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Using the pause created by the COVID-19 pandemic, this essay expands upon the reflections offered by many accounting academics across the world. Many questions about where we find ourselves in our ...

This paper critically assesses the potential of the liberal arts to contribute to accounting education in the USA. I argue that the contribution that these disciplines can make through current institutional structures is quite limited and highly conflicted. A proposal is made to extract the essential skills that are believed to be produced by the liberal arts. These could be re-embedded in an accounting education that featured the classic professionalism model as a conceptual centerpiece. Consequences of such an approach are extended and limitations are recognized.

We have all experienced the moment when we are obliged to explain accounting research to a ‘lay’ person. The longer you are in this community, the more glib you get at this somewhat tortured descri...

Advocates of the case method in accounting education have provided strong arguments in favour of this classroom approach. However, a primary objection has been unanswered. Cases generate ‘canned’ solutions that, when passed between students, jeopardize the accountability of individual efforts and the educational value of the exercise. Although students have leveraged computer technology to exacerbate this problem, academic staff generally have not ‘fought fire with fire.’ This paper shows how computer technology, through the use of artificial intelligence, can restore the confidence that each student will work his/her own case solution and, therefore, will extract the intended educational value from the effort. With computer technology made to act intelligently, the case method in accounting classes should become more robust as a primary pedagogical device. ∗The authors are willing to share the data in this paper

Does anyone have enough time to reflect? Caught up in the usual tasks of teaching and research, accounting academics should be, but usually are not, particularly self-reflexive. Spreading our persp...

I confess to an inexhaustible fascination with the social structure of academic accounting. Although I do not go out of my way to find its curios, I do not want to miss an opportunity to report wha...

Recent attention to institutional variables that underlie the publication productivity levels of academic accountants threatens to obscure the fact that research is conducted by individuals who bring differing levels of ability, motivation and interest to scholarship. This study introduces willingness to write as a new correlate of productivity. Using the population of PhDs in accounting from US universities with conferred degrees between 1986 and 1996 as a sample, the results show that willingness to write is significant in the explanation of publication productivity when this is measured in a variety of ways. In turn, willingness to write is explained by institutional status. However, the direction of these relationships needs to differentiate the type of publishing that the individual undertakes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that only a great mind could hold two opposite ideas at the same time. The purpose of this essay is to expose such a tension, and then to propose a way to reconcil...

This paper considers issues pertaining to accounting faculty performance evaluation as it is generally applied in the United States. How performance is evaluated is a question of interest to all stakeholders in the enterprise of accounting education, particularly in the light of recent changes in the educational environment. Some characteristics of faculty performance evaluation are institutionspecific. For example, the number of years of service required before a tenure decision can vary across universities, and the level of formality in the evaluation process is not uniform. Furthermore, some business schools do not use the separate academic department structure. Regardless of these differences, evaluation is typically a function of the faculty member's research, teaching, and service contributions, and precise expectations are rarely fully specified, leaving open the question of just how any particular contributions are evaluated. We use game theory to create a model of faculty efforts and outcomes wit...

Academic accounting units at universities possess varying degrees of social esteem. The maintenance of relative position requires continuous efforts of reproduction. Using Bourdieu's theoretical analysis, this paper hypothesizes institutional positioning as a function of cultural, economic and symbolic capital possessed by these institutions of higher education. Operationalizing the hierarchy of universities in the USA according to their results in the academic labour market, the results suggest that reproduction occurs directly based on cultural capital (research productivity) and indirectly based on economic capital (unit size) and symbolic capital (university reputation).

Although many attempts to improve tax education have provided worthwhile enhancements for the classroom, few have addressed the need to train tax students in tax planning applications. Starting from the recognition that the critical parameters used by the tax practitioner are not deterministic, students can model probabilistic tax situations through simulation techniques. This paper illustrates how, using recent computerized developments, Monte Carlo simulations can make teaching advanced taxation both more realistic and more challenging. The philosophical shift that becomes possible with this technology is also consistent with recent suggestions to reorient accounting education toward active learning and skill development.

Prestige distinctions are critical to any understanding of the US academic community. Past rankings of academic departments of accounting, based on a variety of factors including faculty publications, citations and external perceptions, fail to provide a means of assessing relative prestige. This paper proposes that an accounting department's ability to place its doctoral recipients should serve as the pivotal prestige measurement. As such, prestige becomes an ex anteattribute of the stratification system rather than an ex postproductivity metric. An empirical analysis of accounting faculty placements from graduate schools in the US was conducted as a means of ranking US departments of accounting that offer the doctoral degree. The resultant rankings, also evaluated over time and against programme size, provide a unique opportunity to observe a hierarchy of social judgment.

All too often, educational research and commentaries are excessively obsequious. As a result, the implications of this work are barely noticeable and its impact destined to be minor. The present ar...