Understanding social closure in its cultural context: accounting practitioners in France (1920-1939)

This article tries to show how the result of a process of social closure an d the achievement of a professional project are heavily dependent on the cu ltural context in which they are embedded. The concepts of field and of cap ital developed by Pierre Bourdieu help to understand the failure, before th e Second World War, of the project to institutionalise the accounting profe ssion in France. The accountants' inability to solidify hierarchies interna l to the professional field and the unfavourable insertion of this field in the overall hierarchy of social fields will be used as key-arguments to ac count for this failure. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.