Re figuring accounting and maternal bodies The gendered embodiment of accounting

Description
This paper examines the relationship between the body and the self for women accounting professionals. It explores
how they come to embody the identity of accountant and what happens when forms of organizational and professional
embodiment coincide with other forms of gendered embodied self, such as that experienced during pregnancy and in
early motherhood. These forms of embodiment can be seen simultaneously both as a mechanism of social control,
and as a form of self-expression and empowerment for women.

(Re)?guring accounting and maternal bodies: The
gendered embodiment of accounting professionals
Kathryn Haynes
*
The York Management School, Sally Baldwin Building, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between the body and the self for women accounting professionals. It explores
how they come to embody the identity of accountant and what happens when forms of organizational and professional
embodiment coincide with other forms of gendered embodied self, such as that experienced during pregnancy and in
early motherhood. These forms of embodiment can be seen simultaneously both as a mechanism of social control,
and as a form of self-expression and empowerment for women.
Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction – The body and the self
Human beings have always had the capability
of adapting the presentation of their bodies to ?t
with social norms of culture, beauty, health or
fashion. Popular interest in the body is evidenced
by newspapers, magazines and television, which
are crammed with features on diet, exercise, health
issues and fashion, or even more acute cases,
including extreme body building, cosmetic surgery
or genetic engineering. The body is central to a
person’s sense of self-identity (Giddens, 1991; Shil-
ling, 1993), as self-image and the body are interre-
lated. Turner (1996, p. 195) suggests that ‘with
mass culture and consumerism came a new self, a
more visible self, and the body comes to symbolize
overtly the status of the personal self’. While most
individuals do not possess the resources or the
inclination to radically reconstruct their bodies,
awareness of the body involves individuals being
conscious of, and actively concerned about, the
‘management, maintenance and appearance of
their bodies’ together with a ‘practical recognition
of the signi?cance of bodies; both as personal
resources and as social symbols which give o? mes-
sages about a person’s self-identity’ (Shilling, 1993,
p. 5). The body has, therefore, become increasingly
commodi?ed and ‘marketized’, such that body
image is used to achieve what Featherstone has
described as the ‘marketable self’ (Featherstone,
1991, p. 171). This emphasis on the presentation
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2007.04.003
*
Tel.: +44 (0)1904 434640; fax: +44 (0)1904 434163.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
and management of the body can be highly
problematic for individuals, as even apparently
more mundane transformations using diet or exer-
cise can be extremely di?cult to achieve, causing a
detrimental lack of self-esteem in regard to body-
image (Bordo, 1993; Orbach, 1998; Wolf, 1991).
Medical and biological knowledge have con-
structed the body as an object which Dale (2001,
p. 9) calls ‘the body-as-organism. . . about which
there can be objective knowledge of a universal
kind. . . into its constituent parts and systems.’
Outside of the medical literature, the body and
its relationship with the mind has also been a focus
for investigation from within a number of disci-
plines. Despite being described as ‘an absent pres-
ence’ in both sociology (Shilling, 1993, p. 9) and
organizational theory (Dale, 2001, p. 20), it has
also, more recently, generated interest in these dis-
ciplines. Notions of bodily discipline, technologies
of the body, mind and body, bodily power rela-
tions, and sex di?erences are of interest in the man-
agement, psychology, philosophy and feminist
literature (see, for example, Bordo, 1993; Butler,
1990; Foucault, 1977, 1979; Irigaray, 1991;
Kirkup, Janes, Woodward, & Hovenden, 2000).
Yet, despite the breadth of work on the body,
there has been very little emphasis on the body
itself within the accounting literature.
The body is a socially constructed phenomenon,
in?uenced by social and cultural forces, as well as
a phenomenologically lived entity, through which
we experience our everyday lives. Human beings
have bodies that allow us to see, smell, taste, and
listen, and also to act, think and feel, both physi-
cally and emotionally. The body, as an integral
component of human agency, is a central concern
of personal identity, and relates to the structure
and functioning of organizations. We all know
‘what it is to have or to be a body’ (Turner,
1991, p. 22), even if we are unhappy with the body
that we inhabit. The notion of ‘embodiment’
emphasises this lived body, as the subject who
knows the world through bodily perception, rather
than as an object of scienti?c knowledge (Dale,
2001). Embodiment rejects any dichotomous and
dualistic separation of subject and object, the
Cartesian split between mind and body, by sug-
gesting that the body is both subject and object,
nature and culture, knower and known. Our expe-
riences of embodiment provide a basis for theoriz-
ing social commonality, social inequalities and the
construction of di?erence.
This paper examines the relationship between
the body and the self, and in particular the gen-
dered aspects of that self, for women accounting
professionals. I consider what happens when
forms of organizational and professional embodi-
ment, such as those found with in the accounting
profession, come into contact with other forms of
gendered embodied self, such as those experienced
by the women accounting professionals in this
study, during pregnancy and in early mother-
hood. Pregnancy represents a particular embodied
episode, during which a woman has little jurisdic-
tion over her body’s appearance and demeanour,
and which belies the modern Western conviction
that we possess our own bodies and are able to
mould them accordingly (Warren & Brewis,
2004). The paper asks, therefore, whether there
is a di?erence between the embodiment of profes-
sional women accountants and the gendered
embodiment of women as mothers. If so, it
considers the implications for women and the
profession in terms of social justice and social
equality.
The paper is structured as follows: ?rstly, I
locate the study of embodiment in its historical
context of women’s inclusion in the accounting
profession, and within the literature on profes-
sional socialization of accountants, which, I sug-
gest, largely fails to examine the e?ects of
gender on the embodiment and socialization of
accounting professionals. I then discuss the
research methodology and research context. The
paper draws from the extensive oral history narra-
tives of ?fteen women accountants, who are also
mothers, gathered over a two-year period. In
addition, I also re?ect on my own experiences of
embodiment whilst working within the accounting
profession. I then examine the experiences of the
women in re-conceptualising their sense of self
in the process of bodily renegotiation to conform
to professional accounting norms, and during
pregnancy and early motherhood. This occurs in
part through the response of others to their
changing embodiment, as the corporeal forms of
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 329
both mother and accountant interact, bringing
potential clashes and con?icts. I apply Bourdieu’s
(1984) theory of social reproduction to the empir-
ical material to evaluate the process of learning to
embody the self, the social construction of our
embodied identity. I argue that the body becomes
a vehicle for displaying conformity, or indeed
non-conformity, to social norms, which a?ects
our embodied practices, emotions and identities.
I discuss the e?ect of changing embodiment on
perceptions of identity, and ?nally, draw out some
implications for the re?guring of accounting and
maternal bodies.
Embodiment and the accounting context
Individuals may strive for the embodied identity
that they perceive to be valuable, marketable or
desirable. Their sense of self is re?exively under-
stood in terms of an embodied biography. As Shil-
ling (1993, p. 5) suggests, there is a:
‘‘Tendency for the body to be seen as an
entity which is in the process of becoming;
a project which should be worked at and
accomplished as part of an individual’s self-
identity’’.
Inevitably this takes place within the context of
societal constraints, or those of the particular
social or professional group to which the individ-
ual belongs or is hoping to belong. In the account-
ing context, attitudes to embodied identity are
a?ected by gender and moulded by professional
socialization. Historically, the very opportunity
for women to take on the identity of accountant
has been problematic, as gender con?icts restrict-
ing women’s access to the profession persisted
since the early 1900s (Lehman, 1992). Women
were seen by some as both physically and intellec-
tually un?t for such a role (Lehman, 1992), and
their oppression within accountancy interacted
with the development of power and in?uence in
the profession itself and the constitution of its
knowledge base in terms of gender (Kirkham,
1992). Until the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury, the professional echelons of accounting were
a male preserve (Westcott & Seiler, 1986) with
women con?ned to the clerical and secretarial
functions, as the masculine qualities required of
accounting professionals ‘contrasted markedly
with the image of the weak, dependent, emotional
‘‘married’’ woman of mid-Victorian Britain’
(Kirkham & Loft, 1993, p. 516). For many years
the price women had to pay for very small promo-
tions and meagre ?nancial independence within
accounting was the renunciation of marriage and
children (Cooper & Taylor, 2000), and the deskil-
ling and feminization of bookkeeping has persisted
into recent decades (Cooper & Taylor, 2000; Loft,
1992; Roberts & Coutts, 1992).
In more recent years, the socialization of
accountants into the profession has also a?ected
the way their embodied identities are perceived.
