Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments October 2007 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Despite the amount of accounting ethics research conducted over many years, ways to improve the measurement instruments and to make them appropriate for application in other cultures or countries are still needed. In that direction, the main purpose of this study is to test a modified Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) to measure the ethical evaluations of Latin American and United States accountants and to determine the effects of culture and gender on the results. This study reviews the ethical evaluations of 2,297 accounting students from ten Latin American countries and the United States. The data examined was collected as part of a larger study on the ethics decision-making process. The study found important differences in the evaluative criteria between the Latin American and the United States respondents, providing new evidence to support the relationship between ethics and culture. In addition, the results provide supportive evidence to Gilligan's theory but contrary to Kohlberg's, pointing the need to new approaches to ethics research. The results suggest that individuals use multiple moral concepts simultaneously to make their ethical evaluations and adjust them according to their culture and the situation. No important differences in the evaluative criteria by gender were found in the Latin American sample suggesting that differences in ethical behavior are not due to the individuals' ethical core