Dr Ozlem Arikan

PhD

Management School

Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Management

BA Accounting and Financial Management Level 2 Programme Director

Ozlem Arikan.
Profile picture of Ozlem Arikan.
o.arikan@sheffield.ac.uk

Full contact details

Dr Ozlem Arikan
Management School
Sheffield University Management School
Conduit Road
Sheffield
S10 1FL
Profile

Ozlem's research interest in a broad sense entails the judgement and decision making of stakeholders in a corporate reporting and accountability setting. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Accounting and Business Research and is one of the few experts in experimental methodologies on corporate reporting in Europe. Ozlem has been the Level 2 Undergraduate Programme Director of the University Sheffield’s Accounting and Financial Management Programme since February 2023, and was the director of an MSc programme in accounting and finance at Aston University between 2019 and 2022.

Being a passionate educator, Ozlem has been nominated to University of Sheffield’s Education Award in the Doctoral Supervision, Leadership, and Teaching Practice categories in 2024. She also received teaching awards from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Warwick, and Aston University.

Qualifications

PhD - University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy

Research interests

Environmental and Social Responsibility

Profitability, a short-term indicator which most stakeholders focus, is bringing the world to an end. Are there better ways to measure performance? When companies focus on environmental and social responsibility, what works, what doesn't work and why? What can we do to encourage organisations to engage more in environmental and social responsibility?

Accountability

Accounting systems in organisations are used to facilitate accountability, however they often have unintended consequences for organisations and individuals. What can we do to prevent such consequences?

Judgement and Decision Making

Language is a flexible communications tool and managers use that flexibility in a strategic way to promote what they want to promote and hide what they want to hide. Ozlem’s research finds that while reading management's reports stakeholders indeed often reach to different judgements on the same information when it is conveyed using slightly different wording. Nonetheless, this does not mean that managers get what they want with their strategic use of the language. The implications of these strategies are often counter-intuitive.

Publications

Journal articles

Chapters

Research group

Centre for Research on Accounting and Finance in Context (CRAFiC)

Grants

Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures (Principal Investigator-Ozlem Arikan): An Emerging Economy’s Struggles with the Application of International Sustainability Reporting Standards. Project members: Ataur Belal (University of Birmingham, UK), Sevim Budak (Istanbul University, Turkiye), Ivo de Loo (Nyenrode Business University, the Netherlands)

Management Control Association (Principal Investigator-Ozlem Arikan): Management Control in the IFRS Foundation-A view from a Distance. Project members: Carolyn Cordery (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Ivo De Loo (Nyenrode Business University, the Netherlands), Melina Manochin (University of Birmingham, UK)

Teaching interests

Ozlem has taught in undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and executive levels and is a passionate educator. A focus on the 'big picture' underpins her teaching activities as the vast amount of details in financial reporting rules can prevent students to miss the main purpose of these rules when that focus is absent. She aims to make learning as enjoyable and as engaging as possible, and she uses playful learning tools to reach that aim. She is the author of the 2021 book chapter 'Playful Learning in Accounting Education'.

Her teaching practice has been recognised with awards and recognitions from the University of Sheffield, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Warwick, and Aston University. In addition to teaching financial reporting, financial analysis, and financial management, Ozlem engages in teaching survey, experimental and quasi experimental research designs to postgraduate and PhD students.

Teaching activities
  • MGT143 - Foundations in Financial Management
  • MGT225 - Intermediate Financial Accounting
  • Experimental Methods in The Social Sciences (PGR Training)
Professional activities and memberships

Editorial Board Member: Accounting and Business Research; Reviewer: Accounting, Auditing and Accountability, Accounting and Business Research, British Accounting Review, Eurasian Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics, International Review of Financial Analysis, Organization, Qualitative Research in Finance

PhD Supervision

Dr. Arikan welcomes PhD candidates with qualitative or survey-based research projects in environmental and social sustainability, as well as in education for sustainability. Additionally, she is interested in experimental projects that investigate judgment and decision-making in accounting and finance.