Abstract
Ethical Accounting Statement (EAS) has been developed by Peter Pruzan, Ole Thyssen, and others at the Copenhagen Business School and has been successfully applied to various public and private institutions in Denmark, such as the City of Naestved Central Hospital, and Sparekassen Nordjylland Bank. The research task in this paper is to examine the possibility of adapting EAS to non-Scandinavian setting of Japanese management systems. The paper first examines the concept, theoretical backgrounds, and application procedeures of EAS. Then, two possible contributions of EAS to the advancement of Japanese management systems are examined: (1) As a means to making the Japanese management system a more open system; and (2) Help mutual understanding and mutual interactions between Japanese and other management systems with EAS as a common procedure for ethical decision-making. For adapting EAS to Japanese management systems, two possible suggestions were offered by the Commentator and the Chairperson at the Conference: (1) Preparation of simplified examples and/or illustrations of EAS applications; and (2) As the first step to attract interests of Japanese institutions, prepare simplified, purposive-system EAS as an information-gathering system of stakeholders' core values, before presenting the full-scale, interactive, dialogue-culture EAS to Japanese institutions, which needs several years of intensive involvement of a institution and the stakeholders for adapting EAS. As the first step toward adaptation of EAS to Japanese management systems, the English version of the EAS telephone-interview computer-analysis program developed by the Sparekassen Nordjylland, will be translated into Japanese.
