squares. Results show strong support for a direct relationship between attitudes and ethical intentions. The proposed direct effect of subjective norms was not supported. However, a significant relationship between subjective norms and attitudes was found. Professionals’ attitudes towards ethical issues clearly influence intentions. Moreover, this study illustrates the potential influence of social factors in attitude formation. Future research should explore the factors in the public accounting domain that most strongly influence attitude formation. This study suggests that the theory of reasoned action offers a useful framework for exploring these issues.     

A Framework for Teaching Business Ethics

What ethical framework should be used as a basis for teaching business ethics? Should business ethics be taught by ethicists in a separate course, by business faculty in business courses, or perhaps by both? These are some of the issues this paper will address. The paper begins with a review of the literature concerning approaches to teaching business ethics. Next, some ethical frameworks for teaching business ethics are considered. Finally, the paper proposes that students should apply their own personal values to business ethical issues in the classroom, thus providing future business leaders with a process for resolving ethical dilemmas.     

Lessons Learned from Ethics in the Classroom: Exploring Student Growth in Flexibility, Complexity and Comprehension

This study shows the link between teaching ethics in a college setting and the evolution of student thinking about ethical dilemmas. At the beginning of the semester, students have a rigid "black and white" conception of ethics. By the end of the semester, they are thinking more flexibly about the responsibilities of leaders in corporate ethical dilemmas, and they are able to appreciate complex situations that influence ethical behavior. The study shows that education in ethics produces more "enlightened" consumers of ethics information who are able to make sound determinations about responsibility in ethical dilemmas.     

How should managers treat ethics in international business?

Business ethics concern the consideration of moral in corporate decision making. International managers may be confronted with a variety of ethical dilemmas, usually due to differences among national markets in what constitutes legal or acceptable practice. Beliefs about what constitutes ethical business behavior commonly stem from one of four moral philosophies: teleology, deontology, the theory of justice, and cultural relativism. A framework incorporating all four is presented here which should provide a useful decision tool for international managers. An application of the framework and the complexities associated with it are presented next. We conclude that an effective integration of the company's perspective on ethics and the business behavior of the employees is critical and that it depends on top management, and the entire organization, demonstrating that they are serious about ethical business behavior on an ongoing basis. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Hypothesized Relationship Between Accountability and Ethical Behavior

Unethical behavior is important to study because it may have an adverse influence on organizational performance. This paper is an attempt to better understand why individuals behave as they do when faced with ethical dilemmas. We first explore the definition, theories and models of ethical behaviors and accountability. This discussion of societal ethics and accountability as forms of social control segues into a discussion of how accountability may influence ethical behaviors. Based on the business ethics and accountability literatures, we suggest a number of research questions and hypotheses that need to be tested, as well as an appropriate research strategy.     

Institutional work to navigate ethical dilemmas: Evidence from a social enterprise

Social entrepreneurs encounter ethical dilemmas while addressing their social and commercial missions. The literature has implicitly acknowledged the ethical dilemmas social entrepreneurs face; however, the nature and implications of these ethical dilemmas and how social entrepreneurs navigate them are underexplored and undertheorized. We address this by conducting a 36-month field study of a social enterprise operating in a rural resource-constrained environment in India and dealing with a stigmatized product. We found four categories of ethical dilemmas faced by social entrepreneurs: challenges in engaging the community (equality vs. efficiency and fairness vs. care), challenges related to spillover effects (right vs. responsibilities), challenges in balancing diverse stakeholders (emotionally detached vs. emotionally engaged), and challenges related to cross-subsidization efforts (utilitarianism vs. fairness). Further, we identified three types of institutional work social entrepreneurs engage in to address ethical dilemmas: recognition work, responsibilization work, and reflective judgment work. We label these three institutional works as inclusion work - purposive actions of an entity to address ethical dilemmas by implementing its program in a way that supports the most marginalized. Our study makes an important contribution to the literature on ethics in the context of social entrepreneurship by identifying specific ethical dilemmas social entrepreneurs face in managing hybridity (balancing social-commercial objectives) and enhancing social impact (managing social-social objectives). Moreover, through the concept of inclusion work, our research not only integrates insights from ethics and institutional theories but also responds to the recent call to address grand societal challenges through institutional work.     

