Canada vs Britain in the imperial accountancy arena, 1908–1912: Symbolic capital, symbolic violence

Abstract

This paper examines a struggle between Canadian accountants and their British confreres (led by the ICAEW) that took place in the period 1908–1912. The ICAEW, with the assistance of the British Colonial Office, tried to roll-back and/or construct on terms advantageous to itself, modifications initiated by Canadian chartered accountants to the deployment of the ‘CA’ designation within Canada. The ultimately successful resistance of the Canadian state-profession axis mitigated the possibility that locally trained accountants would be pushed down the professional status hierarchy. It thus helped to unify Canadian accountants and enhanced the possibility that colonial profession-state axes elsewhere in the British Empire would also assert their autonomy; as illustrated by the case of South Africa in the 1920s. The struggle is characterised, deploying selected concepts from Bourdieu's theoretical corpus, as involving the deployment of various forms symbolic capital to activate, over time, forms of symbolic violence at the different-but-interacting levels of profession and state. It involved, that is, cross-border multi-level ‘exchanges’ of symbolic violence in the political field over which state apparatus could allocate symbolic capital differentially to competing groups in the accountancy field who could in turn deploy it as symbolic violence within that field.