The Nature and Rationale of a Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting by Islamic Banks

Islamic banks have to abide by the revealed doctrines in Islam in conducting their business and financial transactions. They employ in-house religious advisers—often referred to as Shari'a Supervisory Board (SSB)—who issue a special report to inform users of financial statements whether or not the bank has adhered to the Islamic principles. Recently, a private standard-setting body—the Financial Accounting Organization for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions (FAOIBFI)—has been set up to externally regulate the financial reporting by Islamic banks. The FAOIBFI has published two statements on the objectives and concepts of financial reporting to act as a framework in setting accounting standards for Islamic banks. This paper examines the FAOIBFI's approach for developing objectives and concepts of financial accounting and investigates its need for such a theoretical framework. It is argued that the FAOIBFI's objectives and concepts would not be useful in mandating accounting standards on issues that are affected by religious ruling. This does not necessarily mean that such a framework may not be useful in legitimating the FAOIBFI's role and in setting accounting standards for issues that are not governed by revealed moral doctrines although it will be subject to similar limitations to those found by other standard-setting bodies in utilising and applying their framework. However, it implies that the more the FAOIBFI sets accounting standards that incorporate religious ruling, the less it would tend to find its own objectives and concepts useful. The ambiguities that may arise from different interpretations of the religious rules will require resolutions primarily by reference to religious rather than accounting authority.     

基于事项凭证的会计报表生成流程探析

在转轨经济时代，会计报表依然承载着记录会计信息的历史使命，而信息使用者则愈加关注会计信息的具体内容，事项信息的地位逐渐提升，使得会计报表的生成流程有待改进。本文基于传统会计核算流程的缺陷之处，并结合目前XBRL财务报告体系中的启示，对基于事项凭证的会计报表生成流程进行了探讨，为事项信息的充分运用提供合适的平台。     

Pedagogic metaphors and the nature of accounting signification

This paper concerns three metaphors for financial statements associated with accounting education: lenses, photographs, and the board game, Scrabble. These metaphors not only describe financial statements but also affect our interpretations of them and our behavior towards them. The lens metaphor has many implications that accounting cannot live up to; however, that does not mean that it is an inappropriate metaphor to express our aspirations for accounting and to inspire our students. The Scrabble metaphor is a somewhat pejorative metaphor that we may cynically apply to accounting, but it may also be an effective means of criticizing mindless manipulation of financial statement elements. The photographic metaphor, occupying a middle ground, might be the most intriguing of the three. At an elementary level, it captures some simple truths about accounting, or at least some simple statements we would like to be true. But as the complexities of the metaphor are explored, they reveal a variety of intriguing ontological issues that concern financial statements.     

Electronic commerce education: Analysis of existing courses

E-commerce is reshaping business practices and education, yet many have expressed concern over the e-commerce education and training provided to students. This study examines the extent to which business schools, particularly accounting programs, are integrating e-commerce education into their curricula. An analysis of 79 syllabi provides evidence regarding: (1) the scope and nature of e-commerce education; (2) educational approaches to e-commerce; (3) e-commerce topics that could be taught as part of e-commerce education; (4) methods of coverage of e-commerce education; and (5) methods and reference materials for teaching an e-commerce course. This study initiates a general dialogue on the nature, content, objectives, and delivery of e-commerce education. An exploratory review and content analysis of a sample of 79 syllabi, representing different sizes of universities worldwide, reveals that business schools and accounting programs offer e-commerce courses emphasizing a broad range of skills, objectives, perspectives, teaching methods, and cognitive content. However, many common themes, topics, and assignments have emerged. The e-commerce education issues addressed in this study should help business schools and accounting programs prepare students for the challenges awaiting them in the area of emerging technological advances.     

Bridging the gap between green accounting and black ink

The essence of green accounting is accounting for the air we breathe, the water we drink. One way to do this is to create a natural asset account for essential natural resources — such as fertile land — on which an enterprise is economically dependent. As these assets are degraded, a natural resource expense would be recorded in an enterprise's financial statements. This would disclose pollution levels in excess of levels sustainable by an ecosystem. This accounting would reflect a new social contract between business and the stakeholders to whom they are accountable. It would also reflect a business mission that recognizes that some things are beyond accounting.     