Almost all conceptualizations of the professional
self-tend to concern issues of knowledge or exper-
tise, and more particularly control and licensing of
specialist knowledge or expertise in the public
interest (Abbott, 1988; Johnson, 1972; Sikka, Wil-
mott, & Lowe, 1989). The professional, as an indi-
vidual, is de?ned through membership of a
profession and adherence to its rules and stan-
dards, so in the case of accounting:
‘‘being a professional accountant would refer
to accredited competence in the speci?c skills
and knowledge associated with particular
professional bodies. In short, on this view,
a professional is someone who has passed
the exams’’. (Grey, 1998, p. 572)
Hanlon (1998) suggests that the key concepts of
professionalism within the accounting context are
technical ability, managerial skills, and ability to
bring clients into the practice. Grey (1998), how-
ever, suggests that, while quali?cations and knowl-
edge are taken for granted factors legitimating the
accountant as a professional, the predominant way
in which professional accountants themselves use
the term ‘professional’ in discursive practice is
more concerned with appropriate forms of behav-
iour, or ways of conducting oneself, rather than
with issues of accreditation to practise or the pos-
session of technical skills. In the accounting con-
text, several authors, notably Anderson-Gough,
Grey, and Robson (1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2001,
2002, 2005), Anderson-Gough (2002) and Co?ey
330 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
(1993, 1994), have discussed aspects of profes-
sional socialization which mould the individual
into the archetypal, desirable accountant, such
that he or she possesses both the technical and
the behavioural attributes required. The profes-
sional and organizational discourses forming the
socialization processes within accounting exercise
a signi?cant degree of institutional power in the
shaping of the individual (Anderson-Gough
et al., 1998a, 1998b). Identi?cation as a profes-
sional accountant, as well as other forms of indi-
vidual, is also subject to moral, social and
cultural pressures inherent within wider society
(Haynes, 2005).
Most of the professional socialization literature,
excepting Anderson-Gough et al. (2005), does not
consider gender perse, but, as Grey (1998) has
pointed out, being a professional may encompass
ways of conducting oneself, in addition to display-
ing technical knowledge, which has implications
for physical appearance and gendered behaviour.
One of the central concepts of professionalism,
within accounting, remains the presentation of
the self in terms of appearance, modes of conduct
and appropriate clothing (Anderson-Gough et al.,
2002), where ‘self-presentation can be viewed as
development of a professional image and set of
characteristic professional behaviours’ (Co?ey,
1993, p. 68). Thus, trainee accountants model
themselves into what they perceive as the required
identity for the profession, whilst being simulta-
neously constrained by the context of that profes-
sional environment, as the:
‘‘process of adopting the values, norms and
behaviours of the profession is fundamental
to the career success of the professional per-
son’’. (Anderson-Gough et al., 2001, p. 101)
Such norms, values and behaviours may have a
gendered impact, as Anderson-Gough et al. (2001,
p. 120) point out, in that:
‘‘The gendering of professional ?rms and in
particular its relationship to temporal norms
of work may very well have a signi?cant
in?uence upon strategic life choices, perhaps
especially for female employees once
quali?ed’’.
Moreover, the gendering of audit ?rms is con-
nected not only to formal organizational struc-
tures but also to tacit informal components, such
as socializing, which intertwine to reproduce gen-
der domination (Anderson-Gough et al., 2005).
The professional self is not just de?ned within
social interaction between the members of the ?rm
or between ?rm and client, but operates within the
institutional structures of the profession itself. It is
this context that women accounting professionals
have to negotiate when they become mothers and
are subject to changes in their embodied identities.
After detailing the research methodology of the
study, I will go on to discuss how their changed
embodiment may bring the professional and moth-
ering aspects of their identities into con?ict.
Research methodology and context
The empirical data presented in this paper is
drawn from a series of oral history narratives
obtained from ?fteen women in 2002 and 2003.
The term ‘oral history’ encapsulates various forms
of in-depth life history interviews, biographical
interviews, and personal narratives. Reinharz
(1992, p. 130) argues that oral history is di?erent
from simple autobiography in terms of the ‘degree
to which the subject controls and shapes the text’.
Both involve a person telling their own life-story,
but oral history is interactive, drawing on another
person’s questions. I use the term oral history to
encapsulate in-depth personal narratives, in which
I encourage participants to re?ect on their identity,
aspirations, emotions and experiences.
Despite the proliferation of oral history in his-
torical research (Thompson, 1988; Vansina, 1985;
Yow, 1994), it has rarely been used extensively in
the accounting context. Collins and Bloom (1991,
p. 23) did call for the use of oral history in
accounting but largely to suggest it should be
used to ‘supplement and clarify the written
record’ and verify other forms of history rather
than as a methodology in its own right. Carnegie
and Napier (1996, p. 29) reviewed the role of his-
tory within accounting, speci?cally arguing that
‘oral history’s greatest potential lies in its ability
to capture the testimony of those e?ectively
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 331
excluded from organizational archives’, and ‘pro-
vide much insight into the e?ect of accounting on
the managed and the governed’. However, Ham-
mond and Sikka (1996, p. 91), giving Mumford
(1991) and Parker (1994) as examples, suggest
the actual main concern of oral history in
accounting ‘has been to give visibility to the views
of well-known accountants rather than to give
voice to the people who have been excluded,
oppressed and exploited in the onward march of
the institutions of accountancy’. While, more
recently, biographical approaches to accounting
research have become more common (Hammond,
2002; Kim, 2004; McNicholas, Humphries, &
Gallhofer, 2004) as researchers recognise the rich
resource that such methods elucidate, there is still
a suggestion that the accounting context renders
some of its participants ‘voiceless’. For the
women in my study it is likely no written or other
form of record already exists which may be used
to document their experiences. Indeed, the oral
history narratives may be the ?rst time they have
had the opportunity to voice their identities.
Kyriacou (2000) recognised this in her choice of
the oral history method to provide insights into
the lives of ethnic minority women accountants.
An oral history methodology has the potential
to enable the voices of those marginalised to be
heard by capturing their lived experience, thus
o?ering ‘deeper and di?erent understandings of
the role and in?uence of accounting’ (Hammond
& Sikka, 1996, p. 92).
Some of the participants in the oral history
research were known to me, but the majority were
obtained from ‘snowballing techniques’ (Bailey,
2000, 2001), whereby they were referred to me
through contacts. Snowballing is invaluable when
the potential participants are few in number, di?-
cult to ascertain, or where some degree of trust is
required to instigate contact (Atkinson & Flint,
2001). In this case, the fact that I am also an
accountant and mother gave me some degree of
shared experience with the participants that
seemed to facilitate the divulgence of intimate
experiences for some and break down the barriers
of being researched. I made it clear that the
research was an independent project and not
linked to their organization in any way, so that
they were able to speak freely. All the women were
professionally quali?ed accountants, eight with the
Institute of Chartered Accountants in England
and Wales (ICAEW), two with the Chartered
Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA),
two with the Chartered Association of Certi?ed
Accountants (ACCA), one with the Association
of Accounting Technicians (AAT), and two with
the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland
(ICAS). Additionally two women had Chartered
Institute of Taxation (ATII) membership. As
mothers with young children, they were relatively
similar in terms of age, being between 26 and 45
at the time of the obtaining the narratives. A
recent Financial Reporting Council report (Profes-
sional Oversight Board for Accountancy, 2005)
shows marked di?erences between the age pro?les
of the accounting bodies in the UK. The ACCA
has the youngest membership with 70% of its
members being under 45, whereas only about
50% of the ICAEW’s members are under 45.
Moreover, the ICAEW has the lowest proportion
of women members at only 21%, so it is likely that
being young women in a male dominated profes-
sion, they had some experiences in common. They
were spread geographically around the UK,
although ?ve of them worked for the same large
accounting practice. All the women, except one,
had one or more children and was, or had been,
working in a professional accounting role at the
time when they became pregnant.
However, they were not selected to form a rep-
resentative group, because the study aimed to
explore and interpret the personal experience of
being an accountant and mother, rather than sam-
ple a speci?c population. To some extent, they had
experiences that were potentially similar and it is
these experiences that I intended to explore. How
they dealt with them and felt about them may be
di?erent. Moreover, it is a mistake to assume that
people with similar pro?les can provide an easy
basis for generalization because they must have
been achieved via similar biographies. Even with
the same pro?les and biographical similarities
there can be signi?cant di?erences in meanings
for people (Hockey & James, 2003).
A summary of their status at the time referred
to in the oral history narratives in relation to this
332 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
paper is provided in Table 1. Their names have
been anonymized to protect their identity.
The women’s oral history accounts of their
experiences lasted up to four hours. Notes of my
immediate impressions of each participant were
made immediately after each meeting in my ?eld-
work diary. The narratives were tape recorded
with the permission of each participant and then
transcribed. On receipt of the transcripts I listened
to the tape whilst scrutinising the transcript to cor-
rect for any errors. The transcripts were read for a
second time whilst listening to the tape, and anno-
tated with signi?cant examples of emotion,
changes of tone and emphasis, ‘as emphasis,
mood, intonation and so on, can crucially elabo-
rate meaning’ (Jones, 1985, p. 58). Further analysis
and annotation took place in subsequent readings
by drawing out any references or inferences to the
body or embodiment. Cross references could then
be made between the comments and experiences of
the participants, which were enhanced by ‘focusing
on the ways in which di?erent people relate their
experiences according to the circumstances they
found themselves in’ (May, 1997, p. 126). In this
way I could use theory to make sense of experience
in an ‘interpretative and synthesising process,
which connects experience to understanding’
(Maynard, 1994, p. 24).
As the paper is concerned with the lived body,
and the way it is represented and used in speci?c
ways in the particular cultural context of account-
ing, the signi?cance of the participants’ bodies as
social symbols during the oral history interviews
is also relevant. The physical body is ever-present,
even though it may change over time and in di?er-
ent contexts, and its state of development, appear-
ance and form can be incorporated as a form of
data available to researchers. Non-verbal commu-
nication may be interpreted in addition to speech.
