Christopher J. Cowton

• BA, MA, MScEcon, PhD, DLitt
• Professor Emeritus at University of Huddersfield

The UK Bribery Act 2010 stands out internationally as far reaching in its scope. The Act creates the offence of failure by a commercial organisation to prevent bribery on its behalf. The offence is one of strict liability. However, if bribery does take place, the organisation has a defence if it can show that it had in place ‘adequate procedures’ d...

This article is an edited transcript of the keynote session at the 16th annual Philosophy of Management conference in Oxford on 23 June 2024. The keynote took the form of a dialogue between Roger Crisp (Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford) and Chris Cowton (Emeritus...

Purpose The accuracy of budgeting is important to fulfilling its various roles. The aim of this study is to examine perceptions of budgeting accuracy in UK universities and to identify and understand the factors that influence them. Design/methodology/approach A mixed methods research design comprising a questionnaire survey (84 responses, = 51.5%...

Most people use money almost every day, and financial assets have become so important to us that they determine our fate both as individuals and as societies. Yet we seldom stop to think about what all of this means, how it works, and how it ought to work. How can that small piece of paper in your wallet have value? How can so much power be vested...

Universities face an uncertain funding environment and turbulent marketplace. Financial scenario modelling offers a potential mechanism to assist in navigating a way forward. Our previous paper on UK universities' practice found some variation in the sophistication of the approaches taken, but the overall impression was of a relatively simple appro...

This study examines the relationship between board gender diversity, the presence of environmental committees and corporate environmental disclosure (CED). Using 1130 firm-year observations of 113 firms listed across five Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) stock markets from 2010 to 2019, we find that the extent of CED in SSA is low compared with developed c...

Through qualitative analysis of a dozen semi-structured interviews, this study identifies the issues that limit the ability of accounting education programmes to prepare students for the workplace in Libya, a country in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Factors include: faculty’s lack of practical experience; weak links with the profe...

Many firms have sought to de-risk their pension provision by closing or freezing their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. This shifts future pension risk onto employees, but it does not de-risk the firm’s existing obligations. Pension buy-ins and buy-outs, which are a form of insurance, have become an established option for de-risking such obligat...

Financial development has been found to have mixed effects on CO2 emissions. One reason appears to be the relationship is not linear, as is assumed in most earlier studies. This paper re-examines the relationship between financial development and CO2 emissions based on a panel data of 61 countries categorised as high- and middle-income economies, f...

Financial scenario modelling: a study of UK universities Abstract Financial scenario modelling appears to offer the potential to help universities cope with an uncertain funding environment. By means of a questionnaire survey of UK universities, supported by interviews with members of finance departments, this paper explores the prevalence and cons...

Despite the growth in corporate environmental disclosure (CED) across the world, there remains considerable heterogeneity in the extent to which firms disclose their environmental impacts. To better understand these changes and variations, we identify possible macro-level determinants of CED. Drawing on institutional theory, we examine the influenc...

Several studies have found a relationship between corporate social and environmental disclosure and firm value or accounting profitability. Where environmental disclosure has been the focus, though, only single-country studies have been published; and most of the previous research concerns the developed world. This study examines the association be...

Fraud is a growing challenge for English local government, yet the resources and support local authorities (LAs) have available to prevent, detect and investigate it are limited. Forensic accounting services (FAS) provided by external specialist private sector firms, particularly those undertaking mandatory external audit, might be one solution. Re...

Some well‐publicized financial reporting “scandals” have markedly increased interest in accounting ethics in recent years. This article is constructed around two principal themes: truth and professionalism. First, it might be thought that the issues surrounding the quality of accounting numbers amount to no more than a question of whether those num...

Poem: Strange Counting A poem about the First World War in Shakespearean sonnet form.

In this chapter I open up for examination the possibility that professionals, with their supposed commitment to competence and ethics and hence the public interest, provide one source of influence to make banking, and business more generally, better than it might otherwise be. There is considerable scepticism, not to say cynicism, towards profess...

It is not unusual for doctoral research to take a long time to complete – not only because of the work involved but also because of delays caused by other factors. This can apply to any research, but it is something that can particularly afflict a doctorate. Noting how an intended empirically-based contribution to knowledge sits between a changing...

