Purpose – Women in public accounting firms are still proportionally much fewer in number in the highest levels of the hierarchy than men, whereas recruitment at junior level tends to be increasingly gender-balanced. This paper aims to analyse the relationships between the glass ceiling and...

This review paper argues that the institutions and sites of professionalization projects and regulatory processes matter. The institutions and locations where regulation takes place affect both the outcome of the regulatory process and the legitimacy of the rules and practices produced. Changes...

The interplay between the ideology of the profession that seeks to legitimize accounting's regulatory regime and the practices of accountants in expanding the scope of the markets for their labour is critical to understanding the changing “professional” ideology of accountants. This...

In 1984 the European Commission issued the Eighth Company Law Directive requiring each member State to ensure that its national rules met common standards for the education, training and qualification of statutory auditors (84/253/EEC; OJ 1984 L126/20). The Directive insisted that national...