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Abstract

The thesis seeks to answer the question of why it is that the professional education of\rEnglish chartered accountants appears to differ, both from that of other professions in\rEngland and from that of chartered accountancy in other comparable countries, in that\rit is not based in the university sector and undertaken by academics. Only a minority of\rthe students who enter the profession in England have studied accountancy at university;\rinstead, practitioners are mostly trained by private tutorial firms which have little or no\rconnection with academic research and academic research is largely divorced from both\rprofessional education and practice.\rUsing a framework for professional development which combines the work of Andrew\rAbbott with a method of analysis proposed by Burrage, Jarausch and Siegrist, the thesis\rtraces the history of professional education and certification for the Institute of Chartered\rAccountants of England and Wales from 1880, when the Institute was established, until\r1990. The factors which are seen to have been the most important in the development\rof this unusual situation can be summarized under three broad headings: state factors,\rpractitioner factors and university factors.\rHistorically, the English state has tended not to lay down requirements for the content\rand delivery of professional education.\rPractitioner factors include the existence of a practitioner body which harbours deeply\ranti-academic attitudes and sees no need either for university based accountancy education\ror for academic research, plus an increasing oligarchization of the chartered accountancy\rprofession.\rUniversity based factors include the late development of accounting as a university\rsubject, a university sector which has always been small relative to the size of the\rprofession's educational requirements and an anti-commercial bias within much of the\runiversity establishment.