Economia Aziendale: a missing connection between the theory and academic syllabi

ABSTRACT

The paper is focused on an interesting aspect of accounting education: based on the analysis of the syllabi of Economia Aziendale (EA) from all 65 Italian universities teaching economics or business administration, strong inconsistencies emerge among themselves and between syllabi and theory. The choice of the analysed subject is very relevant in Italian universities of Economics and Business Administration, since it represents a fundamental subject of the curricula and deeply impacts on financial accounting. EA is strongly related to the specific Italian approach to financial accounting compared with many other countries, and in particular with the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and International Financial Reporting Standard system. Our findings are the following. First of all, the analysed syllabi are generally not fully consistent with the theory as it was stated at its origin, and how it is still considered today. In particular, the unitary approach of the discipline specifically stated as one of the main characteristics of this science is missing. One of the pillars of EA is, in this way, omitted or deleted. Our paper analyses the reasons of these inconsistencies and finds an important connection with these three elements: the career needs, the working constraints and the legal system of rules.

KEYWORDS:

• Economia Aziendale
• education
• syllabus
• Italian universities
• comparison

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the guest editors of this dedicated issue, Prof. Greg Stoner and Prof. Themin Suwardy, for their very constructive comments and suggestions that really helped the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Economia Aziendale is such a specific a definition that it is not perfectly translatable in other languages (lost in translation). It is usually translated to ‘Business Administration’, but some authors suggest other definitions, as, for example, ‘Business Economics’ (G. Galassi, in the syllabus of Economia Aziendale – Corso progredito, 2012–2013). According to Viganò (1998, p. 382), ‘Business administration’ is certainly unsuitable, as administration is an early, rough term for management and seems to relate to a firm’s non-production activities. ‘Business economics’ gives a better idea as the term economic is used, referring to the discipline that characterizes scientific research about the enterprise, but it is partial, as it may be understood to refer only to for-profit units and thus not consider non-business and not-for-profit organization.

2 This quotation is in English in the original publication. All the following quotations are originally in English with the exception of the ones that we have translated from Italian texts and are specifically indicated in the footnotes.

3 Translated by the authors from Italian text.

4 Translated by the authors from Italian text.

5 ‘The ECTS is a tool that helps to design, describe, and deliver study programmes and award higher education qualifications. The use of ECTS, in conjunction with outcomes-based qualifications frameworks, makes study programmes and qualifications more transparent and facilitates the recognition of qualifications’. http://ec.europa.eu/education/ects/ects_en.htm at the 7.7.2015.

6 ‘Faculty’ represents the meaning of’ ’Facoltà’, which was the classical division within universities, based on specific subject areas.

7 As we can see analysing the third aspect ‘Objectives of the course’, in many cases (41 on 65) EA is considered an ‘Introductory course’.

8 The claims are dependent mainly on the number of hours devoted to classes.

9 This aspect was strongly debated at the origin of EA and in the Italian literature there are many contributions against the unitary vision of the EA and the superseding of accounting as an autonomous science (see Aprile & Nicoliello, 2015). Even in recent years some contributions have been published about the difficulties that EA is facing nowadays (see Coda, 2012).

10 This (official) Italian Scientific Sector includes Professors and Researchers teaching and studying different disciplines, in particular: Economia Aziendale, Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Financial Statements, and, only more recently, further new issues such as for example, Corporate and Social Disclosure and Non-Profit Sector.