Occupational identity of management accountants in Britain and Germany

Thomas Ahrens · Christopher S. Chapman

202 citations0/0 files storedEuropean Accounting Review

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Management and Organizational Studies Accounting and Organizational Management Accounting Education and Careers

Abstract

The existence of management accounting as an unproblematic occupational label is often taken for granted. Prompted by contemporary discussions concerning radical changes in management accounting practice, we sought to examine the extent to which practitioners' accounts of practice demonstrate a coherent occupational identity. Collecting sixty-four occupational autobiographies in seventeen German and twelve British firms we found that management accountants in the two countries constructed common occupational identities out of their diverse experiences. Echoing the findings of anthropological practice theory, the good practitioner rhetorically reconciled a wide variety of contradictory attributes in their occupational idiom.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 202 citations exist upstream.

References

2023The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1988The System of Professions 2023Modernity and Self-Identity 1994Career as a Project of the Self and Labour Process Discipline 1986Towards a critical understanding of accounting: The case of cost accounting in the U.K., 1914–1925 1998On being a professional in a “Big Six” firm 1993Getting comfortable with the numbers: Auditing and the micro-production of macro-order 1989Management accounting

Cited by

2017Exploring integrated thinking in integrated reporting – an exploratory study in Australia 2013Dirty work and the construction of identity. An ethnographic study of management accounting practices 2005Organizational Encounters with Risk 2007Transforming identities: Accounting professionals and the transition to motherhood 2005Making the Case for Narrative Methods in Cross-Cultural Organizational Research 2018Backstage and frontstage interactions in management accountants' identity work

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.