The very physicality of the body in the oral history
meetings related directly to the identity and experi-
ences being discussed or displayed by the partici-
pants, as the mind and body interrelate and
interact in a fusion of mental and physical experi-
ence. For example, although the meeting with
Lorna, who was six months pregnant, took place
in the accounting practice where she worked and
where she presented herself in the professional
context, her pregnant shape was a physical pres-
ence signifying her dual identity as accountant
and mother-to-be. Judith’s account of the di?cul-
ties she had encountered trying to combine her
accounting career with early motherhood was
given whilst breast-feeding her child in her home.
This caused her discussion of mothering to be very
real and vivid: a corporeal display of her identity
Table 1
Status of participants
Participant pseudonym Qualifying body Type of ?rm
a
Employment status
Alice ICAEW Small city ?rm Tax senior
Amanda ACCA Big 5 Audit senior
Anne ICAS Big 5 Audit senior
Annette CIMA Industry Finance manager
Caroline CIMA Industry Finance manager
Deborah ICAEW Mid tier large ?rm Audit partner
Hannah ICAEW/ATII Big 5 Tax senior
Judith ICAS Industry Internal audit manager
Julie AAT Mid tier large ?rm Tax senior
Katy ICAEW Big 5 Audit manager
Lorna ICAEW Mid tier large ?rm Insolvency manager
Maureen ICAEW Mid tier large ?rm Corporate ?nance manager
Melissa ACCA Public sector Finance manager
Nicky ICAEW Mid tier large ?rm Tax manager
Susan ICAEW/ATII Big 5 Tax manager
a
This re?ects the type of ?rm that the participants were employed in at the time of their pregnancy and early motherhood referred to
in the oral history narratives. Some have since moved to di?erent types of employment. Contraction, merger, and de-merger in the
accounting profession has since led to the ‘Big 5’ major ?rms becoming the ‘Big 4’.
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 333
as mother. Deborah’s breasts were also swollen
with milk, as a physical reminder of her nurturing
role as mother, even when she was emphasising in
her narrative the intellectual aspects of her identity
as professional audit partner. The bodies of other
women in the study also thrust themselves into the
research context: Alice going to the toilet several
times and Caroline nervously wringing her hands,
perhaps with anxiety at the prospect of the meeting
with me. Aspects of the thinking self can be read
from the physical body, as it re?ects the way the
mind in?uences the body, encapsulating aspects
of identity as perceived by both the subject and
others, as mothers, as accountants, as subjects of
research. In such a way the lived body is interwo-
ven with systems of representation, identity, mean-
ing, and knowledge.
In addition, my own body, and my identity as
an accountant and as a researcher, ?gure in this
paper. As a researcher, I was conscious of the
impression my own body was giving to partici-
pants. When meeting women in their own homes
I tended to dress more casually and informally to
alleviate the impression of their being formally
‘researched’, whereas when meeting them in their
work environments, or in accounting ?rms, I
tended to wear smarter clothing in order to appear
more professional or business-like. In addition, as
I have also been socialized in the accounting pro-
fession, and worked within it while pregnant and
while bringing up small children, I bring some of
these experiences to bear, placing myself in the
research. Much qualitative research discusses the
role of the researcher in the research, and how
his or her biases, preconceptions, politics, emo-
tions or ontology a?ects the research process
(Reinharz, 1992; Roberts, 1990; Stanley & Wise,
1993). Conversely, the research process will also
a?ect the researcher (Haynes, 2006b). The
researcher’s response to empirical material is likely
to arise, in however attenuated and complex a
way, from his or her own autobiography, but
rather than seeing this as an obstacle to be over-
come, Walkerdine (1997, p. 59) argues that
‘instead of making futile attempts to avoid some-
thing that cannot be avoided, we should think
more carefully about how to utilize our subjectiv-
ity as part of the research process’. A critical use
of intellectual autobiography (Stanley, 1992)
locates the researcher re?exively in the research,
which allows the emotional and physical experi-
ences of the author to creatively and analytically
enhance the work (Haynes, 2006a; Wilkins,
1993), and acknowledge ‘the ways in which self-
a?ects both research process and outcomes’ (Wil-
liams, 1993, p. 578). Equally, as Dale (2001, p.
30), suggests:
‘‘ ‘Scienti?c’ knowledge writes out the body,
and the identity of the person who knows,
as part of the hidden but none the less polit-
ical use of rationality, to give a seemingly
objective and neutral gloss to inclusions
and exclusions of knowledge’’.
I regard it, therefore, as a political act to write
my own embodied entity in to this paper.
While the sample of women, including myself, is
not intended to be generalizable, the analysis pro-
vides some insight into our relationships with our
bodies, and what our embodiment seems to mean
in our working lives in accounting, which allows
for the drawing of some implications for the
embodiment of the profession. I now turn to the
analysis of the oral history interviews.
Learning to embody the self
Embodied behaviour and norms, as described
earlier, are socially constructed from within the
context in which they are located. Thus, trainee
accountants, I suggest, ‘learn to embody the self ’;
in other words, both consciously and subcon-
sciously, to present their bodies, behaviours and
self-image in terms of the identity they aspire to
as professional accountant, and to obtain a ‘?t’
within the norms of this context.
Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction is
helpful in explaining some of the complexities of
embodied professional socialization and learning
to embody the self within the accounting profes-
sion, as it has at its very centre a concern with
the body as a bearer of symbolic value (Shilling,
1993). While Bourdieu does not provide a detailed
account of gendered orientations to the body, I
extend his insights to encompass gender and a
334 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
form of gendered physical capital. Bourdieu (1984)
suggests that the body has become commodi?ed in
modern societies and has become central to the
acquisition of status and distinction. The body is
a comprehensive form of physical capital: a posses-
sor of power, status, and distinctive symbolic
forms, which is integral to the accumulation of
various resources. Moreover, there is an interrela-
tionship between the development of the body and
people’s social location, such that the context in
which the commodi?cation of embodiment takes
place will clearly in?uence the outcome. Through
the commodi?cation process, women may be
encouraged more than men to develop their bodies
as objects of perception for others (Shilling, 1993).
Bourdieu recognizes that acts of labour are
required to turn bodies into social entities and that
these acts in?uence how people develop and hold
the physical shape of their bodies, and learn to
present their bodies through styles of walk, talk
and dress. As Kerfoot (1999) proposes, there is a
tendency within organizations to view the compe-
tency of a manager in his or her ability to display
the body in a manner that is culturally acceptable
to their organization’s bodily code in terms of
dress and physical appearance. For Bourdieu
(1984), the body bears the indisputable imprint
of an individual’s social class because of three
main factors: ?rstly, Social location, the class-
based, material circumstances which contextualize
people’s daily life and contribute to the develop-
ment of their bodies; secondly, Habitus, a socially
constituted system formed in the context of peo-
ple’s social locations and inculcating in them a
view of the world based on, and reconciled to,
these positions; and ?nally, Taste, which refers to
the processes whereby individuals appropriate, as
voluntary choices and preferences, lifestyles which
are actually rooted in material constraints such
that people develop preferences within the
resources available to them (Shilling, 1993). Bodies
develop through the interrelationships between an
individual’s social location, habitus and taste,
which naturalise and perpetuate the di?erent rela-
tionships that social groups have towards their
bodies, and are central to the choices that people
make in all spheres of social life (Bourdieu,
1981). I extend Bourdieu’s ideas to argue both that
bodies develop in gendered ways that favour par-
ticular forms of physical capital, and that the mod-
ern body plays a complex role in the exercise of
gendered power and social inequalities as the sym-
bolic values attached to bodily forms become par-
ticularly important to many people’s sense of self.
This can be seen in the relationship that Susan
has with her embodied being, in which her appear-
ance and her sense of self are interrelated:
‘‘I still feel that I need to have this image to
be accepted, so part of me just wants to go
into work in my jeans and speak the way I
do and be myself and do my job well and
be appreciated for what I am. But part of
me feels that if I am going to a meeting or
if I am going to a conference then I have to
have an expensive suit and an expensive
handbag and have my hair all tidy and look
a bit posher than I am’’. (Susan)
Client expectations of the ?rm and its employ-
ees may play a role here in that care taken over
smart dress may signify that the employee will take
equal care in dealing with the client’s business.
Susan’s social location, however, incorporating
her working-class social background, and the hab-
itus in which she operates, causes her to feel disem-
bodied and lacking ?t with the accounting culture
in which she is employed:
‘‘I think the London o?ce was very much
geared towards public school and Oxbridge
graduates and very Home Counties focused
really, so the fact that I had a Yorkshire
accent and I don’t have a posh accent, I felt,
it made me feel, the only way I can explain it
is as if I have got dirty ?ngernails. You know
like when you are in the Brownies and you
are having your nails checked, and have
you got everything in your pocket, it made
me feel like that, I felt sort of scru?y and
working class and felt I was being looked
down on’’. (Susan)
While it is di?cult to determine to what extent
Susan’s view mirrors how people actually feel
about her, or how it re?ects her own sense of infe-
riority, it is evident that she feels seriously under-
mined by it. The very fact that she uses a
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 335
metaphor of the body, and one which is dirty and
soiled, to explain her sense of isolation and disen-
gagement with her accounting ?rm emphasises the
strong links between embodiment and identity,
which can cause individuals to feel estranged from
the very context within which they are trying to
operate, and can a?ect their behaviour in such
an environment. Even our ‘social commitments
(and) strivings for change may be undermined
and betrayed by the life of our bodies . . . regulated
by the norms of cultural life’ (Bordo, 1993, p. 165).
