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Accountants are by far the most prominent professionals active in British management today. This is not the case in most other countries and it was not always so in Britain. The first section of this article sets out, for the first time, accurate figures for the membership of the accountancy societies and presents the results of statistical exercises designed to quantify the extent and characteristics of the involvement of accountants in British management. Section II attempts to explain, within an international context, the probable causes of the large number of accountants in Britain. Section III sets out the possible factors contributing to the increasing employment of accountants by industrial and commercial companies in Britain, while section IV looks at the reasons that might account for their peculiar hegemony in the hierarchy of British management. The conclusions are summarized in section V.

The accountancy profession created itself in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The first accountancy society in the world was formed in Scotland in 1853. Societies south of the border date from 1870 and, after combining, a Royal Charter was won in 1880. As part of the processor establishing accountancy as a profession, these chartered accountants admitted to membership only those able to meet stringent entry requirements including, in most cases, a costly five-year period of articles in chartered accountant’s office and written examinations. Those unable to meet these conditions, however, founded their own organizations and, in the continuing process of ‘closure’, erected their own barriers to entry.1Table 1, columns 1-10, sets out the membership of each of these major accountancy societies and the totals for 10-year intervals from 1882to 1991.
Membership of these societies provides the only feasible definition of professional accountant, but it is an inadequate measure of the number of practicing accountants for several reasons. First, there have always been those who, while performing the work of an accountant, remained unqualified. Their exact number (including those in training who event- ally qualified) will always remain unknown, but is perhaps as much as double the number qualified. Secondly, there were, from time to time, number of other accountancy societies not included in this study, but these were small and it is safe to say that table 1, column 10, captures well over 90 per cent of the membership of all societies.2 Thirdly, adjustments should ideally be made to eliminate double counting of accountants belonging to more than one society; while, fourthly, a certain proportion of the societies’ membership will be retired. It is not possible to calculate accurately the numbers in these third and fourth categories, but they are unlikely to be sufficiently large to affect significantly the overall picture.3 Fifthly, and of more significance, is the proportion of the membership who worked abroad, and columns 11 and 12 in table 1attempt to take account of this factor using estimates derived from sampling the societies’ membership lists

Footnote references
Adrift, D. H. and Ville, S. P., European economy, 1750-1914: a thematic approach (1994).
Allen, G. C., Short history of modern Japan, 1867-1937 (1964).
Armstrong, P., ‘Changing management control strategies: the role of competition between accountancy and other organizational本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。