Suggestions for Providing Legitimacy to Ethics Research

Empirical approaches used in most accounting research may not always be appropriate when examining accounting ethics--a fact that may be considered suspect to traditionally trained accounting academics. Consequently, research in accounting ethics may not be accorded the legitimacy it deserves, and therefore ethics research is in danger of not receiving the necessary level of effort and interest needed for it to survive in the accounting academic community. By no means do I suggest that legitimacy is a substitute for quality research; rather, I argue that accounting ethics research has traditionally been undervalued due to the use of a different research methodology and its relatively recent entry as an appropriate topic for accounting researchers. There is evidence supporting the hypothesis that ethics is not perceived to be an important area to the majority of accounting educators. For example, of the approximately 6,200 accounting academics who teach accounting in North America (Hasselback 2002), only 168 (2.7 percent) indicate that ethics is an area of interest. Further, only 41 percent of these 168 academics listed ethics as their first or second interest; the remaining 59 percent listed it as a third or fourth interest. Consequently, ethics is, at best, a secondary area of interest for most accounting educators. Similarly, this relative lack of interest is demonstrated by comparison of the attendance at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, which draws about 2,400 colleagues (AAA 2002), with the Ethics Symposium, which has about 100 attendees annually. To answer why research in accounting ethics does not have a larger following, consider the fact that none of the 40 journals used by Hasselback et al. (2003) to rank "accounting's prolific authors" include ethics as a potential area of interest for manuscripts (Cabell 2000a). In fact, an examination of Cabell indicates that only four of the 131 journals (3.1 percent) list ethics as a topic of interest. Compare this to the management area where 156 of the 540 journals (28.9 percent) included in Cabell (2000b) indicate ethics as an area of interest for manuscripts (i.e., over nine times the rate of accounting journals). These numbers indicate that unlike other business disciplines such as management and marketing, most accountants apparently do not consider ethics to be a field in which to invest intellectual capital. Apparently, benefits in the form of publication opportunities and recognition are perceived to be insufficient to justify the cost needed to be incurred in the form of time spent to become current in ethics as a field of academic interest. The need for more research in accounting ethics is apparent; in the short run, there appear to be two possible strategies for finding suitable outlets. The first strategy is to view ethics not as a subfield of accounting, but instead as a field within business. Following this strategy, accountants interested in ethics should submit their research to management or business ethics journals where there are receptive audiences. As an example that accounting researchers are pursuing this strategy, during the past 15 years, the Journal of Business Ethics, one of 18 journals used by the Business Week and the Financial Times to rank M.B.A. programs (Merritt 2002), has steadily increased its annual publication of accounting articles from six to 19, on average. A longer term solution is to encourage the inclusion of journals that specialize in accounting ethics research in rankings of accounting journals. …