In a similar way, I recall my own sense of
embarrassment on an audit out on location where
the team had to stay in a hotel. While it was appar-
ently acceptable for the male members of the team
to wear one suit, with a fresh shirt each day, the
women had numerous combinations of clothing
or suits, which I did not possess, let alone had
brought with me. I think at that time I had no real
desire to spend my hard-earned money on this sort
of clothing in which I was not quite comfortable.
Such failure to enact the required professional
embodiment of accounting with poise, and my
apparent willingness to break the rules governing
social encounters, revealed a potential gap between
my aspirational embodied identity and my actual
embodied identity, which I would term ‘an embod-
ied entity disparity’. This undermined my sense of
self-con?dence in appearing the equal of my fellow
trainees. Self-identity as an embodied being is
inculcated through exposure to others and to cul-
tural norms within the same organization or pro-
fession, which may include both the quantity and
type of clothing that is acceptable. In such a
way, our bodies are a medium of culture represent-
ing the symbolic forms of the context we are
embedded in and which moulds us though seem-
ingly trivial routines, rules and practices (Bordo,
1993), such that, as Bourdieu puts it, values are
‘given body’ and culture is ‘made body’ (Bourdieu,
1977, p. 94, emphasis in original).
Embodied gendered behaviour
While appearance is a signi?cant factor in the
presentation of the self, behaviour is also of con-
siderable importance in the gendered embodiment
of the accounting professional. Taking the case of
Katy: she was known in the practice where we had
both worked as being highly technically compe-
tent, and rose to being the most senior female
manager in audit in the (now-merged) ?rm. Yet,
her slight physique and quiet demeanour were con-
trary to the usual behaviour in the profession
where, as Judith put it, ‘there would be a lot of tes-
tosterone sort of whipping around’:
‘‘You’d go in and you’d always get some-
body who’d be like ‘Speak up!’ you know,
as if you are a woman and you’re speak-
ing. . . , but I am quietly spoken, ‘Speak up,
speak up’, and I don’t know whether it was
trying to make a point like, you know, but
I did get used to it, but initially I think it
was, you know, you had to sort of take a
big gulp and think, right, go into the meet-
ing’’. (Katy)
Katy also had to ?ght against gendered assump-
tions about seniority similar to those pointed out
by Grey (1998):
‘‘On two occasions I went out, along with a
team of four of us and I was the only female,
and we went in to introduce ourselves to the
client and the client automatically went up to
the guy stood next to me and shook his hand
and started talking to him, and I said ‘Excuse
me I’m in charge’, and he was really embar-
rassed about it, but it was almost as if with-
out even thinking he’d automatically gone up
to the man’’. (Katy)
It could be argued that the fact that Katy was
not perceived as the most senior colleague could
be because of her quiet demeanour. As Berger
(1972) suggests, a ‘man’s’ presence is dependent
on the promise of power that ‘he’ embodies, but
the embodiment of power does not always have
to present itself purely through the development
of a powerful ideal body type. Instead, it can be
subtler, incorporating other elements of power
such as posture, height, walk, and, in this case,
voice, which are still subject to masculine norms
of volume, competition and assertion. So, the gen-
dered embodiment of accounting professionals is,
to borrow Butler’s (1990) phrase, ‘performative’,
336 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
in that individuals have to draw on scripts of mas-
culinity and femininity to succeed in their portray-
als of the self. Moreover, as Brewis (1999, p. 92),
suggests:
‘‘Bodily appearance and demeanour is moul-
ded to send out certain signals about capabil-
ities; for women managers, this . . . is intended
to undermine the meaning-laden properties
of their biologically sexed bodies. This
undertaking of a more masculine identity
project can be seen to render the individual
a ‘successful’ organizational subject, some-
one who is ‘?t’ to join the ranks of manage-
ment; there is pressure to appear outwardly
masculine in one’s working life, even if one
is biologically female’’.
Hence, the symbolic values attached to bodily
forms, appearance and attributes become particu-
larly relevant to the identity of accounting profes-
sionals, with the body playing a complex role in
the exercise of power and the reproduction of
social inequalities. Control of the body and its out-
ward display is central to the embodiment of the
accounting professional, largely premised on a
masculine norm of rationality, discipline, asser-
tion, and presence. Moreover, as Grosz (1994, p.
13) points out:
‘‘A convenient self-justi?cation for women’s
secondary social position. . . [is to] contain
them within bodies that are represented, even
constructed, as frail, imperfect, unruly, and
unreliable, subject to various intrusions that
are not under conscious control’’.
This is particularly the case during pregnancy
when the body may be characterized as particu-
larly unruly and out of control. What happens,
therefore, when professional gendered embodi-
ment comes into contact with another form of
embodiment, that of pregnancy and motherhood?
The fertile body and social inequality
Pregnancy can represent an intrusion of the
female sexual and fertile body into the context of
the masculine professional world of employment
(Warren & Brewis, 2004). During life one cannot
escape from the physical body, as the lived body
reminds us of its constant and inevitable presence
through the need to eat, drink, sleep and excrete
(Dale, 2001). Pregnancy, however, is a time when
the simple physicality of the body is brought to
the forefront of the lived experience for women,
increasing awareness of the spatial dimensions of
the body:
‘‘I was huge, and I’ve looked at photographs
of me and I’m enormous, absolutely enor-
mous, especially towards the end’’.
(Deborah)
The very corporeality of existence is intensi?ed,
with the additional incidence of tiredness, weight
gain, varicose veins, backache, heartburn, sick-
ness, constipation, increased need to urinate or
other related symptoms, which intrudes into daily
professional life, as many of the women in the
study found:
‘‘I couldn’t have done it anymore, it was
physically too much with travelling and even
at the later stages I struggled to get out of my
seat. So it was quite hard really’’. (Caroline
on commuting whilst pregnant).
‘‘I remember having to get to meetings that
meant using the tube and it was horrendous
as I had to get o? at every stop because I
kept feeling faint’’. (Hannah)
Pregnancy is also characterized as a time during
which a woman has little jurisdiction over her
body, representing a particular ‘body episode’
which belies the modern Western conviction that
we have and possess our bodies and are able to
mould them accordingly (Warren & Brewis,
2004). I have already discussed the need to con-
form to particular norms of embodied behaviour
within the accounting context, including dress
and image, but the ability to conform in appear-
ance and demeanour is dramatically reduced dur-
ing pregnancy:
‘‘Obviously in practice there is a certain
expected dress code that you can’t achieve
when you are Ten Ton Tess!!’’ (Amanda)
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 337
‘‘I think again it is a matter of control, isn’t
it, when you are able to dress yourself and
present yourself in the way that you think
that you should do, and then you do. But
having been pregnant and not being able to
control how you look, you just accept that
you can only get by on what you can get
by on (laughs) and you can’t always do
everything that you want to do. . . I don’t
know if men realised how much you are
not in control about the way you look’’.
(Amanda)
Women’s reduced control over the body and its
appearance during pregnancy is at odds with the
need to present the self in a particular professional
manner in the accounting context. The marketiza-
tion of the self required by neo-liberal economic
imperatives brings the pre- and the post-pregnancy
embodiment into potential con?ict.
Moreover, pregnancy is not a state which can
be easily concealed, except in the initial stages,
though women tend to try to conceal their other
bodily processes. Menstruation, lactation, or men-
opause are typically concealed in the work envi-
ronment, arising from the need to conform to the
disciplined bodily basis of organizations, which
takes the male body as the norm (Halford, Savage,
& Witz, 1997). As Brewis (1999, 2000) suggests,
however, this is not always possible, as biological
functions do intrude into working life owing to
the organization of time, space and duties. In the
case of pregnancy, it is inevitable that it becomes
evident over time, but women may feel reluctant
to bring it to the attention of the organization
through a perception that their career may be
jeopardized:
‘‘I didn’t tell anybody for about ?ve months
. . . there was a reluctance then because
I . . . had an ambition to be a manager, and
I didn’t know when, or if, that was on the
cards, and therefore I didn’t want to tell
them till the last possible minute in case that
a?ected whatever was on the cards’’. (Nicky)
Certainly in my own case, I told no one, despite
the physical and emotional pain endured, when I
su?ered a miscarriage in the early stages of preg-
nancy in the toilets at the o?ce. I left early on that
Friday afternoon and returned on the Monday
morning as if nothing had happened. I felt that if
my superiors and colleagues in the ?rm had known
I was pregnant, particularly at this early stage of
my accounting career, they might have questioned
my commitment, rationality, and ability. Preg-
nancy tends to become public property once
known about, such that the body is no longer
one’s own but becomes publicly accessible, appar-
ently inviting comment or touch. Maureen, for
example, found that the date of her baby’s concep-
tion became a source of gleeful speculation
and comment in the o?ce, which embarrassed
her, as:
‘‘It was as though. . . I’d almost got myself
into a mess . . . Whereas it was something we
wanted.’’ (Maureen)
Alice was annoyed that her private disclosure of
her pregnancy to a colleague became common
knowledge at a time when posts were vulnerable
due to redundancies, which she felt could leave
her in a more susceptible position:
‘‘At the time we didn’t ever let people know
we were pregnant until we were sort of at
least three months in and I’d obviously told
the person who was in charge of my tax
training quite early on and he then went
and told the partner because they’d made
someone from the department redundant,
and I think he did it with the best of inten-
tions to try and change his mind about this
other guy, but it didn’t make any di?erence,
and I was a bit cross with him for doing that
because at the time. . . I know you can’t sack
anyone for being pregnant, but they were
making people redundant, and any reason
to make someone redundant, I said well
‘you do realise what that could do? . . .’ and
he sort of went ‘Oh I’m really sorry I hadn’t
realised the implications’ ’’. (Alice)
For Hannah, her whole identity felt subsumed
by the pregnancy:
‘‘I didn’t enjoy it in the sense that I felt that I
was possessed by something and it wasn’t my
338 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
body and people had a stake in it apart from
me’’. (Hannah)
Thus, pregnancy a?ects a woman’s sense of her
relationship both with her body (Bailey, 1999), and
with her professional, working connections.
