Role Relations and Value Adaptation: A Study of the Professional Accountant in Industry

Abstract

The idea of a general professional/bureaucrat conflict has a very narrow empirical base. It is suggested that such conflict may be `value specific' or `role specific'. To test this, a sample of members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants was drawn as a criterion professional group, because of the equal distribution of its members between private practice and industry. The profession's values were operationalized in specific terms as being concerned with `caution', `exactitude', `anti-theoretical pragmatism', `professional exclusiveness', `quantification' and `rationality'. Differences between members of the profession in private practice and in industry were shown on the first four of these values. A further sample of Accountants in industry showed that the values of `quantification' and `rationality' did not differ between holders of different roles in industry, which accorded with the hypothesized functionality of these values. The extent to which the other values were held was shown to vary with aspects of the role relationships in which the Accountant finds himself in industry.