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Professionalization And The Accounting Profession, Alan J. Richardson

Odette School of Business Publications

This Chapter reviews the critical literature on the emergence, development and demise of the professional model in accounting and auditing. While the critical accounting literature is broad and amorphous, in this Chapter the focus is on those studies that present an “immanent critique” of professionalization (i.e. an analysis of the contradictions of this institutional form) or which place the accounting profession within a political economy framework that examines its position at the nexus of the economy, civil society and the state. The Chapter is structured as a stylized history of the accounting profession beginning with the emergence of professional associations, …