Measuring Ethical Sensitivity and Evaluation

Measures of student ethical sensitivity and their increases help to answer questions such as whether accounting ethics should be taught at all. We investigate different sensitivity measures and alternatives to the well-established Defining Issues Test (DIT-2, Rest, J. R. et al. [1999, Postconventional Moral Thinking: A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ]), frequently used to measure the effects of undergraduate accounting ethics education. Because the DIT measures cognitive development, which increases with age, the DIT scores for younger accounting students are typically lower, have limited range, and are not likely to vary sufficiently with corresponding choices in ethical dilemmas. Since the DIT measures only the moral judgment component of ethical decision-making, we consider the multidimensional ethical scale (MES) to allow respondents to provide explanations for their moral and other judgments. The MES has been used to measure attitudes related to justice, utility, contractualism, egoism, and relativism. Unfortunately, the MES is not comparable in one-dimension to the DIT, and unlike the DIT, the MES has no theoretical or objective base. Therefore, we construct a comparable one-dimensional relative measure, a Composite MES Score, obtained from previous research on practicing accountants. We compare the reliability of this measure to the DIT in explaining the ethical choices of 54 specially chosen, somewhat homogeneous students, whose ages range from 18 to 19, and who are taking a second semester freshman accounting course at a private, religion-affiliated university. These particular students are relatively untrained in the formal use of questionable accounting choices. These students are less likely to recognize the dilemmas of the MES and are also less likely to demonstrate sufficient variation in their DIT scores, traditionally low for freshmen students. As freshmen, they are recent graduates of high school and more likely guided by other ethical influences including friends, family, or contractual obligations (some of the MES constructs) rather than higher cognitive development. This study confirms suspicions. We find the DIT scores do not vary sufficiently to explain the moral reasoning of freshmen. For eight dilemmas and 24 choices we find the DIT score correlates with only three choices, whereas the MES regression models have at least one significant construct for 23 out of 24 ethical choices. The Composite MES Score (a relative measure) also explains 23 out of 24 choices and is statistically related to the DIT in only one of the choices. Unlike the DIT, the Composite MES permits pretest and retesting with different dilemmas to evaluate changes in ethical sensitivity. These results argue for relative rather than absolute measures of sensitivity and guides beyond cognitive development (the DIT-score) to explain undergraduate student sensitivity.     

Prisoner’s Dilemmas, Cooperative Norms, and Codes of Business Ethics

Prisoner's dilemmas can lead rational people to interact in ways that lead to persistent inefficiencies. These dilemmas create a problem for institutional designers to solve: devise institutions that realign individual incentives to achieve collectively rational outcomes. I will argue that we do not always want to eliminate misalignments between individual incentives and efficient outcomes. Sometimes we want to preserve prisoner's dilemmas, even when we know that they systematically will lead to inefficiencies. No doubt, prisoner's dilemmas can create problems, but they also create opportunities to practice the cooperative norms that make market institutions possible in the first place. An ethical market culture, I argue, benefits from the presence of prisoner's dilemmas. I first consider standard approaches for solving prisoner's dilemmas. I then argue for the value of prisoner's dilemmas. Finally, I show the significance of this argument for advocating codes of business ethics.     

Accounting Student Ethical Perceptions: An Analysis of Training and Gender Effects

This study examined accounting student responses to academic and accounting/business ethical vignettes and examined if gender or formal training in ethics affected their responses. The study also controlled for a student's tendency to respond in a socially desirable manner by including a social desirability response bias instrument as part of the research materials.The results indicate no general differences in responses between the students with and without formal ethical training, or between male and female students. However, comparisons between the academic and accounting/business vignettes revealed that although students perceived the unethical actions discussed in the cases similarly, they indicated they would be more likely to engage in the unethical actions in the accounting/business cases compared to the academic dilemmas.     

