'No French, no more': language-based exclusion in North America's first professional accounting association, 1879-1927

Crawford Spence and Marion Brivot

Accounting History Review, 2011, vol. 21, issue 2, 163-184

Abstract: 1This paper draws on Bourdieu's sociolinguistic theory to interpret the overrepresentation of Anglophone accountants vis-a-vis Francophone comptables in the formative years of North America's first professional accounting association. In a linguistic market, where English was taken for granted as the official language of commerce, we find that the founding members of the Association of Accountants in Montreal (AAM) possessed a 'distinctive' cultural and linguistic habitus. We observe that the AAM enacted for many years a number of exclusion strategies to effectively limit its admittance of Francophone compatibles who possessed a different cultural and linguistic habitus. When the AAM eventually did explicitly embrace Francophone memberships, this was in order to counter the threat of a rival accounting designation.

Keywords: professional closure; accounting profession; language; Quebec; Canada; Bourdieu (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.1080/21552851.2011.581839

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