This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest's model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention-thus providing support for Rest's model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest's model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world.
This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of corporate environmental disclosure in the Arab Middle East and North Africa region. Using a detailed research instrument containing 55 items, content analysis of the annual reports of 180 non-financial companies listed on nine major stock markets was conducted over a 5-year period. The calculation of an unweighted disclosure index indicates that, although the level of disclosure might be considered relatively low by international standards, it varies by country. Perhaps of greater significance for the future of sustainable development in the region, disclosure is shown to have increased significantly over the period [2010][2011][2012][2013][2014]. Further analysis shows that although there are some differences relating to categories of disclosure, this is a region-wide phenomenon not driven by a subset of countries or types of company. This benchmark study provides a systematic picture for policy-makers in the region and, for future researchers, both substantive findings and methodological insight.
The proportion of business ethics literature devoted to accounting and the proportion of academic accounting literature devoted to ethical issues are both small, yet over the past two decades there has been a steady accumulation of research devoted to ethical issues in accounting.Based on a database of more than 500 articles gathered from a wide range of accounting and business ethics academic journals, this paper describes and analyses the characteristics of what has been published in the past twenty years or so. It identifies and explores patterns and trends in publication outlets and the type of research conducted. Furthermore, through a comparison with issues that have been raised in the general business ethics literature, it offers guidance to researchers who intend to take the field of accounting ethics forward using empirical methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.