A pariah profession? Some student perceptions of accounting and accountancy

Roy Fisher · Vivienne Murphy

75 citations0/0 files storedStudies in Higher Education

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Accounting Education and Careers Accounting Theory and Financial Reporting Management and Organizational Studies

Abstract

Accountancy is firmly established as an important profession and as a major employment destination for graduates in the UK. There is, however, some ambivalence regarding the image of the accountancy profession as well as the status of accounting as an academic discipline. This paper reports on small-scale surveys of the perceptions of groups of accounting and non-accounting students which suggested that negative stereotypes of accountants which were prevalent during the 1960s have survived beyond the Thatcherite revolution. The surveys undertaken indicated that within the two groups there was an apparent co-existence of high status and low esteem in their perceptions of accounting and accountancy. The authors follow this with a brief discussion of a range of historical and sociological factors which may have contributed to this contradictory condition. The transformation of accounting pedagogic practice, through the incorporation of critical approaches to knowledge, is seen as a necessary prerequisite to the creation of a more positive image for accountancy as well as to the general progression of accounting as an academic discipline. When I was young, accountants used to be figures of fun … For the kids today, the people we used to snigger at are role models, swashbuckling marauders sailing the seas of high finance, corporate raiders whose motto is “Get in, get out, get rich˚d. Dennis Parsons was an accountant of the new “creative˚d variety, for whom the firm's actual turnover represents only the original idea on which the completed tax return is based. When it came to cooking the books, Dennis was in the Raymond Blanc class. (Michael Dibdin, Dirty Tricks, 1991)

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