Pregnancy may also be characterized as a period
during which matter or the body literally takes over
from the mind, and the phenomenology of the body
becomes the focus of attention (Warren & Brewis,
2004). The very physicality of the situation causes
some women to question the ability of the mind
to focus in the same way on professional matters:
‘‘It was hard to feel like you were doing your
job properly, I suppose, as your mind wasn’t
completely on it’’. (Caroline)
This could, however, be partly due to the way
self-identity is de?ned, and bodies are used,
through exposure to the ways in which other peo-
ple experience those bodies and identities. A mas-
culine gaze deriving from the cultural norms of
accounting may make women more aware of being
a woman during this period, and a?ect the way she
is treated:
‘‘They would not even let me carry my
bags . . .’’ (Anne)
‘‘I felt that occasionally people were having
digs at me if you like, for example when I
went and had a meeting with one of the
female bankers who was also pregnant and
about to go on maternity leave and she
wanted to introduce me to her sort of succes-
sor and someone made the comment ‘Oh yes
you can both go and knit bootees together’ ’’.
(Maureen)
Awareness of the body and its frailties during
pregnancy causes its own worries and emotions.
Many women in the study stated how well they felt
during pregnancy:
‘‘I was very lucky, I had, you know, a fairly
easy pregnancy, I didn’t feel ill at all, I felt
pretty ?ne really the whole way through’’.
(Maureen)
For Lorna, who had conceived after fertility
treatment, the pregnancy was a source of pride:
‘‘I was so proud of my bump and everything
like that, because it had just been such a long
time in coming, it felt to me’’. (Lorna)
However, it was also a source of great anxiety
and even fear due to anticipation of potential
health or developmental problems:
‘‘I was absolutely thrilled to bits, yeah, then I
was thinking well there’s lots of miscarriages
in the ?rst three months, I’m going to lose
the baby, and then once I got past that, there
was going to be something wrong with the
baby and I just had to continually sort of
talk myself out of being negative about it. I
chose not have the blood test to work out
whether there was a Down’s risk and this,
that and the other, because I’d had so much
trouble getting pregnant that I thought, well
I knew, I’m never going to terminate, so
there’s no point having the tests, and I was
quite happy with that decision, until I got
to about seven months and I thought what
if there is something wrong with the baby,
how am I going to cope with that?’’ (Lorna)
Women react in a number of ways to a potential
loss of their fertile identity (Wadsworth & Green,
2003) and many mothers fear the loss of their baby
(Hahn, 2001). In this case Lorna’s situation caused
her to ?nd the process di?cult and to a?ect her
emotional relationship with her pregnant body.
At the intersection of work and pregnancy, the
body impacts more directly on the abilities of
women to cope with all the expectations levelled
at them. These may derive from the ?rm, societal
expectations or their own expectations of profes-
sional ability. They may also derive from a sense
of temporality in terms of the point in time
reached in the women’s careers or where they are
in the organizational hierarchy. When Nicky
found herself unexpectedly pregnant before she
even took up her training contract, the ?rm she
was joining agreed that she could delay her entry
by a year to allow her time to have the child, but:
‘‘. . . they weren’t very keen. . . they thought I
wouldn’t turn up, they thought it would be
very, very di?cult, they made that very
plain’’ (Nicky)
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 339
In contrast, when Katy was pregnant, she was
already quali?ed and a manager in a newly merged
Big 5 ?rm, in which there was some degree of com-
petitiveness between members of the two merged
?rms. Her ability to continue working hard during
her pregnancy and to cope afterwards on returning
to work gave her a degree of credibility amongst
her colleagues:
‘‘One day I was still working at about eight
o’clock, and the partners had come out of a
partners’ meeting, and one of the [Other
Firm] partners said something about some-
body in the audit room still working, I
remember them saying ‘oh such a body is still
here’ and one of our partners as he walked
past said ‘yes, and Katy is too and she’s preg-
nant’ . . . when I went back to work they were
just so almost proud because I was a [Origi-
nal Firm] person going into an [Other Firm]
environment, which was di?cult enough, but
the fact that I’d coped so well, and I’d had no
problems, just gone had the baby and come
back and just slotted right back in. . . in a
way it was almost as if they were like well
she’s a [Original Firm] person, she’s coped,
and you’re a credit to us type of thing’’.
(Katy)
In Melissa’s case, however, the physicality of
the pregnancy literally prevented her from ful?ll-
ing the professional duties she hoped to complete:
‘‘I worked right up until the day, no I was
actually admitted the same day actu-
ally. . . Yes, it was my biggest job and it was
the fourth time I had done it, and I had really
struggled to build up the relationship with
the client . . . and I was determined I was
going to ?nish this bloody job. . . I went in
for my check up and they basically said that
my blood pressure is up and you have got
protein in your urine, you aren’t going any-
where’’. (Melissa)
Some women may feel able, or compelled, to
maintain their professional duties without any
constraint from their burgeoning bodies during
pregnancy, in a style named by Smithson and Sto-
koe (2005, p. 161) as ‘macho maternity’, in which
women maintain their work responsibilities right
up to the moment of labour, and/or during a
short maternity leave. This may, however, put
additional strain on the body’s stamina, which
leaves some women feeling physically inad-
equate:
‘‘I made myself a bit sick worrying about it, I
felt really sick, yeah I spent two days in bed
and, you know, proper sick, you know, I
think it was all stress related’’. (Maureen)
‘‘There was de?nitely a thing in the city that
women should have it all . . . there were cer-
tainly women that were very pregnant and
still at work past their due date, and then
they came back sort of four weeks later,
and anyone who didn’t really want to be like
that . . . I remember I left at six weeks before,
which again some people said ‘Why aren’t
you working right up to your due date?’ Well
in actual fact I was feeling quite tired and I
wanted to go and put my feet up’’. (Alice)
The professional working environment can
itself be physically demanding, tiring and require
copious stamina. Anne was so used to feeling
exhausted from the experience of work that she
did not realise for some time that her symptoms
also mirrored her unexpected pregnancy:
‘‘I was working so hard. . . I’d just come back
from overseas and I was exhausted, I felt a
bit funny, maybe tired, maybe emotional,
that wasn’t unusual, I was quite sick in the
morning, I just didn’t really put two and
two together and then I suddenly started to
realise I’m being sick every morning’’.
(Anne)
For some women pregnancy can be a release
from the rigours of the professional environment.
‘‘You can go into denial and think ‘All right,
I will concentrate on my work and I won’t
have to think about it’ so that you have this
kind of juxtaposition that you can try and
put it out of our mind or alternatively if your
work is really crap one day, you can think
‘Oh I have something else to look forward
to’ ’’. (Hannah)
340 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
It can also act as a release from the constraints
and expectations of working life, bringing another
set of opportunities for identity formation.
‘‘I was pregnant with her and in some ways it
got me out of the tax exams! (Laughs)’’.
(Alice)
Although Alice’s comment here seems fairly
jovial, her pregnancy did o?er some choices, which
culminated in her leaving the profession to pursue
a full-time role as a mother. In a similar way, one
of my pregnancies occurred whilst I was studying
for professional accounting examinations. In a real
mind and body contradiction, this brought addi-
tional di?culties of dealing with physical transfor-
mation and a new form of embodied
comprehension of the life growing inside me,
whilst focusing the mind on requisite accounting
knowledge. I, too, recall contemplating whether
this changing embodiment would a?ect my desire
even to pursue the very thing I was endeavouring
to achieve in my professional life.
Early motherhood
The changing embodiment of women does not
occur simply during pregnancy and end with the
birth of the child, however. There is also a signi?-
cant period of re-adjustment in early motherhood,
when mothers may also be breast-feeding. During
this time women may ?nd it di?cult to mould or
maintain their bodies in the same way that they
have in the past in order to preserve their physical
capital in the working environment. The case of
Deborah illustrates this point.
