Pilot project to identify and measure the relevant costs of production for sustainable agriculture products

Accounting professionals sought to help farmers understand costs of production for their products

Understanding Cheating: From the University Classroom to the Workplace

Cheating is defined as taking information, credit, or reward that one neither deserves nor did the work to achieve. Cheating behavior is often seen as a driver behind many of our current economic problems and the temptation to cheat has been associated with our downward slide in business practice for the past two decades. For example, the current housing crisis has been explained in part as banks cheating in terms of qualifying people for loans. Additionally, current headlines focus on legislators and Wall Street analysts who cheat investors by unfairly taking advantage of inside information not publicly available to others in the market. Cheating defeats fairness of competition and undermines the basis of business integrity. Writers in the business press are expressing concern over the widespread levels of ‘cheating’ among business executives. Enron, HealthSouth, and Tyco, all cheated shareholders in order to pad the pockets of their corporate executives. Some of the smartest and best business minds have fallen subject to the temptation to cheat and the result has been some of the most wideranging financial regulation in our history. The Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank Acts were enacted in reaction to the perceived prevalence of cheating by business managers. The controversial new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is yet another attempt to address this problem. Classroom teachers are also experiencing a growing concern over what seems to be ever increasing levels of cheating among students. Students cheat for a variety of reasons including a felt pressure to maintain good grades and because they perceive many opportunities to cheat but few real penalties for getting caught. Instructor behavior may unwittingly exacerbate the problem by giving unclear or arbitrary assignments that create a climate for cheating when students view the benefits of figuring out and completing the assignment honestly to be minimal at best. The problem of classroom cheating is that students are likely to carry the behaviors they learn in the classroom into the workplace. It is this prospect that leads us to examine the nature of classroom cheating as a precursor to what might happen in actual business settings. It is likely that many of us have cheated at something or in some way, however unimportant, in our lives. We may have taken advantage of unsuspecting others in sports or play and the amount of harm done is probably very little and accepted as part of the interaction. But when the stakes get higher and include academic or business integrity and the validity of a grade or financial statement are at stake, then cheating has significant potential consequences, and needs to be both understood and managed

Classroom Cheating and Student Perceptions of Ethical Climate

This study examines relationships between perceived ethical climate types, as determined using Victor and Cullen’s (1988) ethical climate questionnaire, and actual cheating behavior by students completing a take-home exam problem. Data regarding students’ behavior were gathered from sixty-four students in two sections of an accounting course at a well-known university. Our major finding is that students who perceive the classroom as a benevolent climate focused on local groups (i.e. team identification is preeminent) engage in more cheating behavior than do students who perceive a benevolent climate focused on broader organization or societal groups. We conclude by discussing the ethical and pedagogical implications of this association between team-interest climate and higher levels of cheating behavior

Ethical Distancing: Rationalizing Violations of Organizational Norms

Recent work on moral reasoning has focused on the psychological relationship between the actor, the action and the outcome. The argument is that a tighter connection between these categories leads to more moral behavior. Using data from students who cheated on an exam, we extend this literature by delineating how people can rationalize non-moral behavior by loosening the above relationships. In particular, we found that students tried to distance themselves from the wrongfulness of cheating using four types of rationalization: separating themselves from the action, blaming a third-party for influencing the decision, re-defining the action as something good, and defining alternate outcomes from the behavior. Supporting these rationales are nine basic arguments based on confusion, character, professor clarity, attractive nuisance, culture, intent, acceptance, comparisons and outcome. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for our understanding of moral reasoning and provide some practical approaches for minimizing this behavior

Undergraduate Preparation and Dissertation Methodologies of Accounting PhDs over the Past 40 Years

There is a shortage of accounting faculty and this shortage is predicted to worsen in the future. The number of new PhDs in accounting has declined from approximately 200 per year in the late 1980\u27 s and early 1990\u27 s to just over I 00 per year in recent years. Currently, we expect approximately 400 to 500 new accounting faculty positions to open up annually over the next to five to ten years. We believe that there has been a narrowing of the number of PhD candidates coming from fields other than accounting and other business related fields. If this is true, we believe that the number of accounting PhDs could be increased and the shortage could be reduced by increasing the number of non-accounting/non-business bachelor degree holders in accounting PhD programs. In this study, we examined patterns in the undergraduate majors of accounting doctorates over a forty-year time period to determine whether there was such a narrowing and how it related to the total number of accounting doctorates issued. We find that the percentage of non-accounting undergraduates was highest when the number of accounting PhDs granted annually was the highest. We also analyze the frequency of topics and research methods used in accounting dissertations to determine whether shifts in topics and research methods are related to changes in the total number of accounting doctorates. Results indicate that topics addressed and methodologies used in dissertations have become less diverse. Thus, we could perhaps increase the supply of accounting PhDs by expanding the applicant pool to include undergraduates with non-accounting/business degrees

