An Exploration Of Values And Ethical Choices Of Accounting Students

An individual’s ethical and economic values impact his decision processes when faced with resolving certain dilemmas.  The primary issue of this research is to examine the relationship between accounting students’ ethical and economic values and their responses to business dilemmas. Additionally, this study attempted to see if senior accounting students responded with more ethical responses to the dilemmas than did lower-division accounting students.  A measure of ethicality proposed by McCarthy (1997) was compared with subjects’ ethical responses to the business dilemmas.  No correlation between the students’ measure of ethicality and the number of ethical responses to business dilemmas was found.  Results did indicate that senior students exhibited a greater ethicality measure than lower-division accounting students.  Additionally, senior-accounting students respond with marginally more ethical responses than lower-division accounting students.  These findings indicate that, analogously to cognitive moral development, ethical value development arguably is occurring in accounting students.  A contribution of this study is the use of the Rokeach value survey and eight business dilemmas to assess accounting student’s ethical value development.  The Rokeach measures the student’s relative ranking of eighteen different values, including ethical and economic values.  The business dilemmas measure the students’ ethical and economic responses to situations they could face in their lives.  These instruments could shed additional light on accounting students’ ethical development

Sustainability Reporting Practices In Portugal: Greenwashing Or Triple Bottom Line?

This paper examines the status of sustainability reporting in Portugal.  The Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) guidelines for sustainability reporting is an initiative that attempts to create a paradigm of triple bottom line reporting that encompasses the economic, environmental, and social performance of business. Measurement and reporting of environmental and social aspects are in their infancy compared to financial/economic reporting. The objective of the GRI’s framework is to elevate environmental and social reporting to the level of financial reporting by developing reporting principles and information qualities similar to those used in corporate financial reporting. In the post-Enron corporate reporting environment, such credibility may be tarnished and lead stakeholders to suspect corporations of greenwashing their reputations by issuing reports that are environmental window dressing.Currently 860 companies in a variety of industries worldwide are voluntarily listed as using the guidelines on the GRI’s web site; however, only five are from Portugal. Two of the five companies are GRI organizational stakeholders and one is listed as reporting 'in accordance' with the guidelines. Content analysis will be used to examine both the quantity and quality of information in the GRI reports of Portuguese companies. An additional issue regarding the transparency and credibility of the information provided is whether the reports have been verified (a more generic term than audit used for a similar assurance-type service relative to GRI Reports). The results of the content analysis will be used to shed some light on whether the companies generating these reports are bridging or widening the sustainability reporting expectations gap between companies and stakeholders

The Ignatian Pedagogy Paradigm and the Global Imperative of Biotechnology

The potential of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) is realized in the reflective actions of students after they leave the Jesuit educational setting and go out into the world. With developments in science and technology accelerating, and worldwide dissemination immediate, the imperative to infuse the IPP into areas driven by science and technology is clear. It is this imperative which draws us to the global biotechnology industry. This paper presents a short overview of the industry, describes how “science-business” differs from traditional business, and discusses the process by which the IPP – context, experience, reflection, action and evaluation – has been developed in the Business of Biotechnology program at the University of San Francisco (USF). The cases developed to exemplify the IPP are “Organized Religion and the Business of Biotechnology,” “Humanist Measures for Success in Bio-Business,” and “The Poor and Marginalized.” In addition, the Business of Biotechnology program utilizes the Biotechnology Innovation Expertise Model (BIEM 2.0), which identifies a recognized complement of the disciplines needed to bring breakthrough bioscience to a commercial product. These disciplines are readily present at Jesuit universities, which can, in turn, directly support education of value to the global biotechnology industry

The Presence of Jesuit Values in a Selection of University of San Francisco Courses: The Students’ Perspective

Even with the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) well-integrated into university coursework, the IPP works optimally in the presence of Jesuit values. But do students perceive the presence of these values in their courses? An effort was undertaken at the University of San Francisco (USF) to determine if student perception of USF’s core values in their courses could be measured, and if so, to what extent they were present. A total of 511 USF core values surveys were collected from both undergraduates and graduates in the School of Management from Spring 2014 to Intersession 2016. This paper reviews the development of the Original and Revised Surveys, and the findings that were made. This includes one low-scoring core values statement, and statistically significant differentials among international graduate students on a gender basis. The most significant finding was that all students perceived every USF core value on a substantive level in every course. Final recommendations include: (1) a detailed review of USF’s core values for clarity, and (2) a revision of the core values survey to better recognize values perception in international students of both genders

A Comparison of Cognitive Moral Development of Accounting Students at a Catholic University with Secular University Accounting Students

Previous research has shown that accountants may be inadequate moral reasoners. Concern over this trend caused the Treadway Commission (1987) and the Accounting Education Change Commission (1990) to call for greater integration of ethics into the student's training. Ponemon and Glazer (1990) found a difference in cognitive moral development (CMD) between accounting students at a public university and a private university with a liberal arts emphasis. This study expands Ponemon and Glazer's research by examining two liberal arts universities, one a private, secular institution and one a Catholic institution. The primary research question asks if Catholic university accounting students manifest greater CMD growth than secular university accounting students. Additionally, this study examines and compares the priority that accounting students from the different institutions place on ethical values versus economic values. It was expected that Catholic university accounting students would manifest both greater CMD growth and a greater concern for ethical values over economic values when compared with non-Catholic university accounting students. The study utilized a two-phase approach. In the first phase, an organizational study of two institutions was made to determine how each strives to integrate moral development into their accounting students' education. In the second phase, lower-division and senior accounting students were given three ethical and values related tasks to complete which propose to measure differences in ethical and economic values