The Professional Rubric: A Weberian based framework to assessing professional accounting practice and its educational needs

Professionals and professional bodies are noting the rapidly evolving formats of service delivery from several pressures, including such things as rationalising and marketising of delivery, accountability to the public, ethical responsibilities, changing technology, increasing fragmentation of knowledge, globalisation, increasing specialisation, neo-liberal policies of deregulation, and reduced monopolistic protection. These pressures on professionals involved in the delivery of professional services is forcing them, in Darwinism terminology, to adapt for survival or become irrelevant and extinct. Within the workforce, professions play a significant role and are a specialised form of labour and have, in sociological terms, several key criterion or characteristics that have been used to traditionally delineate them from occupations. Nine of these criteria have been framed into the The Professional Rubric, a Weberian conceptual framework, to assess any given profession. Applying this exemplar on the accounting profession, by way of a case study across several countries, to establish how accounting practitioners and academics envisage what their profession will look like in 10-15-years’ time; and what changes will be required to meet the future educational needs for professional practice.
This is phase two my PhD studies into the sociology of the professions and the professional practice of accounting and its educational needs.