Deborah was an audit partner in a large
accounting ?rm who had recently had her ?rst
child at the age of 38. She expressed strong loyalty
to the ?rm and its values, which I initially took to
be a standard ‘sales pitch’ from a partner, but later
re?exively revised this reaction to accept that her
strong degree of commitment to a range of people
in her life was part of what was meaningful to her
sense of self. Deborah certainly expressed the view
that has been discussed earlier in this paper that
professional appearance is central to expectations
of the professional accounting context:
‘‘You are expected to dress and present your-
self in a professional manner because you’re
working in a professional environment, so
clearly you can’t come in dressed in some
pair of levis and that sort of thing, there
aren’t any de?nite set down rules in as you
must do this and you must act in this way,
but there is a kind of generally accepted rule
that you do behave in a professional man-
ner’’. (Deborah)
This was belied, however, by Deborah’s own
appearance throughout our meeting, which took
place in the accounting ?rm during a normal
working day. She was wearing a short skirt and
casual t-shirt in a camou?age-type pattern, which
I evaluated as scru?y rather than smart. Given
the cultural norms of the profession already noted
in this paper, and the apparent observance of them
by others in this organization, and despite some
allowance for an increase acceptance of ‘business
casual’ dress within the o?ce, this was not at all
what might be expected from a partner. Moreover,
her reminiscences of being pregnant juxtaposed
sharply with her tired, dishevelled, rather frumpy
appearance during our meeting:
‘‘I absolutely loved being pregnant, I was
never ill at all and my skin seemed to be
glowing and my hair seemed to be too, and
all the things that you’re supposed to bloom
I was very fortunate in all that happened and
that I was never sick, and I had loads of
energy’’. (Deborah)
Deborah found it di?cult to spend time on
‘body work’ (Brewis & Sinclair, 2000; Kerfoot,
1999) owing to other competing issues, particu-
larly the demands of the baby:
‘‘When you’re coming to work and you do
this, it’s not just like you can just jump up,
throw a pair of jeans on and just shower,
you’ve got to do your hair and it just takes
ages with a baby, I just never had imagined
how long it would take’’. (Deborah)
The fact that she was still breast-feeding was
evident, as her breasts looked very swollen under
her tight t-shirt, which did not look terribly
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 341
comfortable. I suspect, given what she had said
about the di?culty of maintaining her appearance
and body image, she had just thrown it on without
thinking, but there may also have been an element
of accentuating her breasts in this new mothering
role, even if unconsciously. Breasts are traditional
symbolic signi?ers of either sexuality or maternity
(Bartlett, 2000), with breast-feeding in modern
Western society characterized as an activity to be
culturally learned, controlled and managed,
rather than as a corporeal, physiological activity
(Bartlett, 2002). For women who are breast-feed-
ing in the working environment it is often di?cult
to undertake, or manage, breast-feeding whilst
retaining any level of decorum or privacy, with-
out the process of lactation becoming public
knowledge, or intruding into the professional
environment.
Deborah’s understanding of her self was based
on her perceived success at work and with mother-
hood, rather than maintaining her body image, but
‘success’ is experienced, in part at least, as the con-
trol of the body and its outward display. The
maintenance of her physical capital was problem-
atic and demanding:
‘‘Before I was a mother I would like to pam-
per myself every now and again, go have a
facial or go have a massage, that type of
thing and it was a nice time for me and it
was kind of a little treat once a month,
because you’ve worked hard and felt like
you deserved it, I haven’t done anything like
that for months and months and months and
months’’. (Deborah)
In addition, her attitude to her weight and body
shape had been in?uenced by the reactions and
cultural norms displayed by others, as well as her
own embodied being in the past. The construction
of bodies is often in line with gendered stereotypes
of grooming, slimness, and dress. Deborah had
been used to presenting herself immaculately,
within the context of and subject to the cultural
norms of accounting, and in the quotes above
appeared to be aware that her presentation of her-
self had ‘slipped’ owing to lack of time and prior-
ity. Deborah’s ‘lack’ and di?erence left her
somewhat disembodied in her professional role,
and clashing with the embodiment of motherhood,
as a result of the application of externally assessed
measures of competence and de?nitions of status
and success.
The role and expectations of and for profes-
sional women in society in the UK may exacerbate
this sense of disembodiment. For whereas several
of the women recalled with a sense of nostalgia
the very embodied presence of their mothers lar-
gely being at home during their own childhoods,
as many women, including my own mother, were
forced to leave work in the 1950s and 1960s when
they became pregnant, they also acknowledged
that in the current socio-economic and cultural cli-
mate it may be regarded as the norm that edu-
cated, professional women should both want to
work and be given the same opportunities as
men to do so:
‘‘I say it’s normal, it feels more normal to be
at work than to be at home all the time’’.
(Judith).
‘‘My mum never worked, you know, she was
always there when I came home from school,
you know, the house was always warm, the
lights were always on, all those sort of
things . . . I think the di?erence now is that
you feel guilty if you don’t go out to work,
and you’re not earning your crust, and
almost that you’re a bit of a layabout’’.
(Maureen)
These expectations in themselves are only possi-
ble because of the high salaries earned by profes-
sional women to pay for extensive childcare.
Other women in less lucrative careers or with fewer
educational opportunities may not have the same
choices available and may have to give up work
or move into lower paid part-time jobs. For some,
such as Lorna who worked part-time after the
birth of her ?rst child, con?icting expectations of
her embodiment as a professional and as a mother
cause a certain level of guilt that she is perpetuat-
ing the situation where women are perceived as the
primary careers of children, and not making the
most of her professional opportunities
‘‘If I’d heard myself saying this ten years ago
I would have shot me, because we chose to
342 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
have the child, it’s an equal relationship, all
of this but . . . I still have the perception,
and I know it’s wrong, that I still think fun-
damentally it’s my responsibility to look
after my child. . .. I still think it’s quite an
amazing thing to create life and that’s quite
phenomenal . . . fundamentally I guess it’s
what we’re here for, you know, we might
be super intelligent and doing all these
things, but all we are here on this earth to
do is reproduce’’. (Lorna)
There is a dichotomy about whether she is
complicit in societal oppression of women’s
opportunities, or whether she is actually exercis-
ing agency and freedom in choosing to live her
life the way she wants to. Moreover, the very
expectations of and choices available to women
may vary in di?erent cultural or international
environments, where the availability of publicly
funded childcare, in, for example, Scandinavia,
means that the expectation of women at all levels
of career status is that they will return to work
after pregnancy. Thus, the embodiment of each
of the women is a product of the national, institu-
tional, social and cultural context in which they
operate.
Re?guring accounting and maternal bodies
Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and
physical capital is helpful in interpreting the
women’s embodied experiences, as discussed in
this paper. While Bourdieu’s social theory has little
speci?c reference to gender, it has relevance in its
theorization of social action as always embodied,
of the social being incorporated into the body, of
the body’s bearing of symbolic value, and of power
as subtly inculcated through the body. Bourdieu
(1984) suggests that any given embodied practice
can only be understood diacritically, that is in its
relation to other practices in the same arena. His
theory of the ‘habitus’, the ‘principles of the gener-
ation and structuring of practices and representa-
tions which can be objectively regulated and
regular’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72) is central to these
points.
In the professional habitus of accounting, the
acquisition and maintenance of physical capital
through particular embodied forms is derived from
the socialization processes of the profession, which
inculcate the norms and values of appearance and
behaviour. These socialization processes in
accounting could be said to be what Bourdieu
(1977, p. 89) refers to as ‘‘the structural apprentice-
ship, which leads to the embodying of the struc-
tures of the world, that is, appropriating by the
world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the
world’’. In other words there is a dialectical rela-
tionship between the body and the context in
which it operates, each informing the other, such
that the rules, hierarchies and metaphysical com-
mitments of professional culture are inscribed on
the body, and the body re?ects this back by acting
‘as a memory. . . entrust[ing] to it, in abbreviated
form, the fundamental principles of the arbitrary
content of the culture’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 94).
Thus, the women accounting professionals in this
paper, including myself, strive to embody what
we perceive, or what we believe others perceive,
to be the archetypical successful, professional
accountant, in terms of dress, behaviour, voice
and presence.
This has implications for identity, as the body
represents a signi?cant component of how the self
is perceived by oneself and others. Identities are
conferred upon subjects through cultural authori-
zation. Bourdieu suggests that embodied identities
may be understood in terms of the operation and
the markers of the habitus, and that identity
groupings and social classes are constructed
though successful bids for cultural and physical
capital, which gives recognition of and authoriza-
tion for a set of behaviours, and hence identity
(Bourdieu, 1977; Lovell, 2004). The body becomes
a site of identity de?nition.
We are also constituted by our bodies into a
gendered identity. Women accountants act within
a system of recognition and authorization as
embodied identities. The image of the desirable,
legitimate body in accounting is gendered, in that
categories and practices operate as material forces
which help to shape and form women’s and men’s
bodies in ways that reinforce particular images of
femininity and masculinity. The body may be an
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 343
essential component of identity, agency and the
self, but the assumed ability to mould it freely in
the accounting context is problematic. The process
of marketization and commodi?cation of the body
in accounting reduces its potential for non-confor-
mity. Certain ways of experiencing or managing
bodies are viewed as alternatively legitimate or
deviant, a?ecting whether bodies are viewed as in
need of control or correction. Thus, we have seen
how myself, Susan and Katy felt estranged from
the norms of professional embodiment by lack
of, or choice of, clothes, voice or presence.
