This paper is concerned with UK insolvency practice in. It considers how the field of insolvency has developed since the passing of the Insolvency Act 1986 through a Bourdieusian theoretical lens. The case of the administration of Gretna football club is presented as a “special case of what is possible” to enable one to consider “the deepest logic of the social world” (Bourdieu, 1998, p 4). Football is a field with its own complex insolvency rules which are incommensurable with the Insolvency Act. The case therefore presents an opportunity to reveal that whether insolvency laws are applied or not is determined by a complex socio-political process. Through revealing the socio-political process the paper problematizes the notion that insolvency practice is neutral

Advances towards egalitarianism in professional recruitment may be offset by processes of occupational re-segregation. Drawing on gender theory this paper investigates horizontal segregation in the UK insolvency profession, as revealed through the lived experiences of female and male practitioners. It is shown that horizontal segregation pervades at different levels of practice and is undergirded by various elements of gender essentialism. Physical essentialism explains why insolvency practice has been traditionally gendered male. Interactional essentialism combines with the management of work-life balance to define the subfields of corporate and personal insolvency as masculine and feminine respectively. Gender essentialist assumptions also pervade the distribution of roles and the allocation of work tasks. Networks are identified as arenas for the reproduction and perpetuation of occupational segregation. The findings indicate the continuing potency of gender in everyday professional life, and suggest the limitations of diversity-orientated policies and the complexities of formulating transformative agendas.

1At the beginning of the 21 st century, the British Government was faced with significant policy decisions to make in the field of corporate insolvency. The impact of the American rescue culture and the acceptability of failure, the development of international insolvency laws within the European Union and localized problems inherent in current insolvency practice provided the impetus for legal reform. Using the work of Halliday (1985Halliday ( , 1987, this paper seeks to understand how professional knowledge and authority impact upon the state-profession relationship and the development and deployment of state policy. The British Government reacted to the global and local pressures with a shift to codification and prescription, greater enforcement of the legal system and an attempt to control and institutionalize insolvency practitioners' moral authority. However in spite of radical reforms, insolvency practitioners' services were retained and their private, expert knowledge systems and authority valorized over corporate management. Insolvency practitioners' localized knowledge, the capacity to disguise moral authority as technical expertise and their networks and coalitions with senior members of Parliament and capital providers, resulted in an interpretation and implementation of legislation that has not seen the dramatic shift in practice that the reforms had envisaged. Despite the reforms being triggered within the global institutional sphere of corporate failure, the institutional sphere of corporate failure, at least in Scotland, retains a local definition, with business rescue packages derived from professionals' social intelligence, their daily micro practices and localized networks.

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This paper seeks to understand how insolvency practitioners attempt to build trust with a heterogeneous creditor body during the crisis of formal insolvency and the role accounting information and processes play. Accounting information is mobilized in different ways according to how insolvency practitioners believe the information will be interpreted and valued. This paper suggests specific qualitative characteristics, accounting principles, and processes which appear to enhance trust building in a crisis context. These include perceived objectivity, comparability, cash flow accounting, “matching” of secured liabilities with secured assets, and “crisis” audit. The value ascribed by insolvency practitioners to maintaining specific creditor relationships also appears relevant to trust‐building activities. A “tit‐for‐tat” strategy emerges with secured creditors, whereby insolvency practitioners engage in demonstrable fee write‐offs, but on the implicit understanding that future, lucrative work will come their way. This study points to the importance for researchers and policymakers of understanding the “desirable” properties of accounting through informed understandings of how and why that information is mobilized and received in specific relationships between people.