You reap what you sow: the ethical discourse of professional accounting☆
Section snippets
The discursive change of academic accounting
In the 1960s the academy where accounting is taught was transformed by its colonization with Positive Economic Science (PES; Williams, 2002a). This was spurred by the desire to make accounting more scientific (Zeff, 1966). This push for scientific rigor was accompanied by the creation of the Journal of Accounting Research and the aggressiveness with which the doctrines of PES were imposed on the unsophisticated teachers and practitioners who were unaware that they were sorely mistaken about
Sharing responsibility for Enron/Andersen
A professional, which most accountants likely believe describes them, acquires his or her status as a professional only by being a member of a group. Only as a member of a group that publicly judges the quality of service being performed by an individual can that individual be a professional (May, 1992, p. 100). The important implication of this group nature of professional status that is relevant to this essay is that we in the academy must accept responsibility for Enron/Andersen events by
Conclusion
This brief commentary on the circumstances of the Enron/Andersen affair leads to a rather ordinary conclusion. That is that members of the academy must be concerned with other than their politically correct academic reputations. We in the academy must accept some of the responsibility for the instances of corporate corruption that continue to reveal themselves. Depriving ourselves of an ability to discuss the morality of what we do in exchange for the illusion that we are engaging in some kind
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This brief essay is based on remarks presented at a panel session on Enron at the Critical Perspectives on Accounting Conference, April 26, 2002. A highly abridged version of those remarks was published as an editorial in Williams (2002c).