Individual and Organizational Antecedents of Professional Ethics of Public Relations Practitioners in Korea

This study examines the effects of individual ethical values and organizational factors on the professional ethics of PR practitioners in Korea by considering a person–situation interactionist model. Individual ethical values are used as individual factors, and organizational factors consist of an organization’s reward and punishment for ethical/unethical behavior, the behavior of peers, and the ethical integrity of the chief ethics officer. The professional ethics of PR practitioners (the dependent variable) are classified into the following three dimensions: professional ethics for the public, the client, and the PR industry. The results indicate that agency practitioners were more likely to be committed to their profession than to their organization, whereas in-house practitioners were more likely to be committed to their organization than to their profession. That is, in-house practitioners showed weak professional commitment, indicating that they perceived themselves as employees, not as PR professionals. Organizational factors such as reward, punishment, and peers’ ethical behavior had considerable influence on the professional ethics of in-house practitioners, whereas they had little influence on agency practitioners. Organizational factors as well as individual ethical values were more likely to influence the professional ethics of in-house practitioners than that of agency practitioners. Thus, to foster in-house practitioners’ professional ethics and commitment, professional associations in the PR industry should make efforts to provide in-house practitioners with more information on the PR industry and more opportunities for interacting and maintaining communication with their colleagues in the industry.     

Situating ‘Giving Voice to Values’: A Metatheoretical Evaluation of a New Approach to Business Ethics

The evaluation of new theories and pedagogical approaches to business ethics is an essential task for ethicists. This is true not only for empirical and applied evaluation but also for metatheoretical evaluation. However, while there is increasing interest in the practical utility and empirical testing of ethical theories, there has been little systematic evaluation of how new theories relate to existing ones or what novel conceptual characteristics they might contribute. This paper aims to address this lack by discussing the role of metatheorising in assessing new approaches to ethics. The approach is illustrated through evaluating a new pedagogy and curriculum for ethics education called Giving Voice to Values (GVV). Our method involves identifying a number of metatheoretical lenses from existing reviews of ethical theories and applying these to examine GVV’s conceptual elements. Although GVV has been explicitly presented as a pedagogy and teaching curriculum, we argue that it has the potential to contribute significantly to the development of ethical theory. We discuss the general implications of this metatheoretical method of evaluation for new approaches to business ethics and for GVV and its future development.     

Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice: Using the 1991 Federal Sentencing Guidelines as a Paradigm for Ethics Training

Although Business Ethics has become a topic of wide discussion in both academia and the corporate world, questions remain as how to present ethical issues in a manner that will effectively influence the decisions and behavior of business employees. In this paper we argue that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (FSG) offer a unique opportunity for bridging the gap between the theory and practice of business ethics. We first explain what the FSG are and how they apply to organizations. We then show how discussions of the FSG might be used in business ethics courses in a way that is both theoretically sound and practically applicable. Finally, we show how the requirements of the FSG can be used by companies to develop effective ethical compliance programs. As such, we maintain that the FSG provide a powerful heuristic tool for the teaching and training of business ethics.     

Accountant ethics: A brief examination of neglected sociological dimensions

Traditional treatments of accountant ethics make implicit assumptions inconsistent with a sociological perspective. This paper identifies the ways in which accountant ethics have been approached both in literature pertaining to practice and the classroom. The boundaries of the topic, when its definitions are left tacit, systematically preclude many important features of ethics. Included in these are sociological treatments of the accounting profession as a group, extra-personal aspects of decision making, the stratification of accounting practice, and a sense of ethical action. The paper concludes with an illustration of how institutional theory has the potential to create a systematic sociological interpretation of accountant ethics.Timothy J. Fogarty is an assistant professor at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include accounting professionalism, public accounting organizations and accounting education. He has published articles in the accounting, sociology, management, legal and education literatures.     