Socially responsible investment or investing (SRI) is the practice of integrating social, environmental and ethical (SEE) considerations into investment decisions. In particular, SRI refers to the addition of SEE criteria to conventional financial criteria in the selection and management of portfolios of shares (stocks) of companies listed on stock...

Ali is continuing research interests related to corporate environmental disclosure, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance, business ethics, earnings management, and corporate reputation.

This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of corporate environmental disclosure (CED) in the Arab MENA region. Using a detailed research instrument containing 55 items, content analysis of the annual reports of 180 non-financial companies listed on nine major stock markets was conducted over a five-year period. The calculation of an unwe...

Purpose The purpose of this poem is to allow the reader to contemplate the substitution and to decide whether it works. Design/methodology/approach A short “poem” based on the idea of replacing “love” with “profit” in St Paul’s famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13, and often read at weddings. The word “charity” would appear instead of “love” if the...

In spite of its commercial importance and signs of clear concern in public policy arenas, trade credit has not been subjected to systematic, extended analysis in the business ethics literature, even where suppliers as a stakeholder group have been considered. This paper makes the case for serious consideration of the ethics of trade credit and expl...

After a period in which accounting has been implicated in a succession of corporate scandals, virtue theory offers considerable, and so far unfulfilled, potential for understanding and improving accounting practice. A virtue perspective should pick out those characteristics particularly associated with “good” accountants, while recognizing that acc...

After a period in which accounting has been implicated in a succession of corporate scandals, virtue theory offers considerable, and so far unfulfilled, potential for understanding and improving accounting practice. A virtue perspective should pick out those characteristics particularly associated with “good” accountants, while recognizing that acc...

Purpose – This purpose of this paper is to add strength and depth to the few other studies that take Libya as a point of departure to understanding the dynamic between disclosure practices and the context in which they are performed. Not enough is known about social accounting disclosure practices in developing countries. Design/methodology/approa...

Focus groups are a well established qualitative research method in the social sciences that would seem to offer scope for a significant contribution to the advancement of knowledge and understanding in the field of business ethics. This paper explores their potential contribution, reviews their contribution to date and makes some recommendations re...

This paper is an essay based on many years of reviewing journal submissions and discussions with business ethics scholars on a range of themes regarding methods. To some extent, it contains condensed thoughts from two experienced scholars in the field, which we hope will be useful, especially to emerging scholars who, to some extent, may still be w...

As a result of its empire and the early industrialization of its economy, the United Kingdom had a significant impact on business institutions and practices around the world. This article considers institutions of significance to business ethics in the UK – in particular, the governance framework and the stock market – and provides an overview of t...

Not for the first time, the banks and other financial institutions have got themselves – and the rest of us – into a mess, this time on an unprecedented financial and geographical scale. It is no surprise that opinions about causes, consequences and cures abound with ethical issues, as well as technical and economic concerns, a focus of attention....

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of...

Interest in accounting ethics has increased markedly in recent years.Keywords:business ethics;ethics in finance;practical (applied) ethics;conflict of interest;normative ethics

In this chapter the authors consider using email as a method for carrying out in-depth, qualitative research interviews. Prompted by an experience of conducting e-interviews, they set out some of their key characteristics, embedding their discussion in the methodological and conceptual literature on qualitative interview and on-line research. The a...

Dissertations are a common feature of final year undergraduate study. Although there is some research on students' perceptions of the dissertation, it appears there is less research concerning supervisors' perceptions of the value of the undergraduate dissertation. Data for the study was collected via a questionnaire administered to staff within tw...

Purpose The audit committee is one of the most prominent board sub‐committees, having a potentially important role to play in ensuring sound corporate governance. This paper aims to examine and discuss the behaviour of companies following revisions to the UK's Revised Code. Design/methodology/approach A variety of annual report data from a sample...

This chapter provides an overview of ethics in banking by focusing on the core process of financial intermediation that banks engage in through accepting deposits from savers and lending to borrowers who seek credit. Banks lend on a variety of bases and terms, including overdraft facilities associated with checking accounts, and term loans. The pro...

