The ideology of professional regulation and the markets for accounting labour: Three episodes in the recent history of the U.K. accountancy profession

Abstract

The interplay between the ideology of the profession that seeks to legitimize accounting's regulatory regime and the practices of accountants in expanding the scope of the markets for their labour is critical to understanding the changing “professional” ideology of accountants. This interplay, the paper argues, is central to each of three recent episodes in the history of the U.K. accountancy bodies examined in this paper, which are (1) negotiations over the scope and impact of the Eighth EC Directive, (2) the positioning of the accountancy bodies in relation to the Financial Services Act (1986), and (3) the effort of the accountancy bodies to secure their powers of self-regulation conferred upon them by the state.