Reviews the book "Normative Audit Control for On-Line/Real-Time Systems: A Feasibility Study," by Maxwell E. Aiken, Kevin G. Hulme and Phillip J. Grouse.
This article presents a comment on the study of some observations on student values and their implications for accounting education in the U.S. If accounting majors are less concerned with wisdom and beauty than other students it may be incumbent upon accounting educators to raise the consciousness level of their students. This could be done by pointing out the scholarly background of accounting and the infinite complexities of designing a useful and reliable method of measuring economic and financial transactions.
A participant observation methodology is employed in this paper to investigate the management strategy of a large public accounting firm. The author directly observed partners and managers of an audit practice office going about their daily tasks over a 3-month period. A descriptive model of the management strategy was developed from the observed matrix of daily interactions. The results indicate that there are three components to the management strategy: Doing, Representing and Being. Doing is defined as those activities which the firm undertakes to maintain and improve its relationship with its clients. Representing is defined as those activities which the firm undertakes to maintain and improve its relationships with outside parties other than clients. Being is defined as the image of the firm. The three components work together to manage the environment in which the public accounting firm operates.
The article focuses on the differences in value systems between university students in the United States. These are university students who are interested in pursuing accounting as a career choice and those students who are not interested in such a career choice. Differences in value systems are tested using the Rokeach Survey of Values. Significant differences are found on these eight variables: a comfortable life; a world of beauty (negative); wisdom (negative); ambitious; clean; imaginative (negative); family security; and responsible. The eight differences have construct validity based upon prior research in this area. However, results are inconclusive as to whether accounting majors in fact, do, have different value systems from other university students. Anthropologists have found that even the most primitive cultures have elaborate ethical systems which delineate proper and improver behavior. Throughout most of history the study of values was dominated by the religious leaders of a culture.