‘We do good things,don’t we?’: ‘Blended Value Accounting’ in social entrepreneurship

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the emergent reporting practices used by social entrepreneurs in terms of their institutional settings and strategic objectives. These reporting practices not only account for financial performance but also disclose more nuanced and contingent social and environmental impacts and outcomes. Furthermore, they act as symbolic objects expressing the market orientation of many socially entrepreneurial organizations in that they aim to provide more complete and transparent disclosure of a variety of performance impacts. Conceptually, this paper draws upon approaches developed within the sociology of accounting as institutional practice and uses three theoretical interpretations to conceptualize the function and effects of reporting, disclosure, and audit in social entrepreneurship: positivist; critical theorist; and interpretative. A discussion of five case studies leads to the development of a new theoretical construct – ‘Blended Value Accounting’ – that constitutes a spectrum of disclosure logics used by social entrepreneurs to access resources and realize organizational mission objectives with key stakeholders. Conclusions consider some further questions around socially entrepreneurial reporting practices and strategies and suggest some new lines of research going forward.     

The impact of introductory accounting courses on student perceptions about the purpose of accounting information and the objectives of business: A comparison of the UK and Japan

This paper is concerned with the impact of introductory financial accounting courses on student perceptions of business objectives. The paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey of UK and Japanese university students which investigated their views at the start and end of an introductory financial accounting module. The views of Japanese students, in comparison with those from the UK, are of particular interest given evidence in the literature that traditional “social market” traditions in Japan are being influenced by Anglo-American “stock market” values. Our results are consistent with such a phenomenon in that Japanese students’ values regarding business objectives show significant changes that are not mirrored by changes in the perceptions of their UK counterparts. We suggest that accounting education is acting as a conduit for views more commonly held in Anglo-American societies.     

Critical thought on critical thinking research

Calls for improving the critical thinking ability of accounting students have been clear and repeated in both the accounting education and professional accounting literature. Although numerous ideas for developing critical thinking skills have been generated, there remains a significant lack of empirical evidence, in both the accounting education and higher education literature, that any specific instructional method can enhance the critical thinking skills of students. Given the lack of empirical support for success in the development of critical thinking skills, the value of further efforts to develop students' critical thinking skills must be questioned. The premise of this paper is that accounting programs and faculty wanting to address the issue of developing critical thinking skills in their curricula should be able to empirically examine whether their efforts are achieving the desired effects. This article first presents a brief review of prior research on critical thinking skills development and then offers suggestions to improve the design of future research on this topic. The authors attempt to provide guidance on the design of more powerful empirical tests of promising curricular strategies so that accounting faculty can determine if their attempts to enhance student critical thinking skills are meeting expectations.     

The dialectic of accounting education: from role identity to ego identity

Within the critical accounting literature interest in accounting education appears to be growing (see, for example, Amernic, 1996; Chua, 1996; Davis & Sherman, (1996); Dillard & Tinker, 1996; Galhofer & Haslam, 1996; Neimark, 1996; Paisey & Paisey, 1996; Reiter, 1996). However, as yet the discussion does not appear to be grounded within the well-established critical education literature. Little critical analysis has been provided of the specific ways in which power may operate through accounting education, or the forms that a more critical education might take; or of the theoretical problematic of the dialectical tension that exists between both possibilities (that is between emancipation and domination). Given the significant and perhaps even primary role that social theorists have ascribed to education in the reproduction of social structures, and the maintenance of forms of subordination, this seems surprising (see, for example, Althusser, 1971). This paper draws on some well-established critical education theory in order firstly to explore the hegemonic operation of power within accounting education and secondly to use these insights as a basis for developing some thoughts on what a more critical accounting education might look like in practice.     

Reclaiming ‘Sense’ from ‘Cents’ in Accounting Education

Abstract

This essay adopts an interpretive methodology of relevant literature to explore the limitations of accounting education when it is taught purely as a technical practice. The essay proceeds from the assumption that conventional accounting education is captured by a positivistic neo-classical model of decision-making that draws on economic rationale to inform and report on corporate activities and make value judgements about accounting. Accounting with its emphasis on transactions and recording makes little sense unless accountability and stewardship objectives are effective. This essay calls for an increased use of active learning strategies (experiential and in-context activities) to connect students to the social realities of accounting. Cognitive dissonance, as an explicit objective of accounting education, provides the means to challenge accounting as a rational stage of endeavour through critical and dialogical perspectives in accounting. Two types of learning pedagogies based on ‘in’ and ‘out’ of classroom activities were discussed and analysed.     

Excel in the accounting curriculum: perceptions from accounting professors

Public accounting firms emphasize the importance of accounting graduates being proficient in Excel. Since many accounting graduates often aspire to work in public accounting, a question arises as to whether there should be an emphasis on Excel in accounting education. The purpose of this paper is to specifically look at this issue by examining accounting faculty's perceptions of Excel in public accounting and accounting education. We survey 245 faculty members at over 100 accounting programs. We find that a majority of faculty incorporate Excel in their accounting classes consistent with their perception of Excel importance. However, we find that students are not fully proficient in Excel based on faculty's perceptions. This study contributes to the accounting education literature by identifying possible disconnections between Excel skills faculty include in the accounting curriculum and specific Excel skills faculty believe new hires (i.e. recent accounting graduates) most often use in public accounting.     

