Professional Formation: The Case of Scottish Accountants - Some Corrections and Some Further Thoughts

‘All sorts and conditions of men’: The social origins of the founders of the ICAEW

“…The collection and publication of biographical information on those who instituted the first professional organisations in Edinburgh (1853), Glasgow (1853) and Aberdeen (1866) Macdonald's (1984) analysis of the social origins and professionalisation of accountants in Scotland. This sparked a heated debate with Briston and Kedslie (1986) concerning the motives for professionalisation north of the border.…”

“…As noted earlier, in relation to accountancy Macdonald (1984), deploying data on the social origins of practitioners from Brown (1905) and Stewart (1977), controversially (Briston & Kedslie, 1986;Walker, 1995) perceived the professionalisation of accountants in mid-nineteenth century Scotland as an attempt to achieve the twin advantages of collective social mobility and market control. In his conclusion Macdonald (1984, 188) hypothesised that timing differences in professional formation north and south of the border might be explicable by the presence of "far fewer" of the "established middle class" among their ranks.…”

The emergent Institute of Chartered Accountants of India: An upper-caste profession

“…The role of gender in the professionalisation of the accounting occupation has been identified and analysed by several researchers (Carrera et al, 2001; Cooper, 2008, 2010; Kirkham and Loft, 1993; Lehman, 1992), with Roberts and Coutts (1992: 389) summarising the key theme as follows: “For an occupation like accountancy, which was involved in a complex struggle to achieve professional status, the risk implied by feminization was too large a one to take”. Similarly, social class is a particularly prominent theme in studies of the emergence of accounting as a professional occupation in Britain (Briston and Kedslie, 1986; Kedslie, 1990a, 1990b; Macdonald, 1984, 1985; Walker, 1988, 1995) and is also identified as a determining factor in the United States (Lee, 2009) and Canada (Richardson, 1989). Kedslie (1990b: 13), for example, characterises the early members of the Society of Accountants of Edinburgh as being “predominantly upper to upper-middle class”, and notes that these social origins ensured that the Society itself “could not fail to gain immediate social status which was then imputed to subsequent members” (1990b: 15).…”

On the social history of accounting: The Bank Audit by Bruce Marshall

“…8. For discussions of the complex interplay between the social class and professional status of accountants, see Macdonald (1984;, Briston and Kedslie (1986), Walker (1988), Richardson (1989), Puxty (1990), Lee (1996) and Edwards, Carnegie and Cauberg (1997). 9.…”