Discourse of the professions: The making, normalizing and taming of Ontario's “foreign-trained accountant”

Abstract

Informed by insights from the sociology of categories (Lamont, 1992; Lamont & Molnar, 2002; Gieryn, 1983) and the anthropology of pollution (Douglas, 1966), the paper focuses on how the category “foreign-trained accountant” is constructed on the basis of attributes that are deemed polluting and impure in the context of Ontario accountancy. The paper illustrates the problems of social categorization by demonstrating how Ontario's 'new immigrant' ACCA and CIMA qualified accountants, straddled two incompatible categories and in so doing, became dangerously polluting to the professional accountancy landscape of Ontario. Theoretically, the paper locates boundary-work within the sociology of categories literature, and by making an analytical distinction between boundary-work and social closure, provides a perspective for understanding the cultural dimension of professions.