The Outstanding Scholarly Contribution awards recognize specific, distinct scholarly accomplishments by Bentley faculty each year. Nominated by members of the Bentley community and overseen by the Teaching and Scholarly Activities Committee (TSAC), the awards are designed to encourage high quality scholarly work within the Bentley community, including a monetary award for each honoree (or a split among Bentley co-authors), and cover contributions made during the preceding three calendar years. Up to two honorees from the Arts and Sciences departments and two honorees from the Business Departments are selected.
This year’s awards were given to:
Mohammad (Ali) Abdolmohammadi, professor of Accountancy, for his essay
“Correlates of Co-sourcing/Out-sourcing of Internal Audit Activities,” published in Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, a journal with a top tier ranking of A+. The study is a survey of 1,059 chief audit executives (CAEs) of organizations located in Anglo-culture countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. It investigates the outsourcing of internal activities by many worldwide organizations that cost significant resources. Abdolmohammadi finds that audit committee involvement is positively and significantly associated with outsourcing, an indication that post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act audit committees may be more concerned with audit quality than cost. The essay also won the Best Paper Award at the 11th Conference on Internal Audit/Corporate Governance in Oslo, Norway.
Liz Brown, assistant professor of Law, Taxation, and Financial Planning, for
her book Life After Law: Finding Work You Love with the JD You Have, published by Bibliomotion. Brown’s book shows lawyers how to move successfully to a non-legal career by providing innovative, practical advice and profiling thirty former lawyers in new careers ranging from nurse to rabbi to editor to management consultant. Bentley President Gloria Larson, a former lawyer herself, wrote the foreword. The book has won nationwide praise for its approach to career change, not only for lawyers but also for all professionals seeking greater fulfillment at work. It has been lauded in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate.com and other major media outlets. Life After Law has had a major impact on the legal profession, as shown by the American Bar Association’s decision to ask Brown to introduce its own career change guide.
Jeffrey Moriarty, associate professor of Philosophy, for his essay “Compensation Ethics and Organizational Commitment,” published in Business Ethics Quarterly, which is ranked 3rd out of 52 journals in the field of ethics by Journal Citation Reports, and 1st out of 440 journals in the field of Philosophy by the SCIMago Journal Ranking. Moriarty’s study asks the question: If two people perform the same work equally well for a single employer, does the employer have a moral obligation to pay them equally? A simple economic model of the labor market predicts that employers will do so. But the messy reality is that employers have a choice to make. Some employees are willing to work for less than other employees – even those who do the same work equally well – because they are committed to their organizations. Moriarty argues that whether it’s wrong for an employer to obtain a “discount” on the labor of these employees depends on the organization’s culture. The paper was awarded “Best Conference Paper” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Business Ethics in 2013.
Jeff Stern, lecturer, English and Media Studies, for his film The Morning of 
Everything. Stern wrote, produced, directed and edited this lyrical short film in which a father (played by Stern) envisions the world through the eyes of his three year-old son (played by Stern’s son, Leo). As the boy traverses strangely beautiful and increasingly dangerous lands in search of his lost owl, the father drifts deep into a fever dream, confusing his identity with the boy’s, the owl’s, and that of his younger self. The film was an official selection in ten national film festivals, including the prestigious Independent Film Festival Boston, Nantucket Film Festival, Ashland Independent Film Festival, and the Monadnock International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film.