The habitus of the accounting context,
entrenched in embodied, socialized norms, is made
all the more visible by the incongruity of other
forms of embodiment. When women accountants
are pregnant or in early motherhood, they stand
outside the system of legitimation, outside the
accounting habitus, as a di?erent socio-political
category. The two embodied identities and subjec-
tivities of professional accountant and mother
have the potential to clash. Pregnancy can be char-
acterized as an unwelcome intrusion of the fertile
body into the professional environment. The
female body itself has been seen as the ‘other: mys-
terious, unruly, threatening to erupt and challenge
the patriarchal order’ (Davis, 1997, p. 5), through
‘distraction from knowledge, seduction away from
God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or
aggression, failure of will, even death’ (Bordo,
1993, p. 5). Davis (1997, p. 5) suggests that organi-
zations su?er from a ‘distinctively masculine fear
of femininity and a desire to keep the female body
and all the unruliness which it represent(s) at bay’.
The in?uence of Cartesian philosophy and its
assumptions based around the rational mind/irra-
tional body dualism has led Dale (2001, p. 26) to
suggest that: ‘those whose identities are associated
with the body, emotions, nature – for example,
women, the ‘‘lower’’ classes, people from other
racial groups, people with mental or physical
‘‘abnormalities’’ ’ are denied rights as self-deter-
mining individuals. Grosz (1994) also argues that
female sexuality and women’s powers of reproduc-
tion are the de?ning cultural characteristics of
women under patriarchy, making them appear
vulnerable and in need of protection or special
treatment, such that:
‘‘Women’s corporeal speci?city is used to
explain and justify the di?erent (read:
unequal) social positions and cognitive abili-
ties of the two sexes. By implication,
women’s bodies are presumed to be incapa-
ble of men’s achievements, being weaker,
more prone to (hormonal) irregularities,
intrusions, and unpredictabilities’’. (Grosz,
1994, p. 14)
As a result, human reproduction has been deva-
lued compared with the value placed on produc-
tion in the construction of knowledge about
people and organizations.
Fertile, pregnant women are constituted on a
di?erential basis, as mothers, going through a pro-
cess of social realignment in the way that others
perceive them. Pregnancy marks the cultural and
physical undoing of the socialized identity of the
accountant and the gender transformation into
the identity of mother. Women may be subjected
to subtle practices of power questioning their com-
mitment, belonging, and immersion in the
accounting context. These take a number of forms,
as discussed in this paper: lack of ?t with the
embodied identity of accountant (Deborah), deni-
gratory comments (Maureen), lack of privacy and
public discussion about the pregnancy (Maureen,
Alice,) questioning of commitment (Katy, Melissa,
Nicky), and increased awareness of size, shape and
ability to control the body experienced by many
women in the study. These serve to negate the
forms of embodiment which exist outside the
accounting context, and which are not instrumen-
tal within it.
The women themselves also responded to their
changed embodiment in the way they perceived
themselves and re-conceptualised their identities.
Identity is transformed as women rede?ne their
sense of self in the context of the moral and cul-
tural expectations of motherhood and professional
work, often experiencing emotions of guilt, self-
doubt and anxiety, as well as pleasure, in the pro-
cess (Haynes, 2007). Pregnancy and early mother-
hood represent a particular embodied episode in a
woman’s life which acts as a hiatus to her usual
embodied identity. This shift may be temporary,
in the sense that physical changes soon disappear,
344 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
but shifts in self-perception may linger longer. The
interval of pregnancy o?ers the opportunity to re-
evaluate the self and its possibilities. For some
women, the bodily changes serve as physical mark-
ers of the inner emotional changes, which they
expect to undergo after motherhood. The disrup-
tion can also allow a certain freedom or relief from
the social and cultural constraints of professional
life, as seen with Hannah and Alice. For others,
such as Deborah, the challenge of juxtaposing a
new identity as mother with her previous identity
as ‘high-?ying’ professional, and her sense of ‘lack’
in the accounting context, was so profound that
she left her post as audit partner to become a
full-time mother.
How women respond to this process of identity
change will depend on the response of the domi-
nant habitus, which is produced by:
‘‘di?erent modes of generation, that is by con-
ditions of existence which, in imposing di?er-
ent de?nitions of the impossible, the possible,
and the improbable, cause one group to
experience as natural or reasonable, practices
or aspirations which another group ?nds
unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa’’.
(Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78)
In other words, institutional and organizational
structures pass judgements on whether certain
bodies or bodily practices are valid. Given that
organizations themselves have been described as
masculine enterprises (Connell, 1995), it is not sur-
prising that women are subjected to, and subjects
of, this dominant and privileged way of being that
denies other forms of embodied behaviour. The
very conditions of accounting work and their asso-
ciation with masculinity may aggravate and exac-
erbate the potential for self-estrangement and
disembodiment for women, perpetuating social
inequalities, and, for some, causing permanent or
longer lasting disengagement.
Conclusion
As I have argued in this paper, the body is a
problematic and complex phenomenon, which
embodies the subjectivity of its owner. Thus a phe-
nomenological account of lived bodily experience
such as this can be used as empirical data for theo-
rising the body. While the women in this study are
not necessarily representative, their understand-
ings and experiences allow recognition of women
accountants as embodied beings who have their
own corporeal knowledge.
The women in this study found that they
embraced a newly gendered identity during and
after their pregnancies, which could be either
oppressive, liberating, or both, depending on the
context and their response. During pregnancy,
the body rather than the mind becomes the focus
of attention, the body is deemed to be public prop-
erty, and professional embodied norms are chal-
lenged. As well as a?ecting the responses of
others to her professional identity, pregnancy
a?ects the woman’s own sense of her relationship
with her body and her professional self. Bodily
change during pregnancy is both a resource upon
which women can draw in negotiating their social
positioning, as well as a form of social control and
a means by which they may feel reduced to their
biology. As Dale (2001, p. 205) suggests:
‘‘Where the female gender and embodiment
are denigrated, human reproduction can be
seen as the production of the (devalued)
other, not the (valued) replication of the
same. This is the disciplinary process by
which various aspects of life and individuals
are compared to a constructed ‘norm’ ’’.
So how, then, can accounting and maternal
bodies be re?gured within the professional
accounting context? Increasingly, as the profession
expands its currently fairly small proportion of
women members and as the age pro?le of members
lowers (Professional Oversight Board for Accoun-
tancy, 2005), it is likely that more members of the
profession will be women with children. The ways
in which women’s and men’s bodies are perceived,
categorized and valued are undoubtedly important
in legitimizing and reproducing social inequalities
in the profession. Similarly, the way in which the
women in this study sought to di?erentiate their
professional and mothering embodiment high-
lights the body as a source of sameness, but also
of di?erence and inequality, in which gendered
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 345
images and practices themselves can also become
embodied. The body is delineated by and delin-
eates social life, being both cultural and natural.
Forms of embodiment can be seen simultaneously
as a mechanism of social control, and as a form of
self-expression and empowerment, so models of
embodiment based on one type of body, as the
norm by which all others are judged, should be
refused. The body could be used as an opportunity
for resistance to organizational legitimation of
particular forms of gendered norms in a way that
challenges the perpetuation of social inequalities
within accounting, though currently it seems that
the freedom of the body within this context
remains problematic.
Acknowledgements
My grateful thanks go to the women who par-
ticipated so generously in this research project. I
would like to acknowledge the help and support
of the following people in developing earlier drafts
of this work: Anne Fearfull, Jane Frecknall
Hughes, Alan Murray, Steven Toms, Martin
Wood, and participants at the 2005 Critical Per-
spectives on Accounting Conference (New York),
in particular, David Cooper, Caroline Lambert
and Keith Robson. I also extend my thanks to
the two anonymous reviewers for their help in
developing and re?ning this paper.
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The system of the professions. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Anderson-Gough, F., (2002). On becoming the new accounting
expert: Between formal and informal learning, Ph.D. thesis,
University of Leeds, Leeds University Business School.
Leeds.
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (1998a). Making
up accountants: The organisational and professional sociali-
sation of trainee chartered accountants. USA: Ashgate
Publishing Company.
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (1998b). ‘Work
hard, play hard’: An analysis of cliche´ in two accountancy
practices. Organization, 5(4), 565–592.
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2000). In the
name of the client: The service ethic in two professional
service ?rms. Human Relations, 53(9), 1151–1174.
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2001). ‘Tests of
time’: Organisational time reckoning and the making of
accountants in two multi-national accounting ?rms.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 26(2), 99–122.
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2002). Account-
ing professionals and the accounting profession: Linking
conduct and context. Accounting and Business Research,
32(1), 41–56.
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2005). ‘Helping
them to forget’: The organizational embedding of gender
relations in public audit ?rms. Accounting, Organizations
and Society, 30(5), 469–490.
Atkinson, R., & Flint, J. (2001). Accessing hidden and hard-to-
reach populations: Snowball research strategies. Social
Research Update, 33, 1–4.
Bailey, L. (1999). Refracted selves? A study of changes in self-
identity in the transition to motherhood. Sociology, 33(2),
335–352.
