TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTING KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEIVED FAIRNESS IN UK UNIVERSITIES' RESOURCE ALLOCATION: RESULTS FROM A SURVEY OF ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE

Abstract

This paper provides the first published ‘bottom up’, as opposed to ‘top down’ view of how universities allocate resources to academic subjects. It reports results from a survey of how university resource allocation is seen and understood by a particular academic subject group, Accounting and Finance, the one subject group which may be assumed to be professionally competent to deal with resourcing methods. It shows that there are significant differences amongst UK universities in the use of financial information for academic management and in the transparency to academic subject groups of university planning and resource allocation. Perhaps the most important findings are that it is only with a high degree of such transparency that resource allocations are likely to be perceived to be fair and that this perceived fairness may be related to formal features of accounting knowledge.