The status of internships/cooperative education experiences in accounting education

Academic and practitioner members of the accounting profession have recognized the contribution internship/cooperative education experiences can make to the student, the institution, and the employing entity. This study was undertaken to determine the status of these experimental learning experiences in undergraduate programs in accounting. The study identified the characteristics of internship/cooperative education programs and the program administrators perceptions of the value of these experiences to students, employers, and accounting programs. The results revealed an increase in internship/cooperative education programs in accounting education. Most programs are fairly young, are for credit only (no letter grade), occur during the junior year, are paid rather than unpaid, and require a written project to be completed by the student. Most programs in accounting do not have full or part time coordinators, most do not require on-site visits, and most share the responsibility for identifying internship sites with students and others.     

Accounting Education Lags CPE Ethics Requirements: Implications for the Profession and a Call to Action

Abstract

The accounting profession in the USA has experienced a crisis of legitimacy in the aftermath of a barrage of business scandals. Recent legislation has forced reforms reinforcing the need for additional ethics education. At the same time, the external pressure on university accounting degree programs has been to maintain the status quo of inadequate ethics in the curriculum, even while ethics courses in state CPE programs have grown dramatically. This creates a problem of bad pedagogy in that these new CPE ethics courses, focused on rote delivery of professional codes of conduct, are not grounded in conceptual frameworks which should be provided by university accounting programs. This state of affairs is circular in that it perpetuates inadequate ethics education for the profession. We propose that this deficiency be remedied by the requirement of a stand-alone ethics course delivered early in the accounting curriculum as a foundation for other degree requirements and subsequent CPE courses. The first step in this direction should be the creation of a White Paper that recommends specific content for such a course.     

Generic Skills in Audit Education

The academic literature and higher education benchmark statements identify groups of skills that are desirable both for students seeking employment and for employers seeking to recruit students. Professional accounting education pronouncements also stipulate skills that are necessary for an individual to possess in order to act as a competent accountant and auditor. Through a questionnaire survey, this research examines: (i) which of these skills audit and accounting practitioners expect UK universities to teach; (ii) which skills audit and accounting academics believe are important for students to acquire; (iii) which skills audit academics believe that employers require; and (iv) which skills audit academics teach in the UK. Institutional theory is used to develop and interpret this research.     

Accounting curriculum responses to the 150-hour requirement

Since the 1959 American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Council resolution on the standards of accounting education, a 5-year post-secondary educational requirement for CPA licensing has been deemed important. Twenty-three states have enacted legislation requiring 150 hours of education before a person may take the national CPA exam. Within these states, many colleges and universities have both graduate business administration or accounting programs to prepare their accounting students for the certification exam. The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) member schools in these 23 states were surveyed to determine the curriculum in their graduate business administration and accounting programs. A significant number (31%) of the schools have installed a 30semester-hour or more accounting post-baccalaureate program. The trends in state licensing and the academic responses have been: 1. An undergraduate concentration in accounting, 2. A graduate degree granted at the completion of the post-baccalaureate hours, 3. Most state legislatures select the state boards of accountancy to determine specific courses of advanced study, 4. Most state boards of accountancy specify broad areas of subject categories, 5. Most surveyed AACSB member schools with advanced accounting programs specify over 60% of their hours in accounting subjects, 6. A majority of surveyed MBA programs with an accounting concentration (72%) required less than 40% of their total graduate credit hours in accounting courses, and 7. A higher percentage of surveyed nonaccredited advanced accounting programs (72%) required 60% of their graduate requirements in accounting courses compared to advanced accounting degree programs with both business and accounting AACSB accreditation (58%).     

Expanding the perspective and knowledge of the accounting curriculum and pedagogy in other locations: The case of Mexico

In our analysis of the accounting career and practice in Mexico, we include a comparative examination of the university curriculum, noting how it has changed over time, and we examine the differences between the accounting programs in the public and private higher education systems. We took this approach to investigate recent concerns raised by many academics from the field of accounting, about the ethicality of the accounting practice and the role played by universities in teaching would-be accountants ethics, and how Mexico compares to other countries that are currently being studied in response to Chabrak and Craig's (2012) work. Our perspective and experience with Community Service-Learning as a tool to achieve critical self-reflexivity, foster community engagement, and experiential understanding with principles of social justice, leads us to suggest CSL as another method to help address the valid concerns that have been raised about ethics education in the accounting career.     

