Do Accounting Academics Have the Expertise to Teach a Discipline-Specific Ethics Course? A Research Assessment Approach

Ethics is of increasing concern to many important stakeholders in accounting education. While the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) encourages institutions to demonstrate their commitment to ethics through research agendas, the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy proposed a three-course ethics sequence – one of which was a discipline-specific accounting ethics course. The unanswered question is whether or not the accounting academy has the embedded expertise in ethics to teach a discipline-specific accounting ethics course. While there are numerous ways to establish an expertise in the area of ethics, this study documents the level of ethics research by accounting faculty who teach at institutions in North America in 26 business ethics journals, accounting’s Top-40 journals. Our data indicate that 683 (545) schools or 75.9 (60.6) percent of the 900 schools in the United States and Canada do not have an ethics scholar if one uses a five-year (20-year) research window. The study establishes a baseline that allows stakeholders to assess the level of past, present and future accounting ethics research, and the capabilities of accounting faculty to address alternative ethics education pedagogies