From Meticulous Professionals To Superheroes Of The Business World: A Historical Portrait Of A Cultural Change In The Field Of Accountancy

The purpose of this paper is to examine the cultural shift from professionalism to commercialism in the accounting profession based on an analysis of the promotional brochures used by the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec, over the last forty years, to attract new members. The specific objectives are to examine accountancy's cultural representations depicted in brochures and to establish whether the representations under study provide further insight into the nature of the cultural shift. Drawing on the semiotic approach developed by Roland Barthes, our analysis is predicated on the idea that promotional brochures, though often simple in appearance, constitute complex representations that convey meaningful information about influential values and cultural change.