IntroductionThe collapse of Arthur

Introduction
The collapse of Arthur Andersen in 2002 is often viewed as having generated considerable stress on accountancy. Sense-making endeavors pertaining to the debacle of the accounting firm have tended to identify a variety of potential causes – one of them being a gradual deterioration of accountants’ ethics. Under the latter perspective, individual accountants
Yves Gendron is associate professor of accounting at the School of Business, University of Alberta. Most of Yves’ research is focused on the examination of auditing-related phenomena, informed by sociological perspectives of analysis. He is especially interested in developing a better understanding of the ways in which professional work is carried out in actual practice and the process by which professional work is legitimized in the eyes of relevant audiences. His academic work has been published in a broad variety of accounting journals, such as Accounting, Organizations and Society; Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory; Contemporary Accounting Research; and European Accounting Review. Roy Suddaby is an assistant professor at the Alberta School of Business with a joint appointment in the departments of Accounting & Management Information Systems and Strategic Management and Organization. Roy’s theoretical focus is on processes of institutional change. His primary empirical context is professional service firms. His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Organizational Behaviour and Human Relations. Roy serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal and Organization Studies. Helen Lam is an Associate Professor, Human Resource Management, in Athabasca University, working at the centre for Innovative Management which focuses on graduate management programs in business administration. She received her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Business at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include the areas of downsizing, restructuring, quality initiatives, business ethics, human rights and legal issues at the workspace. Her work has been published in a variety of academic journals, such as Journal of Business Ethics, Industrial Relations, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Labor Research, and Relations Industrielles. Journal of Business Ethics (2006) 64: 169–193
Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10551-005-3095-7 are assumed not to have been rigorous, in a number of situations, in applying their profession’s ethical standards of auditor independence – which basically emphasize that auditors need to maintain emotional distance from auditees. Most people today agree about the decline in core ethical values in the accounting profession; the present study is no exception.
A key question that remains to be addressed is the cause of such lapses in professional ethics. Many critics have pointed to the growing influence of commercial greed over professional objectivity as a key reason for the ethical lapses in accounting. Macey and Sale (2003, p. 1167), for example, argue that the internal governance structures of large
accounting firms made the ‘‘modern accounting industry […] more like a business than a profession.’’ Arthur Wyatt, a former managing partner of Arthur Andersen and now a prominent critic of the accounting profession, maintains that ‘‘simple greed’’ can explain the observed deviation from core ethical values among accountants (e.g. Wyatt and Gaa,
2005). Wyatt argues that the introduction of nonaudit services, primarily management consulting work, into large public accounting firms shifted the reward structure away from adherence to professional standards and ethics toward commercial gain. Bailey (1995) suggests that professional ethics and values are the product of a ‘‘golden age’’ of professionalism that has since passed, and that key ethical standards have not been successfully translated on the
workplace to the younger generation. Simply stated, these critics suggest that changes in the context of professional work have made the accounting profession more susceptible to a logic of commercial gain than professional independence and objectivity. In spite of the rhetoric, there are few empirical tests of any of these assertions. This article seeks to test the general assertion that changes in the context of accounting work have eroded professional ethics. Specifically, we extend the literature on professional ethics by introducing the construct of ethical commitment, and by examining the extent to which professional accountants’ ethical commitment towards auditor independence varies along features of their work and cultural environment. We do so through an online survey of Chartered Accountants (CAs) from four Canadian provincial institutes administered in late 2002. Ethical commitment is defined as the extent to which the individual adheres to ideal moral values and their regulatory enforcement within her/his professional community.1 Because auditor independence is a central concept in the accounting profession, the present study focuses on the commitment that professional accountants manifest towards auditor independence. Specifically, independence commitment is defined as the extent to which the individual accountant considers auditor independence as a key attribute of the profession, and believes that regulatory standards of auditor independence (issued by the profession and/or external regulatory agencies) should be rigorously binding and enforced in the public accounting domain. A key argument of this article is that the erosion of ethical commitment among accountants can be explained by profound changes in the context of accounting work. Work is often viewed as exerting a key influence on individual’s values and behavior (Gini, 2000). Authors in domains such as sociology,
organizational analysis and accounting have deplored researchers’ tendencies to neglect the role of work, stressing that researchers should take work into account in a more meaningful way in their intellectual endeavors (e.g. Abbott, 1988; Barley and Kunda, 2001; Hopwood, 1996). Research on accounting ethics is no exception.2 In short, work constitutes a prime feature of contemporary society; its role and influence should be directly addressed by social scientists. Our interest in the relationship between work and independence commitment ensues from important work changes that have taken place in accountancy in the last two decades, and their hypothesized impact on accounting ethics. The proportion of professional accountants working outside of public practice increased significantly since 1990.3 Public accounting firms, by contrast, are becoming increasingly large and multidisciplinary. Since 1990 management advisory services have become an increasingly prominent activity within public accounting firms, thereby strengthening the influence of commercialism
in these organizations (Zeff, 2003a). The range of advisory services has expanded quite dramatically in the largest accounting firms, including almost any service that could generate revenues (Wyatt, 2004) – such as business ethics, human resource management, IT design, and risk management.4 The involvement 170 Yves Gendron et al. of public accounting firms in consultancy is expected to continue in spite of post-Enron regulatory reforms (Wyatt, 2004). As a result of these ongoing changes, and similar to Fogarty et al. (2005), we argue that it is reasonable to conceive of the accounting profession as a loosely coupled network of sub-communities, permeated with a relatively significant level of intraprofessional tension. Importantly, several commentators voiced concerns regarding the impact of the above changes on accounting ethics (e.g. Shafer et al., 2002; Wyatt, 2004; Zeff, 2003a, b). Our online survey also investigates the relationship between the cultural context of work and independence commitment. It is largely recognized in accounting ethics research that national (or subnational) culture exerts influence on individuals’ attitudes (e.g. Jones et al., 2003; Roxas and Stoneback, 2004). Accordingly, we looked for differences in independence commitment between accountants of predominantly francophone culture and those of predominantly anglophone culture. Three of the provincial institutes of CAs from which our respondents were selected are located in Englishspeaking provinces of Canada while the fourth CA association is in Que´bec, a predominantly Frenchspeaking province. The rest of the article is structured as follows. In the next section we elaborate the notion of independence commitment, review the literature and formulate hypotheses. Then we describe in two distinct sections the research methods and the results. In the last section we discuss some of the study’s key findings and limitations while highlighting areas of future research.