A ccountants are by far the most prominent professionals active in British management today. This is not the case in most other countries and it was not always so in Britain. The first section of this article sets out, for the first time, accurate figures for the membership of the accountancy societies and presents the results of statistical exercises designed to quantify the extent and characteristics of the involvement of accountants in British management. Section II attempts to explain, within an international context, the probable causes of the large number of accountants in Britain. Section III sets out the possible factors contributing to the increasing employment of accountants by industrial and commercial companies in Britain, while section IV looks at the reasons that might account for their peculiar hegemony in the hierarchy of British management. The conclusions are summarized in section V.

British management has the reputation among business historians for being amateurish. This neglects to some extent the work of accountants, an oversight due perhaps to the image of the accountant as simply a financial functionary. In fact, the relatively unique aspects of the British accountant's training and work gave him experience in wider and more general aspects of business which explains his success in reaching the top in British companies. This article analyses the various 'routes' by which the accountant's expertise was brought to bear on British corporate management, and qualifies significantly the previous views on the subject by Chandler, Locke and Coleman.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of the sociological model of professionalisation known as the “professional project” put forward by Magali Larson, which has become the prevailing paradigm for accounting historians. Design/methodology/approach The paper challenges the use of the concepts of monopoly, social closure, collective social mobility and the quest for status as applied to the history of accountancy. The arguments are made on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Findings The use of the concept of monopoly is not justified in the case of accounting societies or firms. The only monopoly the accountants required was the exclusive right to the titles, for example, CA in Britain and CPA in the USA. They were right to argue that the credentials were merely to distinguish themselves in the market place from untrained accountants. The validity of the concept of social closure via artificial barriers to entry is questioned and new evidence is provided that the elite accountants have always recruited heavily from classes lower in the social hierarchy than themselves. The concept of the collective social mobility project is found wanting on a priori and empirical grounds; accountants behaved no differently to other business classes and have probably not enhanced their social status since the formation of their societies. Originality/value The paper offers, in the case of accountancy, one of the few critiques of the accepted model of professionalisation. It demonstrates the weak explanatory power of the sociological paradigms used by accounting historians.

This article argues that some of the most popular treatments of the development of accountancy in Britain do not accord with the historical evidence. This is true of the functionalist's altruistic view of the profession and of the predominant paradigm�-�the Weberian 'professional project'. There is no evidence in the early history of British accountancy to support the concepts of, for example: monopolistic closure, credentialism, or the social construction of skill. Instead, using a model based on technological determinism, the article reasserts the importance of the industrialisation process in forming the accountancy profession, and sees the formation of the chartered societies as largely set up to brand the accountants' training and thereby preserve the value of their human capital.Professions, Accounting History, Chartered Accountancy, Technological Determinism,

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this article is to look in detail into the collapse and its subsequent implications of the London and County Securities bank (L&C) in 1973, one of the most significant UK corporate fraud scandals and regulatory failures in recent decades. Design/methodology/approach -The article is a case study drawing on the report on L&C by the Department of Trade (DT) inspectors and the national and trade press, interviews with and the private papers of some of the major participants. Findings -The study identifies and explains the nature of the fraud, the shortcomings of the auditing of the bank, the poor performance of the DT inspectors, and the weaknesses of the subsequent changes in the regulatory system. Research implications -The implications of the article's findings are: that commentators, and the regulatory and legal system need to distinguish between different types of fraud; that commercial pressures impact adversely on the audit process; that DT inspections conducted by accountants are not independent in their judgements; and that self-regulation is always likely to be ineffective. Practical implications -The findings are likely to be of interest to accounting academics and historians, practitioners and regulators. Originality/value -Provides an insight into the collapse of the London and County Securities bank.