Encouraging Classroom Discussion of Ethical Dilemmas in Research Management: Three Vignettes

While many measures address, say, marketing ethics, little attention has been paid to ethical dilemmas and decision-making in the more general field of ethics in research management. This paper presents results from the development of a multidimensional measure of ethical dilemmas in research management. The investigator developed three vignettes representing ethical dilemmas that could be realistically found in three phases of most business research (the planning, execution, and termination phases). Each vignette is followed by Reidenbach and Robin's (1990) 30-item response scale tapping five theories of ethics: Justice, Relativism, Egoism, Utilitarianism, and Deontology. Results from 216 management majors validate the three vignettes and support this approach in stimulating heated class discussion.     

Importance of and approaches to incorporating ethics into the accounting classroom

Accounting educators are being called on to provide a greater emphasis on ethics education. This paper examines three important issues concerning ethics education in accounting. First, the question of whether ethics can indeed be taught is examined. Next, several innovative approaches are presented which have been used by accounting educators to integrate ethics into the classroom. Finally, results of a survey of students concerning their perspectives of ethical issues in accounting education, the accounting profession, and society at large are presented and discussed. Survey results reveal that students consider a lack of ethics damaging to the accounting profession and society. Results also indicate that accounting students are seeking ethical and moral direction.David S. Kerr is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Accounting at Texas A&M University. Dr. Kerr's research interests include ethics and behavioral decision making in accounting, group judgment/decision making, and audit planning.L. Murphy Smith, is a Price Waterhouse Teaching Excellence Professor of Accounting at Texas A&M University. His major research interests are information systems, auditing, and international issues.     

The Impact of Professional Commitment and Anticipatory Socialization on Accounting Students’ Ethical Orientation

The accounting profession has emphasized the need for ethics education in the accounting curriculum. The current study examines professional commitment and anticipatory socialization, operationalized by perception of financial reporting, as possible determinants of Accounting students’ ethical perceptions and intentions. Accounting students with higher levels of professional commitment and higher perception of the importance of financial reporting were more likely to perceive questionable actions as unethical and less likely to engage in such actions compared to those students with lower commitment and lower perception of financial reporting. The results have implications for accounting instructors and accounting employers as they socialize students in the accounting profession at this early stage.     

Toward an Analytical Structure for Evaluating the Ethical Content of Decisions by Advertising Professionals

This article proposes a model for conceptualizing advertising ethics theory based on a distinction between philosophical and occupational ethical systems and the assumption that the fundamental goal of occupational ethics is to address the imbalance of power between the practitioner group and the community or communities they serve through practices that cultivate a relationship of trust. An analytical model is proposed as the basis for future empirical research to test and clarify the suggested relationships. It is suggested that a more refined theoretical meta-model could provide a common framework within which research in specific advertising ethics issues might be revisited.     

Auditors' ability to discern the presence of ethical problems

Recently, society and the accounting profession have become increasingly concerned with ethics. Accounting researchers have responded by attempting to investigate and analyze the ethical behavior of accountants. While the current state of ethical behavior among practitioners is important, the ability of accountants to detect ethical problems that may not be obvious should also be studied and understood. This study addresses three questions: (1) are auditors alert to ethical issues; (2) if so, how important do they perceive them to be; and (3) what factors affect their sensitivity threshold and their perceptions of the importance of the issues? Most of the prior research in accounting ethics presents subjects with scenarios that contain an obvious ethical issue, and subjects realize that they are participating in an ethics study. In the present study, the ethical problems are integrated into general accounting situations in order to discover the sensitivity of accounting professionals to them. This study defines ethical sensitivity as the ability to interpret a given situation and to realize that a moral problem exists. CPAs responded to an experimental instrument comprised of three auditing scenarios taken from the 1989 Trueblood cases, adapted to deal with different ethical problems — tax evasion by a client, auditor independence, and a client's ethical problem which does not directly affect the audit. The accounting and/or auditing problems presented in the three cases were also different with the information relating to the possible ethical problem embedded in the situation. Multiway contingency tables were used to analyze the data. Factors useful in predicting whether a subject will mention an ethical issue include the nature of the ethical issue, the issue's severity, and the subject's age. Employment position, expertise (measured by two proxies), prior exposure to a similar ethical issue and education level (undergraduate versus graduate) were not significant. The ethical issue itself was also a significant factor in determining the absolute importance given to the ethical issue.