Undergraduate preferences for careers in financial and managerial accounting: Social, professional, and religious factors

The guiding construct of this study is one from the sociology of knowledge offered by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). A person constructs reality, one's way of knowing, through a dialectical process created by interactions of personal experiences, social relationships, and religious beliefs. In this study, the person is the undergraduate accounting major, the social environment is the profession of accounting as described by the academic professoriate, and religious beliefs defined by the manner in which those beliefs are held as one of fundamentalism.;This study also considers the question of whether or not the manner in which an accounting major holds religious beliefs affects his/her preference for financial or managerial accounting. The characteristics that distinguish these two areas of accounting provided a means for establishing unique constructs for measuring that preference. The same goal in accounting, that of providing relevant information to decision makers, exists within the two areas, financial and managerial, with three discernible differences, differences that formed the basis of this study. Those differences are 1) types of decisions made by users, 2) timing of information used, and 3) authoritative standards governing information disseminated.;An online survey, sent to accounting majors enrolled in colleges and universities in Missouri, contained items using the above differences and in terms of self, friends, and a deity. Statistically significant results indicated that undergraduate accounting majors who preferred financial accounting were indifferent to religious fundamentalism but that those accounting majors who preferred managerial accounting were opposed to holding one's religious beliefs in a fundamental manner.;Few studies of the profession of accounting within the United States contain reference to religious topics. As religion is one of the three dialectics operating in developing one's way of knowing or understanding, the author suggests that the profession of accounting encourage more studies integrating religion within the social and personal aspects of the way an accountant makes sense of reality.