Understanding social closure in its cultural context: accounting practitioners in France (1920 – 1939)

This article tries to show how the result of a process of social closure and the achievement of a professional project are heavily dependent on the cultural context in which they are embedded. The concepts of field and of capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu help to understand the failure, before the Second World War, of the project to institutionalise the accounting profession in France. The accountants’ inability to solidify hierarchies internal to the professional field and the unfavourable insertion of this field in the overall hierarchy of social fields will be used as key-arguments to account for this failure Link to the article

RAMIREZ, C. (2001). Understanding social closure in its cultural context: accounting practitioners in France (1920 - 1939). Accounting, Organizations and Society, 26(43955), pp. 391-418.