SUMMARY We examine how small practitioners perceive and react to global standards of practice and the underlying mechanisms put in place by the accounting profession to ensure “appropriate” implementation. Interviews with practitioners, standard setters, and other informants indicate that small practitioners consider many features of global standards ill-adapted to their practices' particular circumstances. However, they do not tend to resist actively global standardization, adopting instead a logic of resilience under which they mobilize coping mechanisms, such as support mobilization, selective application of standards, and increased involvement in the activities of the profession. An important paradox ensues from small practitioners' professional resilience: by adapting to globalization pressures, small practitioners arguably sustain their own marginalization and intensify the fragmentation processes within the accounting profession. For instance, their role is increasingly peripheral within the audit market, and they are often constrained to use “second order” accounting standards.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative cultural shift from professionalism to commercialism in the accounting profession, based on an analysis of the promotional brochures used by the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Québec), over the last forty years, to attract new members.Design/methodology/approach -The study's specific objectives are: (1) to examine accountancy's cultural representations depicted in promotional brochures; (2) to evaluate the extent to which these representations are indicative of the commercialist shift as documented in the literature; and (3) to establish whether the representations under study provide further insight into the nature of the cultural shift. Drawing on the semiotic approach developed by Roland Barthes, our analysis is predicated on the idea that promotional brochures and advertisements, though often simple in appearance, constitute complex representations that convey meaningful information about influential values and cultural change.Findings -We found that commercial values are increasingly apparent through the celebration of multidisciplinary services and the emphasis on generous compensation and high dynamism.Originality/value -Barthes' framework was especially useful to analyze the interplay between images and text to gain insight into the historical emergence of what has become the accountant's representation of today. As such, our study points to promotional representations participating to the inculcation of a cosmopolitan culture, where the internationalization of business is supposedly natural, inevitable, and beneficial to everyone. Our research also highlights the increasingly significant role played by marketing experts in designing professional institutes' brochures, consistent with the broader view of marketization as a key trend within the accounting industry.

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Although some authors highlight the benefits of journal rankings, previous research is often highly critical of them, insinuating that they can lead to desingularization of academic journals (i.e., their impoverishment and standardization) and dequalification of researchers (i.e., a weakening of researchers' ability to evaluate academic research). However, as very few authors have empirically assessed these presumptions, we aim to address this gap in the literature. Based on Lucien Karpik's notions of singularities, judgment devices, forms of involvement, and emulation and rivalry, we assess whether the processes surrounding the production and use of journal rankings might lead to desingularization and dequalification. Our findings support previous research by highlighting that processes where passivity and heteronomy (i.e., lack of autonomy) prevail, are conducive to desingularization, rivalry and dequalification. Our findings, however, introduce some nuances into the debate by underscoring instances where emulation logic is employed instead of mere rivalry logic, and where substantial judgment devices and active involvement are mobilized in the production and use of rankings, thereby somewhat alleviating the spread of desingularization and dequalification. Ultimately, our study raises questions that point to a need for serious collective reflection within the academic community on the processes by which published research is evaluated.

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