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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the ‘state of play’ with regard to accounting education reform, which has been advocated for decades but is notable for having failed to produce significant change. We build on prior calls to ‘liberalise’ accounting education, recommending a move to a more relevant curriculum that considers accounting in its social context. Based on an analysis of the accounting curriculum in 31 Australian and 8 New Zealand universities, we find that, despite widespread and continuing calls for a broader educational approach, there are very few examples of systemic curricular-wide change to the traditional technical and vocational focus of accounting education. As a way forward, a sociologically-informed accounting curriculum is proposed to overcome the widely-recognised limitations of current approaches and the apparent failure of efforts to liberalise the curriculum. We argue that our approach would facilitate the broadening of the curriculum, and the development of better-educated, well-rounded, and socially-aware graduates.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching for its support and funding for this project (Project ID12-2530). We are very appreciative of the assistance of Ms Finn Leach, Senior Project Manager. The analysis in the paper has benefited from the research assistance of Mr Alex Pavlotski, funded with support from the Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See also (Anderson-Gough, Citation2009), whose overview of the history of accounting education in the UK provides insights into some of the longstanding and ongoing tensions between different perspectives on the appropriate purpose, form, and content of accounting education in universities. Howcroft’s (Citation2017) recent analysis provides insight into some disjunction between academic and practitioner/professional views regarding the appropriate content of university accounting education: ‘curriculum and assessment requirements of accreditation crowded out more liberal approaches to accounting education’ (p. 519).
2 Originally published in 1852.
3 Especially: IES2 Content of Professional Accounting Education Programs and IES3 Professional Skills and General Education.
4 And on the authors’ combined knowledge and experience of the accounting curriculum.
5 See Brennan (Citation1991) for a discussion of the value of considering environmental perspectives as a part of contemporary liberal education.
6 For example, in relation to the search for the term ‘ethics’, completion of the second step indicated the term ethics was most commonly used in relation to ‘professional’ ethics, as opposed to a more sociological understanding of ethics as being about ‘living a good life’.
7 For the in-depth analysis, the keyword terms were considered in three groups: ethics; social and society; and environment and sustainability.
8 For the purposes of presentation and ease of reading in , universities are grouped by Australian state and country (for NZ). The analysis is not institution or jurisdiction specific, as this is outside the scope of the paper (and there is no theoretical or empirical reason to undertake a state-by-state analysis).
9 Notable exceptions, where present, are reported in the discussion.
10 A few dedicated ethics subjects were observed: Cultural and Ethical Values (Bond University); Ethics, Sustainability and Culture (management discipline, Charles Sturt University), Corporate Governance and Ethics (Central Queensland University); and Business Law and Ethics (Queensland University of Technology).
11 The University of Southern Queensland Bachelor of Accounting and Sustainable Business.
12 Examples of subjects in which the course description hinted at the existence of a sociological perspective included: Introduction to Financial Accounting and Cost Accounting, University of New England; Accounting and the Sustainability Ethos, University of Newcastle; Accounting Theory and Applications, University of Western Sydney; Sustainability, Business & Social & Environmental Accountability, University of Canterbury; Sustainability Accounting and Reporting, Auckland University of Technology; and Organisations and Society, University of Waikato.
13 Subjects that focused either exclusively on corporate social responsibility and reporting, or contained topics related to these issues included: Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility, Accountability and Reporting, the Australian National University; Contemporary Issues in Law and Society, Bond University; Accounting for Governance and Ethics, Curtin University; Accounting in Organisations and Society, RMIT; and Applied Ethics and Sustainability, the University of Southern Queensland.
14 Ethical also appeared frequently because one institution (QUT) had a ‘Have a Social and Ethical Understanding (SEU)’ requirement for all subjects; this accounts for a large part of the word frequency for ‘ethical’: 54 out of a total of 116 references.
15 Examples of subjects in which environmental issues were canvassed in more detail included: Accounting and Accountability, the Australian Catholic University; Sustainable Resource Use, Southern Cross University; and Accounting Theory and Management; Curtin University.
16 Examples include: Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility, Accountability and Reporting at Australian National University; Financial Accounting Theory, Central Queensland University; Auditing, Bond University; Advanced Management Accounting, Deakin University; Accounting and Sustainability Ethos, University of Newcastle; Sustainability Accounting and Reporting and Stakeholder Engagement and Sustainability Reporting, Auckland University of Technology; and Governance, Sustainability and Ethics, Flinders University.
17 For example, at University of Sydney, University of New England, University of Southern Queensland, Deakin University, University of Queensland, and Charles Sturt University.
18 The authors acknowledge that this study has only examined publicly available documentation in drawing conclusions about the current accounting curriculum. It is possible that a broader approach to accounting is being undertaken by educators and that this has not translated into the official documentation relating to subjects/courses. This is a limitation of the current study that may be addressed by further research.
19 First published in 1959.