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This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

The ethics of rights or the separative model has dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment and the ethics of care was developed as a feminist critique seeking to rebalance our basic thought structure. The ethics of care is used as a framework for analysis and as a visionary ideal to evaluate proposed changes in accounting practice. Reports on changes in conceptualizing accounting practice proposed by the AICPA’s special committees on assurance and financial reporting. The proposals challenge traditional views of accounting practice, based on rights thinking, and adopt concepts from new management theories compatible with the ethics of care. Contends that it is not clear to what extent these proposals, and other current proposals to address the problem of auditor independence, represent a real paradigm shift. The proposed changes are driven by an economic imperative to expand the scope of services of the profession and may result in a significant threat to the accounting profession’s claims to professional status.

Investigates two issues raised by D.C. Moore: the apparent failure of critical accounting theory to launch and sustain a critical programme and relative lack of critical accounting activity in the USA. These concerns are related in that radicalization and change of one′s own academic discipline would seem to be one of the highest‐priority political activities to be undertaken by critical theorists. Offers feminist economics as an example of a critical social theory that meets Moore′s four criteria for successful criteria endeavour and is applicable to accounting research. Compares the feminist economic critique with critiques of accounting by Cooper, and by Shearer and Arrington, based on the French feminist philosophers. The two approaches differ in goals and politics. Suggests that the experience of feminist economics in reforming economics also provides insights into the slow growth of critical accounting theory in the USA.

This chapter explores how one company's disclosure contributes to and reflects the broader discourse of environmentalism over time. We select some of Noranda's earliest environmental reports, 1990, 1992 and 1994, and some of its recent sustainable development reports, 2000, 2002 and 2004. Using Eder's framework (1996), we undertake a discourse analysis along three dimensions: moral responsibility, empirical objectivity and aesthetic judgement. This analysis is then linked to environmental philosophy perspectives as per Gray et al. (1996). Even though Noranda's disclosure changes significantly, the reports reflect a mixture of environmental philosophies that remains relatively constant with the social contract perspective being dominant.

In the two years since the publication of the last volume of this series, the planet has witnessed some devastating environmental events some of which can be attributed to human causes. However, we have also seen the world uniting (except mainly for the United States and Australia) to reduce greenhouse gases and hopefully slowdown global warming. Recognizing that saving the planet from environmental degradation depends on the concerted effort of all countries and entities is a major first step in this rescue effort. Depending on the good graces of countries and companies to voluntarily join this effort however, we believe, is a losing proposition.

The paper initially engages in a discussion of the different concepts of trust promulgated over the years via a review of the literature. Trust is then discussed in the context of three management accounting situations, viz. the typical transfer pricing situation; the (equally) typical budget setting process; and, finally, the rather more specific situation of the accounting information system (here utilising the concept of action at a distance) employed within a particular construction company. So whilst two of the management accounting applications examined are from a theoretical perspective, the third is empirically based (if only because of the dearth of theoretical literature available in the relevant domain)