Great Galway Goslings: Organizational Context of Managerial Accounting*

This case seeks to enhance student understanding of the relationship between accounting information and the order fulfllment and production activities of a manufacturing frm, Great Galway Goslings. Great Galway Goslings manufactures goose sculptures and has been suffering losses in recent years. Students draw on the skills they learned in financial accounting to analyze the company's order fulfllment activities, identify economic transactions, and prepare journal entries. The case provides a link to managerial accounting topics as students use segment financial statements to create contribution margin income statements, perform break‐even analyses, and recommend whether Great Galway Goslings should keep its retail business segment. Students will become familiar with the key features of business process management (BPM) and the extensive, real‐world activities that a manufacturing entity engages in to fll an order. Students will analyze the company's existing order fulfllment process and apply their knowledge of BPM to recommend process improvements for Great Galway. This case contributes to the accounting case literature by serving as a bridge from financial accounting to managerial accounting, intertwining many topics from managerial accounting into one cohesive case, and providing real‐world business process knowledge. Student feedback indicates that, overall, the case met its stated learning objectives. Great Galway Goslings is appropriate for an undergraduate introductory managerial accounting course but can be adapted to the equivalent graduate‐level course or an accounting information systems course.     

A commentary on ‘The long road to publishing: A user-friendly exposé’

Many of the pressing questions currently facing accounting education researchers are best addressed through experimental research. For example, experiments are useful in testing the effect of innovative educational practices on student learning. The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the literature addressing sources of invalidity which may cloud the results of experiments and describe several procedures which are helpful in controlling for these sources of invalidity. Examples are provided, from published accounting education research studies, which illustrate how researchers have attempted to address several of these threats to validity. Experiments must be carefully planned and designed, so the experiment on completion fulfills the objectives of the researcher. Although experiments are more difficult to conduct in the educational environment than in a scientist's laboratory, many procedures are available to assist accounting education researchers in designing tightly controlled experiments.     

Who should teach what? Australian perceptions of the roles of universities and practice in the education of professional accountants

This paper addresses the respective roles and responsibilities of universities and practitioners in educating professional accountants. The issues are explored by a review of the literature in accounting and other professions regarding the respective roles of universities and employers in the development of both technical and non-technical knowledge and skills of professionals, particularly accounting practitioners. The literature review suggests that critics of university-based education fail to recognise (a) the changes that have occurred in the roles and responsibilities of accounting practitioners, and (b) the opportunity costs necessarily associated with providing generalist accounting degrees. Universities and employers have comparative advantages for the development of different types of professional skills and knowledge. These insights are extended by way of a series of interviews with Australian accounting practitioners, representatives from professional accounting bodies, recent accounting graduates, and accounting students about their perceptions of the respective responsibilities and roles of universities and employers. Although some interviewees recognised that universities cannot be ‘all things to all people’, there was a tendency to expect universities to have the major responsibility for the development in accounting graduates of both technical and non-technical knowledge and skills. Such perceptions tended to understate the responsibilities and comparative advantage of employers and result in unrealistic expectations about the outcomes of a university education. Employers need to be made more aware of the resource and other limitations associated with university programs and should develop meaningful opportunities for learning and reflection within workplace contexts.     

Dialogic framing of accounting information systems in social and environmental accounting domains: Lessons from,and for,microfinance

The successful design, application and evaluation of accounting information systems (AIS) in social and environmental accounting (SEA) domains increasingly requires that stakeholder interests be addressed. Because various stakeholders have competing interests, new thinking about how these can be accommodated is needed. Brown (2009) proposes a dialogic framework following from agonistic democracy, which takes the position that when consensus is not possible, progress can be facilitated through ongoing commitment to accounting processes that represent and accommodate competing perspectives. Previous work in AIS (Blackburn et al., 2014; Dillard and Yuthas, 2013) builds on Brown's work to develop a theoretical perspective useful in the AIS-SEA context that takes pluralism seriously. We extend this line of research by exploring developments in the microfinance industry and illustrate how the agonistic accounting principles can be useful in considering AIS-SEA design, implementation and evaluation as well as the initiation of innovation and change in the industry. Microfinance provides an example of an antagonistic context where the social mission/values come into unambiguous conflict with the economic objectives of microfinance institutions. Agonistics suggests that such conflict, if acknowledged and facilitated, has the potential for fostering innovative responses and reducing the likelihood of one perspective dominating the others. Relating accomplishments in this field to the principles of dialogic accounting demonstrates how this perspective can be incorporated into the design and use of systems that address social and environmental objectives as well as economic ones. We explore both accomplishments and shortcomings in achievement of pluralistic systems in the microfinance domain.