Student/Faculty Connections in the Development of Teaching

This project directly involved students in two different models of instructional development. The first model was a Student Consultant program in which faculty selected from a menu of instructional services carried out by students. Typical services included attending class as impartial observers, soliciting feedback from other students on their learning experiences, videotaping class sessions, and evaluating course websites. The second model of instructional development was a program of student-assisted teaching seminars for college faculty. Student Associates helped serve as panelists and facilitators. Assessments of attitudes toward teaching indicated that faculty members viewed both professors and students as collaborators in the classroom as a result of the seminar series

Clinical outcomes and response to treatment of patients receiving topical treatments for pyoderma gangrenosum: a prospective cohort study

Background: pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) is an uncommon dermatosis with a limited evidence base for treatment. Objective: to estimate the effectiveness of topical therapies in the treatment of PG. Methods: prospective cohort study of UK secondary care patients with a clinical diagnosis of PG suitable for topical treatment (recruited July 2009 to June 2012). Participants received topical therapy following normal clinical practice (mainly Class I-III topical corticosteroids, tacrolimus 0.03% or 0.1%). Primary outcome: speed of healing at 6 weeks. Secondary outcomes: proportion healed by 6 months; time to healing; global assessment; inflammation; pain; quality-of-life; treatment failure and recurrence. Results: Sixty-six patients (22 to 85 years) were enrolled. Clobetasol propionate 0.05% was the most commonly prescribed therapy. Overall, 28/66 (43.8%) of ulcers healed by 6 months. Median time-to-healing was 145 days (95% CI: 96 days, ∞). Initial ulcer size was a significant predictor of time-to-healing (hazard ratio 0.94 (0.88;80 1.00); p = 0.043). Four patients (15%) had a recurrence. Limitations: No randomised comparator Conclusion: Topical therapy is potentially an effective first-line treatment for PG that avoids possible side effects associated with systemic therapy. It remains unclear whether more severe disease will respond adequately to topical therapy alone

Making imaginary worlds real: The case of expensing employee stock options

West [West, B. (2003). Professionalism and accounting rules. London: Routledge] and Chambers [Chambers, R. J. (1966). Accounting evaluation and economic behavior. Houston: Scholars Book Company] have provocatively argued that financial reporting has reached a state of near-total incoherence. In this paper, we argue that a source of this incoherence is the transformation of the US accounting academy into a sub-discipline of financial economics, a transformation in which accounting became a servant of the imaginary world of neoclassical economics. After noting the unusually prominent role of rules within the accounting profession, we describe the displacement of accounting’s centuries-old root metaphor of accountability by the metaphor of information usefulness, and situate that displacement within neoliberalism, a broader political movement that arose after World War II. Finally, we use SFAS 123R, the recently issued stock option standard, as a case study of the incoherence that West and Chambers assert. Through various issues – such as reflexivity, theory paradox, and unexplained questions of responsibility – we demonstrate the logical inconsistencies involved in SFAS 123F. The incoherence of stock option reporting rules raises serious questions about the information metaphor as a foundation for either individual rules or the standard setting process. The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) attempts to make the imaginary world of neoclassical economics real have resulted in rules which are not defensible. “We may start with a simple observation: so far as modern scientists know no one, not even the most adapt (sic) fakirs and clairvoyants, have ever learned anything from the future (all emphases in original)” Carl Thomas Devine (1962, p. 13). In his critique of current accounting theory, West observed that accounting failures and public relations crises tend to precipitate “calls for formally stated accounting rules,” (2003, p. 106). A highly salient and contentious example of the accounting profession’s rule-making response is the recent well-publicized battle over accounting for stock options in the US. The history of stock option accounting is the history of an accounting problem never solved. In the US the use of stock options was blamed as a key feature of the irrational exuberance driving the stock bubble of the late 1990s (Berenson, 2003 and Walters and Young, 2008); when that bubble burst, the stock market declined dramatically. As a way to restore the public’s confidence in capital markets, legislators and public accounting rule-makers seized upon changing the required accounting for stock options, exhibiting a conventional faith that disclosing the magnitude of such compensation to market participants would lead to market solutions to the problem. Instead of asking whether stock option abuses could be addressed more effectively by taxation or other regulations, the accounting profession created yet another complicated rule to provide greater “transparency.” If legislators and rule-makers could create new rules to address the abuse of stock options, then perhaps less attention would be paid to deeper, more systemic problems underlying the practice and structure of capital markets and of public accounting. We use the FASB’s rules on stock option accounting (Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R, henceforth SFAS 123R) as a case study illustrating the incoherence of accounting that West (2003) describes. We look first at the unusually prominent role of rules in public accounting. We then describe the current root metaphor (information) which provides the underlying rationale for the form and content of accounting rules and explore the earlier metaphor it explicitly replaced. We then look at how the metaphor of information usefulness emerged in the US and contributed to the formation of current stock option reporting rules. We expose the internal contradictions within stock option reporting rules, which arise because of theoretical weaknesses underlying the current information usefulness metaphor. Finally, we briefly look at what we believe the resulting incoherence within the stock option reporting rules tells us about accounting theorizing and standard setting.NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Accounting, Organizations and Society. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Accounting, Organizations and Society, [34, 6- 7, (2009)] doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.12.001. </p