Dissertations are a common feature of final year undergraduate study. Although there is some research on students’ perceptions of the dissertation, it appears there is less research concerning supervisors’ perceptions of the value of the undergraduate dissertation. Data for the study was collected via a questionnaire administered to staff within tw...

Contemporary academic and policy discussions of corporate governance tend to accord primacy to the interests of shareholders. While the primacy (descriptive or prescriptive) of shareholders is argued for in various ways, others seek to promote a wider stakeholder model of the firm and its governance. In both cases, the interests of creditors tend t...

The proportion of business ethics literature devoted to accounting and the proportion of academic accounting literature devoted to ethical issues are both small, yet over the past two decades there has been a steady accumulation of research devoted to ethical issues in accounting. Based on a database of more than 500 articles gathered from a wide r...

This paper looks beyond recent financial reporting ‘scandals’ to consider the ‘standing challenge’ that ethics represents for accountants and the professional bodies that represent them. It examines the notion of a profession and argues for a position that recognises both the potential benefits of professionalisation and the self‐serving tendencies...

In addressing the question of the place for moral values in the construction of economics, one is challenged by a severe conundrum in the standard interpretation of the “mainstream” tradition of classical and neo-classical theory. On the one hand, under the influence of recent positivist doctrines insisting that normative and factual statements are...

This paper attempts to construct economic ethics or normative economics by a systematic reconsideration of economics and ethics. It starts with the identification of an interface between economics and ethics with the broad concept of good. While economics addresses allocation, distribution, and utilization of resources in light of the end-means rel...

The past years have nurtured the hope that business ethics would become increasingly a field of application and research for management. This development was certainly spurred on by several international corporate scandals as well as the concern that false management theories might be held (jointly) responsible for such bad managerial praxis (cf. G...

Aristotle states that everything worth doing is worth doing well. The economist James Buchanan claims that this is not the principle of economics, which states rather that it is not worth it to do everything well. Aristotle founded his ethics on the principle of arete or excellence, literally bestness. The human being should aim at excellence in al...

Management scandals have received much public attention throughout the last years. Opinion polls demonstrate that managers’ reputation has suffered from these events and that an increasing number of people are convinced that company leaders are not trustworthy. Despite this, corporate social responsibility has found its way into the executive suite...

Philosophers can benefit from empirical evidence about the nature of human altruism or egotism, whereas economists or psychologists stand to benefit from crucial questions arising from the philosophical discourse. For example, where exactly are the boundaries and limits of human norm-abiding behaviour in interactions between different ethnic groups...

Business ethics as a field of academic endeavour has made significant progress over the past two or three decades. It now boasts a substantial body of scholarly literature, which is a major resource in which much time and effort have been invested and from which much can be gained. However, there is still much work to be done, and the dynamic natur...

Since the turn of the century, social accounting has become one growth area in the field of business ethics (Gray 2002, 2001; O’Dwyer 2001; Rasche/Esser 2006; Unerman/Bennett 2004). Particularly in the international context there has been a proliferation of different concepts providing multinational corporations (MNCs) with ways to systematically a...

Kaplan has argued that a single accounting system should not be used to calculate product costs for use in decision making because it is not possible for a single system to satisfy the three different purposes of costs systems. Instead, he has suggested that operating units should use three separate systems to satisfy each of the three purposes or...

This paper reports the results of interviews with 51 qualified management accountants. Grounded theory techniques are used to seek to explain why operating units in manufacturing industry do or do not undertake investigations into the appropriateness of activity-based costing (ABC) and, for those that investigate ABC, how they carry out these inves...

In the last decades the use of trade credit has been extended as a short-term financing, but this indiscriminate use has misleading consequences to suppliers that support the main disadvantages. In this research it has been analysed the use of trade credit in United Kingdom, concretely this paper establish a descriptive situation in Europe and then...

Research into product costing practice has not studied whether there are differences in product costing practice between different types of manufacturing. This paper compares the product costing practices of operating units in discrete-part and assembly manufacturing, and continuous production process manufacturing. The results show that there are...

