This thesis explores the roles of CPD and lifelong learning for accountants today. Accountants are experiencing more career transitions and learning is an increasingly vital element in the ever changing environment. The research findings will be used to help accountants learn more effectively throughout their careers. Since 2005, member bodies of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) have been required to implement mandatory continuing professional development (CPD) schemes and to ‘foster a commitment to lifelong learning’ (IFAC, 2004a, p.1). In this new context this research with members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) explores the roles of CPD and lifelong learning, so contributing to both the CPD and lifelong learning research agendas. The research looks at how accountants perceive and describe their learning activities and experiences using a mixed methods approach involving an initial large-scale survey, exploring learning in one context, followed by in-depth interviews which look at learning across a career. Two conceptual frameworks, developed during the literature review, underpin the research. These are based on a model developed by Illeris (2009) and incorporate the cognitive, interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of learning. Other key concepts referred to throughout the research include identity, agency, engagement, affordance and the metaphors of learning as acquisition, learning as participation and learning as becoming. The patterns of learning varied according to the roles, sectors, career stages and gender of accountants. The need for career adaptability (Bimrose et al., 2011) emerged from the research and was added to professional competence to produce a new learning model, the professional learning iceberg. It is proposed that ‘learning relating to professional competence’ and ‘learning relating to career adaptability’ are more meaningful concepts than ‘CPD’ and ‘lifelong learning’ to describe the learning needed to succeed in the accountancy profession in the twenty-first century.

This overview explains the perceived origins of the candidates research record beginning with the study and work experiences which led the candidate to the research work that has taken up the majority of his professional career. The overview then considers a number of important publications in three groups which, it is argued, have influenced others interested in social and environmental accounting. In addition some investigation of the extent of citation of the candidates work has been reported herein, together with details of a number of publications that have reproduced the candidates work as examples of important contributions to the study of this sub-branch of accounting. The overview concludes with statements justifying the overall contribution as being worthy of consideration for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by publication.

The thesis takes a disciplinary approach derived from the work of Foucault (1977), but further developed by Hoskin (1993) and Hoskin and Macve (1986), to emphasise how disciplinarity has a double positive meaning as knowledge and power. Modern disciplinarity is produced through the exercise of certain key 'disciplinary practices', in particular those of writing, examining and grading, which engender both the modern forms of powerful expert knowledge and the application of expertise-based power to the forming of humans as individuals and populations. This disciplinary approach is used here to re-theorise the study of professionalisation as a historical process, and the constitution of professionals as powerful individuals through qualification in knowledge-powerful professions. The growth of the ACCA is studied as an exercise in disciplinarity, in part because it constitutes such an anomaly for the jurisdictional approach developed by Abbott (1988). It has staked a successful claim to professional independence and now claims to be the largest global professional accountancy body. The study traces the history of the ACCA's development through four major stages of growth. At inception, the ACCA's founder bodies set up an examination-based education and training system like that of the chartered bodies, but with expedient differences, e.g. no requirement for articles or to work in practice. Later various ways of becoming 'more disciplinary' were developed, including the use of more active forms of pedagogy in exam-preparation, and expanding institutional linkages with colleges and then universities. While status differences survived, the ACCA became increasingly undifferentiable from the old chartered bodies. The ACCA capitalised on this lack of difference to grow the organisation. At the same time, it has bought into the higher-level disciplinary knowledge that accounting has become, and now examines potential entrants on that knowledge, and maintains its jurisdictional space on that basis.

Cette thèse explore les formes d’engagement et apporte une réponse à la question : Que devient aujourd’hui le contrat normatif de profession des comptables libéraux dans un contexte de mutation de leur profession ? Nous avons croisé deux champs théoriques : celui du comportement organisationnel avec la théorie du contrat psychologique et la sociologie des professions avec le modèle intégré de De Rozario (2006). Nous avons conduit 20 entretiens qualitatifs auprès de comptables libéraux et mobilisé une grille d’analyse construite à partir de la théorie du contrat psychologique qui prend en compte les actants humains et non humains. Les résultats nous permettent de dire que malgré les violations contractuelles actuelles et les transitions, la profession de comptables libéraux continue de faire engagement par son contrat normatif. Il est composé de trois contrats psychologiques individuels qui sont : transactionnel, transitionnel et relationnel. Les mutations actuelles incitent à des contrats psychologiques transactionnels plus denses avec des réseaux d’experts et un contrat psychologique relationnel avec les outils de gestion surtout digitaux pour répondre aux conjonctures problématiques. Finalement, le contrat relationnel avec la profession réduit aujourd’hui à sa composante diplôme, mute vers des contrats relationnels de réseaux experts de proximité. / This thesis explores the forms of commitment and provides an answer to the question: What is becoming of the normative contract of chartered accountants in a context of change of their profession? We crossed two theoretical fields: that of the organizational behavior with the theory of the psychological contract and the sociology of the professions with the integrated model of De Rozario (2006). We conducted 20 qualitative interviews with chartered accountants and mobilized an analysis grid based on the psychological contract theory that takes into account human and non-human contract makers. The results allow us to say that despite the current contractual violations and transitions, the profession of liberal accountants continues to lead to a commitment through its normative contract. The latter comprises three individual psychological contracts which are transactional, transitional and relational contracts. Current changes are leading to increasingly complex transactional psychological contracts with networks of experts and a relational psychological contract with management tools, especially digital devices, to respond to the crisis they face. Finally, the relational contract with the profession reduces today to its diploma component, moving towards relational contracts of expert networks of proximity.