Critical Perspective on the Influence of Professional Organizations in the Construction of Curricula of Undergraduate Courses in Accounting

Admittedly, the characteristics that underlie a profession possess, as a base, the connection between the actual work activities and for which there is market demand, the higher education obtained in an educational accredited system that qualifies the individual, and preferential access for trained and skilled workers for the job, which institutionalizes the relationship between the higher education system and the labor market. In this context, professional associations act to maintain a captive labor market, with a set of requirements, among them, the abstract knowledge of higher level.

In Brazil, the Law of Guidelines and Foundations of National Education, together with Resolution. 10/2004 of the National Council of Education, expresses  that universities have the autonomy to outline the syllabuses of university courses in Accounting. However, access to the accounting profession requires the attendance of a course recognized by the respective Professional Order and the overcoming of an entrance exam.

This study aimed at verifying, in the context of professional regulation, if Brazilian universities maintain their autonomy when  defining the curricula of higher education aimed at graduating  the professional accountant, from the Accounting coordinators’ perceptions .

In the theoretical approach, it was used, as a conceptual framework, the sociology of professions and their theoretical currents: the functionalist, the interactionist, and the critical approach. It is an exploratory, descriptive and bibliographical study, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The population studied included all the coordinators from  Colleges of Science in Accounting in Brazil, with validated sample within the statistical probabilities.

The results show that the coordinators  perceived that Brazilian universities have lost their autonomy in the construction of curricula of undergraduate courses in Accounting, which are subject to legal and contributory influences from Federal Accounting Council, Ministry of Education,  contributions of the course’s teachers themselves and International Organizations.