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This paper aims to identify ethical challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI)-based accounting systems for decision-making and discusses its findings based on Rest's four-component model of antecedents for ethical decision-making. This study derives implications for accounting and auditing scholars and practitioners.

This research is rooted in the hermeneutics tradition of interpretative accounting research, in which the reader and the texts engage in a form of dialogue. To substantiate this dialogue, the authors conduct a theoretically informed, narrative (semi-systematic) literature review spanning the years 2015–2020. This review's narrative is driven by the depicted contexts and the accounting/auditing practices found in selected articles are used as sample instead of the research or methods.

In the thematic coding of the selected papers the authors identify five major ethical challenges of AI-based decision-making in accounting: objectivity, privacy, transparency, accountability and trustworthiness. Using Rest's component model of antecedents for ethical decision-making as a stable framework for our structure, the authors critically discuss the challenges and their relevance for a future human–machine collaboration within varying agency between humans and AI.

This paper contributes to the literature on accounting as a subjectivising as well as mediating practice in a socio-material context. It does so by providing a solid base of arguments that AI alone, despite its enabling and mediating role in accounting, cannot make ethical accounting decisions because it lacks the necessary preconditions in terms of Rest's model of antecedents. What is more, as AI is bound to pre-set goals and subjected to human made conditions despite its autonomous learning and adaptive practices, it lacks true agency. As a consequence, accountability needs to be shared between humans and AI. The authors suggest that related governance as well as internal and external auditing processes need to be adapted in terms of skills and awareness to ensure an ethical AI-based decision-making.

This paper has two purposes. First, it aims to explore how Australian universities used calculative rhetoric and practices through accounting numbers to persuade employees and legitimize their financial recovery plans to alleviate the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it aims to analyze how the accounting-based solutions were legitimized through a well-blended pathos, logos and ethos rhetoric.

Building on a rhetorical theory of diffusion, we employed a qualitative research design within all 37 Australian public universities involving Internet-based documentary analysis.

This study finds that in an urgent crisis like the fiscal crisis caused by COVID-19, universities again found rescue in accounting tools, in particular budgets, as a rhetorical device to justify their operational and strategic choices such as job-cuts, programs closures and staff pay-cuts. However, in this crisis, the same old accounting-based solutions were even more quickly to be accepted by being delivered in management’s colorful blending of pathos–logos–ethos rhetoric.

While this study is constrained to Australian public universities’ financial responses, its findings have implications for university decision-makers and higher education policymakers across the globe when it comes to university management using calculative devices in persuading employees to work their way through financial hardship caused by an extreme health crisis-like COVID-19 pandemic.

This study adds more evidence that the use of budgets as a calculative tool continues to play a key role in organizations in the construction, mobilization and preservation of certain strategic and operational choices during volatilities. Especially, the same way of creating calculative-based solutions can be communicated via the colorful blending of different rhetoric to make it acceptable.