S. Douglas Beets

The effectiveness of a complaint-based ethics enforcement system: Evidence from the accounting profession

Many professions, in order to enforce their ethics codes, rely on a complaint-based system, whereby persons who observe or discover ethics violations may file a complaint with an authoritative body. The authors assume that this type of system may encourage ethical behavior when practitioners believe that a punishment is likely to result from a failure to adhere to the rules. This perceived likelihood of punishment has three components: detection risk, reporting risk, and sanction risk. A survey of potential violation witnesses related to the accounting profession revealed that the professions complaint-based enforcement system may not provide practitioners with the necessary disincentive to refrain from code violations.

The Quality of Business Ethics Journals: An Assessment Based on Application

With growth in the quantity of business ethics journals in recent years, assessments of journal quality are helpful to ethics researchers and administrators, as researchers consider available publication venues, and administrators consider the value of faculty research. The few published evaluations of business ethics journals have predominantly utilized two methods of journal quality determination: citation analysis and surveys of active researchers. This study employs a novel method to assess business ethics journals: 83 Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) business schools provided their internally developed journal lists (IDJ lists) that were used to evaluate faculty research, and the submitted lists were then analyzed for the presence and assessment of business ethics journals. This analysis yielded a ranking of 24 business-ethics-centric (BEC) journals, and this ranking reflects the collective judgments of AACSB business school faculties. The results of this study are pragmatic in that the journal evaluation data employed metrics actually used by business schools to determine the quality of business ethics journals. These findings also provide additional impetus for the recognition of business ethics as a distinct business discipline and business ethics research as a unique field of scholarly endeavor. While studies of business ethics may be influential when they are published in non-BEC journals, such studies may be more powerfully impactful when published in BEC journals.

An assessment of accounting journal quality based on departmental lists

Inevitably, the career success of academicians is partially dependent on the journals in which their manuscripts are published. Accordingly, knowledge of which journals are considered prestigious or of dubious quality is critical to an academician. Fortunately, several rankings of accounting journals have been published, providing insights to manuscript authors, and this study includes a discussion of several prior studies that have, by various methods, attempted to accurately compare the quality of accounting journals. Critically, however, this study also describes a survey of accredited business schools that submitted their departmental journal lists which were employed by those institutions in the assessment of faculty publications. Those departmental journal lists with multiple quality tiers were used to construct a journal ranking based on the evaluative, departmental reality faced by academicians rather than citation counts or expressed perceptions of journals. While the journal ranking of this study reveals consistency with many previous studies regarding the top five accounting journals, the study also indicates that departmental journal lists, which are reflective of the priorities of the schools that created them, often ascribe value to the diversity of journals that focus on specializations but not journals that are predominantly oriented toward accounting practitioners.