Territorial Battles and Tribal Disputes

Abstract

In Europe, as in the United States, the resurgence of debate on the diversification of professional practices coincides with an intensified internationalisation of trade. It is as if the lines of demarcation between the spheres of competence of different forms of know-how are called into question as an indirect effect of the opening up of national fiontiers. Nonetheless, even if the problem is basically similar, it is taken up very differently on either side of the Atlantic. Europeans pose the problem in terms of multi-disciplinary partnerships (MDPs), whereas North Americans seem only to envisage the possibility of law firm affiliates. Comparative analysis of these debates illustrates Abbott's theses' on the contingent character of the domains over which different kinds of know-how have 'jurisdiction. The impassioned nature of the confrontations over the question of multidisciplinarity is a result of the strategic position of the phenomenon in the competition between different professions for a dominant position within the rapidly expanding international consultancy market. This market, where the rules of the game are still very imprecise, offers ample opportunities for different professions to challenge the distribution of roles resulting from different national histories.2 The immense restructuring process which affects industrial and commercial enterprises has its equivalent in the professional domain.' As with the discovery of colonies in earlier times, the opening up of new markets gives rise to fearsome appetites for power. In this vast game of musical chairs which affects the whole of the professional system, it was the accountants who gave the starting signal, no doubt because they were 'poor relatives' with most to gain from the upheaval. The big audit firms were the instigators of the 'supermarket strategy,'4 by which elite accountants hoped to conquer part of the market and some of the social presige that hitherto had been the privilege of lawyers. As evidence for this ambition, which is one of the strongest motivating forces of their drive to expand, one can cite a text written at the request of those who see themselves as the 'spearhead' of the French accountancy profession and whose practices operate on the Anglo-Saxon model.5 The lawyers responded to