Bailey, L. (2000). Bridging home and work in the transition to
motherhood. The European Journal of Women’s Studies,
7(1), 53–70.
Bailey, L. (2001). Gender shows: First-time mothers and
embodied selves. Gender and Society, 15(1), 110–129.
Bartlett, A. (2000). Thinking through breasts: Writing mater-
nity. Feminist Theory, 1(2), 173–188.
Bartlett, A. (2002). Breastfeeding as headwork: Corporeal
feminism and meanings for breastfeeding. Women’s Studies
International Forum, 25(3), 373–382.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture
and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1981). Men and machines in Advances. In
K. Knorr-Cetina & A. Cicourel (Eds.), Social theory and
methodology. London: RKP.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the
judgement of taste. London: Routledge.
Brewis, J. (1999). How does it feel? Women managers, embodi-
ment and changing public sector cultures. In S. Whitehead &
R. Moodley (Eds.), Transforming managers: Gendering
change in the public sector. London: Routledge.
Brewis, J. (2000). ‘When a body meet a body’: Experiencing the
female body at work. In L. McKie & N. Watson (Eds.),
Organizing bodies: Policy, institutions and work. London:
MacMillan.
Brewis, J., & Sinclair, J. (2000). Exploring embodiment:
Women, biology and work. In J. Hassard, R. Holliday, &
H. Willmott (Eds.), Body and organization. London: Sage.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of
identity. London: Routledge.
Carnegie, G. D., & Napier, C. J. (1996). Critical and interpre-
tative histories: Insights into accounting’s present and future
through its past. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability
Journal, 9(3), 7–39.
Co?ey, A. J. (1993). Double entry: The professional and
organizational socialization of graduate accountants, Ph.D.
346 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348
thesis, University Of Wales, School of Administrative
Studies, Cardi?.
Co?ey, A. J. (1994). ‘Timing is everything’; graduate accoun-
tants, time and organisational commitment. Sociology,
28(4), 943–956.
Collins, M., & Bloom, R. (1991). The role of oral history in
accounting. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Jour-
nal, 4(4), 23–31.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Oxford: Polity Press.
Cooper, C., & Taylor, P. (2000). From Taylorism to
Ms. Taylor: The transformation of the accounting craft.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 25(6), 555–578.
Dale, K. (2001). Anatomising embodiment and organisation
theory. New York: Palgrave.
Davis, K. (1997). Embody-ing theory: Beyond modernist and
postmodernist readings of the body. In K. Davis (Ed.),
Embodied practices: Feminist perspectives on the body.
London: Sage.
Featherstone, M. (1991). The body in consumer culture. In
M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, & B. Turner (Eds.), The
body: Social process and cultural theory. London: Sage.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the
prison. London: Allen Lane.
Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality: An introduction.
London: Penguin.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self identity. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Grey, C. (1998). On being a professional in a Big 6 ?rm.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 23(5/6), 569–
587.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hahn, C. S. (2001). Psychosocial well-being of parents and their
children born after assisted reproduction. Journal of Paedi-
atric Psychology, 26(8), 525–538.
Halford, S., Savage, M., & Witz, A. (1997). Gender, careers and
organisations: Current developments in banking, nursing and
local government. London: Macmillan.
Hammond, T. (2002). A white-collar profession: African Amer-
ican certi?ed public accountants since 1921. North Carolina:
University Press.
Hammond, T., & Sikka, P. (1996). Radicalising accounting
history: The potential of oral history. Accounting, Auditing
and Accountability Journal, 9(3), 79–97.
Hanlon, G. (1998). Professionalism as enterprise: Service class
politics and the rede?nition of professionalism. Sociology,
32(1), 43–63.
Haynes, K. (2005)., (Sm)othering the self: An analysis of
the politics of identity of women accountants in the UK, Ph.D.
thesis, University of St. Andrews, School of Management.
Haynes, K. (2006a). Linking narrative and identity construc-
tion: Using autobiography in accounting research. Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, 17(4), 399–418.
Haynes, K. (2006b). A therapeutic journey?: Re?ections on the
impact of research on researcher and participant. Qualita-
tive Research in Organizations and Management, 1(3),
204–221.
Haynes, K. (2007). Transforming identities: Accounting pro-
fessionals and the transition to motherhood. Critical Per-
spectives on Accounting, in press, doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2006.
10.003.
Hockey, J., & James, A. (2003). Social identities across the life
course. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Irigaray, L. (1991). The Irigaray reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Johnson, T. (1972). Professions and power. London: Macmillan.
Jones, S. (1985). The analysis of depth interviews. In R. Walker
(Ed.), Applied qualitative research. Aldershot: Gower.
Kerfoot, D. (1999). Body work: Estrangement, disembodiment
and the organisational ‘other’. In J. Hassard, R. Holliday, &
H. Willmott (Eds.), Body and organization. London: Sage.
Kim, S. N. (2004). Imperialism without empire: Silence in
contemporary accounting research on race/ethnicity. Criti-
cal Perspectives on Accounting, 15(1), 95–133.
Kirkham, L. (1992). Integrating herstory and history in
accountancy. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(3/
4), 287–297.
Kirkham, L., & Loft, A. (1993). Gender and the construction of
the professional accountant. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 18(6), 507–558.
Kirkup, G., Janes, L., Woodward, K., & Hovenden, F.
(Eds.). (2000). The gendered cyborg: A reader. London:
Routledge.
Kyriacou, O., (2000). Gender, ethnicity and professional mem-
bership: The case of the UK accounting profession, Ph.D.
thesis, University of East London, London.
Lehman, C. (1992). Herstoryinaccounting: The ?rst eightyyears.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(3–4), 261–285.
Loft, A. (1992). Accountancy and the gendered division of
labour: A review essay. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 17(3/4), 367–378.
Lovell, T. (2004). Bourdieu, class and gender: ‘the return of the
living dead’. In L. Adkins & B. Skeggs (Eds.), Feminism
after bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell.
May, T. (1997). Social research: Issues, methods and processes.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Maynard, M. (1994). Methods, practice and epistemology. In
M. Maynard & J. Purvis (Eds.), Researching women’s lives
from a feminist perspective. London: Taylor and Francis.
McNicholas, P., Humphries, M., & Gallhofer, S. (2004).
Maintaining the empire: Maori women’s experiences in the
accounting profession. Critical Perspectives on Accounting,
15(1), 57–93.
Mumford, M. (1991). Chartered accountants as business
managers: An oral history perspective. Accounting, Business
and Financial History, 1(2), 123–140.
Orbach, S. (1998). Fat is a feminist issue. London: Arrow.
Parker, L. (1994). Impressions of a scholarly gentleman:
Professor Louis Goldberg. Accounting, Auditing and
Accountability Journal, 21(2), 1–40.
Professional Oversight Board for Accountancy (2005). Key
facts and trends in the accountancy profession. London:
Financial Reporting Council, pp. 1–48.
Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist methods in social research. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348 347
Roberts, H. (Ed.). (1990). Doing feminist research. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Roberts, J., & Coutts, J. A. (1992). Feminization and profes-
sionalization: A review of an emerging literature on the
development of accounting in the United Kingdom.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(3/4), 379–
395.
Shilling, C. (1993). The body and social theory. London: Sage.
Sikka, P., Wilmott, H., & Lowe, E. (1989). Guardians of
knowledge and the public interest: Evidence and issues of
accountability in the UK accountancy profession. Account-
ing, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 2(2).
Smithson, J., & Stokoe, E. (2005). Discourses of work-life
balance: Negotiating ‘genderblind’ terms in organizations.
Gender, Work and Organization, 12(2), 147–168.
Stanley, L. (1992). The auto/biographical I. Manchester: Man-
chester University Press.
Stanley, L., & Wise, S. (1993). Breaking out again: Feminist
ontology and epistemology. London: Routledge.
Thompson, P. (1988). The voice of the past: Oral history.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Turner, B. (1991). Recent developments in the theory of the
body. In M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, & B. Turner
(Eds.), The body: Social process and cultural theory. London:
Sage.
Turner, B. (1996). Body and society. London: Sage.
Vansina, J. (1985). Oral tradition as history. Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Wadsworth, G., & Green, E. (2003). Changing women: An
analysis of di?erence and diversity in women’s accounts of
their experiences of menopause. In S. Earle & G. Letherby
(Eds.), Gender, identity and reproduction. New York:
Macmillan.
Walkerdine, V. (1997). Daddy’s girl: Young girls and popular
culture. London: Macmillan.
Warren, S., & Brewis, J. (2004). Matter over mind? Examining
the experience of pregnancy. Sociology, 38(2), 219–236.
Westcott, S. H., & Seiler, R. E. (1986). Women in the accounting
profession. New York: Marcus Weiner.
Wilkins, R. (1993). Taking it personally: A note on emotion
and autobiography. Sociology, 27(1), 93–100.
Williams, A. (1993). Diversity and agreement in feminist
ethnography. Sociology, 27(4), 575–589.
Wolf, N. (1991). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are
used against women. London: Vintage.
Yow, V. R. (1994). Recording oral history. London: Sage.
348 K. Haynes / Accounting, Organizations and Society 33 (2008) 328–348

doc_592153727.pdf