Accounting Faculty Ethical Codes: A Time for Action?
AACSB eligibility standards state that accounting academic units must establish expectations for ethical behavior by faculty and administrators. Obviously, this requirement can be met in a variety of ways but the most direct is to establish an accounting faculty ethical code. This paper reports on a two phase empirical study of 70 AACSB accredited accounting doctoral programs in the U.S. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which the accredited accounting doctoral programs have adopted separate faculty codes of ethics. No separate codes for accounting academic units were found. Implications of these findings are discussed in this article. We believe the lack of specific ethical codes for accounting educators is of concern given the importance of ethics in both the educational process and in the business world. There is a need for a serious dialogue in the accounting academy about this issue.
The ethics of accounting research
Abstract Doctoral students and many accounting professors and practicing accountants conduct theoretical or empirical accounting research. Human subjects have been recruited in increasing numbers to participate in behavioral and attitudinal accounting studies. However, the ethical obligations of accounting researchers to other researchers and readers, to subjects, and to participating organizations have received little attention. In this paper, the history of research ethics codes in other disciplines and the ethical obligations of accounting researchers are discussed. A tentative code of ethics is presented for the purpose of stimulating discussion about ethical issues in accounting research.
Ethics for scientific researchers.
more properly, ethics for scientific researchers receives continuing atten¬ tion in the scientific literature. The attention is focused mainly on two aspects ofthe subject: the goals ofthe research and the procedures to be used in the research. Historical deve¬ lopments have led physical scientists to feel a deep concern about the eth¬ ical problems associated with the goals of their research; medical and biological scientists have also come to realize that they too must be con¬ cerned with the ethics of their re¬ search. The magnitude of the loss of life, the suffering and the destruction as¬ sociated with the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 caused a great deal of soul-searching by those direct¬ ly or indirectly involved in the re¬ search which made possible the con¬ struction of the bombs. The major question facing the nuclear physicists was whether they were morally re¬ sponsible for the havoc which ulti¬ mately resulted from their work: is a scientist responsible for the use which others make of his discoveries? Wi¬ thin a few years, as the defence establishments of the United States and other nuclear powers burgeoned, the numbers of scientists faced with this question multiplied. To those who answered the question in the affirmative, it then became necessary to know what use would be made of their work. In a security-conscious organi¬ zation it was not always possible to obtain this information, and the whole concept of secrecy and "classi¬ fied work" became a matter of con¬ cern and debate. Closely related to the problem of security was the ques¬ tion of the scientist's role in the com¬ munity: if he believed that the govern¬ ment or some other body was using scientific knowledge for dangerous or immoral purposes, or if he believed that research in certain areas would produce information that might easi¬ ly be misused, did he have a responsi¬ bility to inform the rest ofthe citizenry ofthe situation? A number of authors have ex¬ pressed their opinions on the subject. The statement of principles of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science is fairly representative of pre¬ valent attitudes and assigns to the scientist the following obligations:1