Accountants v. engineers: The professions in top management in Britain since the Second World War

Matthews, Derek

doi:10.1080/13619469908581552

Contemporary British History

1999

DOI: 10.1080/13619469908581552

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Accountants v. engineers: The professions in top management in Britain since the Second World War

Derek Matthews

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Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

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Doing It for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955

Miskell¹

2016

Enterp. Soc.

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This article examines the efforts of one British steel company to acquire knowledge about American industrial productivity in the first post-World War II decade. It argues that company information-gathering initiatives in this period were overshadowed by the work of the formal productivity missions of the Marshall Plan era. In particular, it compares the activities of the Steel Company of Wales with the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), whose iron and steel industry productivity team report was published in 1952. Based on evidence from its business records, this study shows that the Steel Company of Wales was undertaking its own international productivity investigations, which started earlier and were more extensive and differently focused from those of the AACP. It makes the case for viewing companies as active participants in the gathering and dissemination of productivity knowledge in Britain’s steel sector after 1945.

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Doing It for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955

Miskell¹

2016

Enterp. Soc.

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Professionalization through symbolic and social capital: Evidence from the careers of elite consultants

Kipping

Bühlmann

David

2019

Journal of Professions and Organization

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This article contributes to the debate about how more recent professions, especially those related to management, might achieve a semblance of ‘professionalism’ in the absence of the conditions that facilitated the creation of the traditional professions such as medicine, law or accounting in the 19th century. Much of the recent literature has either argued that these professions had to rely on some form of ‘image professionalism’ or that the professionalization process was ‘captured’ by the dominant firms within the professional field, with the aim of creating corporate, firm-internal rather than open labor markets for these professionals. Building on Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic and social capital, we suggest an alternative pathway to professionalization in stratified professional fields. We namely argue that a career at one of the ‘elite’ professional service firms (PSFs) can provide privileged access to positions at other firms within the same field. Hence, such a career constitutes a form of closure regime and allows, at least to some degree, the external labor mobility so typical of traditional professions. We explore this alternative pathway to professionalization by analyzing a novel and unique historical data set of former McKinsey consultants, identifying a number of boundary conditions that seem to facilitate such intraprofessional careers and others, which, over time, might weaken it. We conclude by pointing to a number of broader contributions from our research.

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Accountants v. engineers: The professions in top management in Britain since the Second World War

Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

Doing It for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955

Doing It for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955

Professionalization through symbolic and social capital: Evidence from the careers of elite consultants

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