Bean counters or bright young things?: A visual study of identity construction among newly qualified professional accountants
Sam Warren, Portsmouth Business School
The accounting image has suffered long term stereotyping. Over time there has emerged a sporadic professional and research literature addressing the beancounter/nerd stereotype - including studies of their representations in cinema (Beard 1994). Yet against this portrayal, accountants’ roles have been expanding over the last decades. While their compliance work has remained relatively strong and static, their financial management, strategic/general management and consulting work has significantly expanded. This shift of occupational focus can be seen in the recruitment literature of the ‘Big-4’ accounting firms and professional accounting bodies, where the emphasis is firmly on selling accounting to high-flying graduates as a ‘fun’ and ‘exciting’ career choice (Jeacle 2006).
Professional accountants work in the midst of an increasingly image saturated world inhabited by political and organisational spin-doctors, ‘infotainment’, image-based mobile technologies, profession advertising and more. Given that new entrants to professions such as accounting are immersed in a visual culture with the hallmarks of this ‘image-based’ aesthetically driven society, we can expect them to place increased importance on professional identity construction based on similar principles. The younger generation of accountants and potential entrants to the accounting profession have been acculturated to a highly ‘visual society’. Image construction for them may reveal not simply surface level images, but deeper level concepts, beliefs and intentions.
In this paper we present preliminary analyses of data gathered during a study utilising photo-elicitation as a research method (Wagner 1979, Warren 2002, 2005). Participants in the UK and Australia were issued with digital cameras and asked to photograph elements of their working lives for later discussion during interviews structured around these images. This is important since identity formation is extensively reliant on the individual’s sense of their ‘socially visible self’, especially here, in the context of an oft stereotyped professional role. Photographing these visual traces allowed for discussion of interviewees’ reasoning behind this process and allowed us to explore their reasons for selecting and framing images, thereby discovering what experiences, perspectives and intentions they revealed in doing so.
In short, this paper investigates how this occupational group are signing the future of their profession – by conforming to traditional images of accountants, or resisting such labelling by constructing new and different identities.