Charting futures: understanding anticipatory professional socialisation practices of prospective accountants within higher education

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Bourdieu’s sociological framework, this study examines how prospective accountants engage with professional socialisation opportunities within the accounting higher education field. Prospective accountants globally experience anticipatory professional socialisation through which they develop employability skills and shape their professional trajectories. Through interviews with Malaysian prospective accountants and insights from local accounting professionals and academics, this study reveals that the prospective accountants’ professional socialisation practice is not solely a conscious and deliberate process. Instead, it involves ongoing negotiation between an individual’s habitus (way of being), capital (resources), and the opportunities that the accounting higher education field offers to them. The findings also highlight the ways in which an individual’s way of being is influenced by their class and ethnic background, and how this impacts their socialisation and career orientations. Individuals from privileged backgrounds tend to possess greater cultural and social capital, positioning them advantageously to benefit from professional development opportunities provided by their institutions compared to those from less privileged backgrounds. These findings raise questions about the role of higher education institutions in promoting equity and expanding access to the accountancy profession for underprivileged groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Career
• Bourdieu
• higher education
• professional socialisation
• ethnicity
• class

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the research participants for the trust placed in us. Their willingness to share their journey, diverse perspectives, and personal experiences has been crucial in shaping the depth and breadth of our findings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, social background refers to the prospective accountants’ class and ethnic origin.

2 Elite professions here refer to occupations such as medicine, law, architecture, and accountancy.

3 This paper uses the term negotiation to highlight prospective accountants’ (albeit constrained) agentic power and how this agency is used to shape their professional trajectories. Our approach counters the criticisms of Bourdieu’s theory which portray it as deterministic and lacking agency.

4 For the list of MIA-accredited university degrees, refer to Part I of the Accountants Act 1967.

5 For the list of Recognised Professional Accounting Bodies, refer to Part II of the Accountants Act 1967.

6 Previously MACPA (the Malayan, and then Malaysian, Association of Certified Public Accountants). MACPA is the first local (non-government) professional body established in Malaysia following the British model (Susela, 2010). While MACPA is set up as a private body, MIA is set up as a statutory body (Susela, 2010). The professional rivalry between these two bodies shaped the development of accounting profession in Malaysia.

7 The citizens of Malaysia consist of three main groups namely Bumiputera (native) (70 percent), Chinese (22.7 percent) and Indians (6.6 percent). The remaining 0.7 percent represents other minority groups (DOSM, 2023).

8 By this, Gebreiter (2020) refers to an individual’s capacity to control or shape their individual self in pursuit of professional employment.

9 It is necessary to reinterpret here in relevant Bourdieusian terms as Gebreiter’s (2020) study adopted a Foucauldian approach (and therefore used different terminology).

10 The data set used in this study was selected from a larger set of data which include interviews, diary entries, documentation, and observations, collected for a PhD project with broader aims. From that set of data, these 25 interviews were selected based on their inclusion of references to anticipatory professional socialisation experiences within the accounting higher education field, ensuring coverage of diverse social origins and institutional affiliations.

11 The topic guide used in this study is reproduced in Appendix.

12 Both initial coding and translations were done by the first author who is proficient in both languages and understands the context very well as a local. A certified translator was also engaged throughout the process for assurance.

13 Approved by the Social Science Ethics Committee of the University of Glasgow. Application no.: 400180143

14 Students are normally selected based on their academic performance and predisposition towards audit work and extra-curricular activities.

15 Selected students usually undergo the program prior to the compulsory 4 or 6-months internship period that accounting students in Malaysia must complete in their final year before graduating.

16 ‘Low level of inherited cultural capital’ refers to the level of inherited cultural capital that is passed on from parents or guardians to prospective accountants. These were qualitatively assessed on a case-by-case basis based on the participants’ in-depth explanation of their social origin and indicators such as parents’ educational background, nature of occupation, and place of origin.

17 TAF is a training program essentially an extra-curricular activity run by members of professional firms. Further explanation is found in first findings and discussion section, which contextualises the prospective accountants’ experiences.

18 This interview guide lists main interview questions and prompts that elicited comments relevant to this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Glasgow.