ECONOMIC CLASS, SOCIAL STATUS, AND EARLY SCOTTISH CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS

Accounting Historians Journal, The, Dec 2004 by Lee, Tom

Macdonald [1995] provides a complementary analysis of professions and economic class to that of Perkin and focuses on the sociological arguments of Larson [1977]. In particular, he notes a relatively recent historical change in perceptions of professionals. This relates to a transition from the traits approach of researchers such as Carr-Saunders and Wilson [1933] and the functionalist approach of those such as Durkheim [1982] with an emphasis on ethics, to the power relations perspective of Larson based on ideas of Weber (and Marx) and rooted in issues of economic class and social status. Modern studies of professions such as Larson are therefore dependent on the general notion of what professionals do rather than what they say they do with respect to translating intellectual capital into economic rewards, social status, and power. Such studies emphasize the argument of Weber that social actions are the most important ingredients in observations of professions. Modern writers such as Macdonald therefore see professions as projects in collective social mobility, with a hierarchy of élite and non-élite members and a persistent focus on the objective of social respectability. In particular, Macdonald [1995, p. 32] describes the professional project as two-pronged. The first prong concerns a sequence of economic order, market monopoly, and relations with the state. The second prong deals with connections between social order, status and respectability, and the prevailing culture. When the two prongs combine, the project achieves market control, social closure, and appropriate social status.

As Jacobs [2003] correctly argues, the work of Bourdieu [1988] is relevant to a review of professions. Professionals have what Bourdieu called habitus or the habit of shared beliefs and dispositions that generate the economic, cultural, and social capital necessary to maintain their power in society through time. What is essential to the survival of professions with social power is their capacity to sustain habitus through reproduction and recruitment from relevant economic classes. In this sense, Bourdieu uses economic class as an analogy for social status or what he describes as "symbolic capital," with the latter "filtered through the prisms of class domination" [Fowler, 1997, p. 20]. More specifically, Bourdieu is consistent with Weber regarding the unique characteristics of economic class and social status but also recognizes that in Western society, economic class is an important ingredient in the more complex notion of social status. This is particularly true of Victorian society in which fluidity in economic class achieved mobility in social status. "The calico-printer and the cotton-master becomes, within two generations, the baronet and the big-wig" [Wilson, 2002, p. 60]. Walker's [1988] study of early Edinburgh chartered accountants is precisely in this genre.

Bourdieu's [1988] major study of class reproduction in professions concerns the strategy of French intellectuals to maintain habitus by recruitment of faculty and students predominantly from élite schools and universities. However, when these recruitment sources were insufficient to supply the numbers required to maintain habitus, the results were recruitment from non-élite sources, potential breakdown in the structure of shared beliefs and dispositions, perceived devaluation of the academy's economic, cultural, and social capital, and active involvement in the French revolution of the late 1960s. In other words, Bourdieu demonstrates that socially dominant groups may seek to defend the habitus of the Weberian social hierarchy built on the supporting pillars of economic class, social status, and political power. This appears at variance, although is not entirely inconsistent, with the process described by Perkin [1989] in relation to professions of a fluid social structure in which changes in class and status take place. Lee [1999] provides a recent accounting illustration of habitus in the history of the American Accounting Association. Since the Association's foundation in 1916 to the present day, graduates from a small number of élite doctoral programs in the US have provided the Association's leadership and received all of its honors despite a widespread recruitment from all economic classes. Such a history is not unlike that of the early Scottish chartered accountancy bodies.