Ethical Implications of Management Accounting and Control: A Systematic Review of the Contributions from theJournal of Business Ethics

Journal of Business Ethics · 2020 · Volume 163 · Issue 2

Abstract

Management accounting and control seeks to provide information that substantiates decision-making at all firm levels and thus may also foster ethical decision-making. Against this background, this article presents a systematic literature review of research on management accounting and control and business ethics that has been published in theJournal of Business Ethics. Through this review, we intend to bring to the forefront a research topic that has been widely neglected in broader literature reviews on accounting ethics research and that has been covered by a small number of articles published by traditional leading accounting journals only. Our systematic literature review is guided by a theoretical framework that integrates the decision-facilitating and decision-influencing roles of management accounting and control information and the stages of the ethical decision-making process. Through this theoretical lens, we analyze 64 management accounting and control articles published in theJournal of Business Ethicsover more than three decades. Synthesizing and structuring this research, we discuss prior accomplishments and elaborate on avenues for future research.

Keywords

Budgeting, Controller, Ethics, Journal of Business Ethics, Management accountant, Management accounting, Management control system, Performance measurement system

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