There has been criticism of the use of budgeted capacity as the denominator of overhead rates. Prior questionnaire-based research has analysed which type of capacity is used in the denominator of overhead rates, but it has not assessed why these capacity levels are used. This paper uses grounded theory techniques to analyse 50 interviews with Briti...

There has been little recent empirical research which has examined the application of costs in make-or-buy decisions. This paper presents the results of a questionnaire survey with 256 British management accountants and interviews with 55 of them that gather evidence about the application of costs in make-or-buy decisions. The results of the questi...

This paper uses the results of a questionnaire survey to conduct exploratory research into the importance of product costs in decision-making. The results of the research reveal that product costs are at least important in selling price, make-or-buy, cost reduction, product design, evaluating new production process and product discontinuation decis...

No abstract available.

This paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) over recent years and highlights the prospects for an increasingly strong connection with the practice of corporate social responsibility. The paper argues that not only has SRI grown significantly, it has also matured. In particular, it has become an investment philosophy...

In recent years, it has come to be recognised that banks' lending operations affect, and are affected by, the state of the natural environment. In particular, rising public concern about the state of the natural environment, as reflected in legislation and consumer attitudes, poses risks for the state of a bank's lending portfolio. Even if they are...

No abstract available.

Ethical investment funds are retail financial products which explicitly add social or ethical goals or constraints to normal financial criteria in selecting their underlying share portfolio. By means of a case study of a UK fund, this paper explores how the relationship between ethical criteria and financial performance might be handled, which is o...

The UK Government is presently conducting a consultation process focused on the introduction of a new legal form of company, that of the Community Interest Company (CIC). Organisations choosing this form of incorporation would be subject to a legal requirement to involve their stakeholders in the governance of the company. This development is just...

Fundamental to Sir Karl Popper’s oeuvre was the insight that humans err — and that we can learn from our mistakes. Critique is therefore valuable in all human endeavours. Although this stance is most famously seen in Popper’s claim that to be scientific a theory or hypothesis has to be falsifiable, Popper adopted a critical approach extensively in...

A large proportion of students in UK highereducation now study business and management. Although universities might be expected to aimto produce well-rounded graduates, there hasbeen a perception that business schools havetended to take a narrow view of businessstudies, paying little attention to ethicalissues. However, recently there have been som...

Although ethical investment is a growing phenonenon which attracts a signficant amount of media interest, relatively little has been written about the internal operations of ethical investment funds. Using a variety of sources, including interviews with a fund manager and participant observation at meetings of the fund’s ethical advisory committee,...

Banking, in common with other areas of finance, is often considered an amoral field focused purely on risk and return. However, ethics does have an important role to play, both traditionally and as business and banking evolve. Based on a speech to a European Union conference on financing small and medium–sized enterprises (SMEs), this paper seeks t...

Relatively little is currently known about thecoverage of ethical issues in the accountingcurriculum. This paper reports on the resultsof a questionnaire survey of universityacademics in the British Isles which found thata significant minority of management accountinglecturers do claim to address ethical issues intheir teaching. In addition to repo...

From its roots in the writings of Robert Anthony and his colleagues at Harvard Business School, the field of management control has expanded greatly, drawing on a wide variety of perspectives. With reference to a case study of a British automotive parts distributor, this paper considers the usefulness of a Foucauldian perspective for understanding...

This paper builds on the authors' recent experience of interviewing by e-mail. It describes the principal characteristics of the "e-interview", as we term it, outlining the principal ways in which the e-interview differs from the more familiar method of face-to-face interviewing. Paying particular attention to issues relating to time, space and tec...

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The p...

Two-by-two grids are a popular means of exposition of management thought. In this note such grids are identified with Carroll diagrams, developed by the Oxford mathematician and logician Charles Dodgson. Using this insight, the nature of the conceptual tool frequently used by management authors is reflected upon. Two-by-two grids are a clear means...

Reports the findings of a pilot survey into how product costs are calculated and how they are used in decision making in manufacturing industry in the UK. The survey examines how many accounting systems firms use, blanket overhead rates in product costing; the bases used to calculate overhead rates; the application of product costs in decision maki...