South Africa’s transition from apartheid: The role of professional closure in the experien

Description
As apartheid gave way to political freedom in South Africa in the last quarter of the 20th
century, chartered accounting firms began to hire black South African trainees for the first
time. The study examines the oral histories of black chartered accountants within the context
of social closure theory and South Africa’s changing political and ideological landscape.
The evidence indicates that processes of professional closure and credentialing excluded
the majority population from the ranks of the profession on basis of race and class throughout
the period 1976–2000.

South Africa’s transition from apartheid: The role of professional closure
in the experiences of black chartered accountants
Theresa Hammond
a,
*
, Bruce M. Clayton
b
, Patricia J. Arnold
c
a
Department of Accounting, College of Business, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA
b
School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia
c
Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
As apartheid gave way to political freedom in South Africa in the last quarter of the 20th
century, chartered accounting ?rms began to hire black South African trainees for the ?rst
time. The study examines the oral histories of black chartered accountants within the con-
text of social closure theory and South Africa’s changing political and ideological landscape.
The evidence indicates that processes of professional closure and credentialing excluded
the majority population from the ranks of the profession on basis of race and class through-
out the period 1976–2000.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘‘We fear . . .the loss of our superiority and the loss of
our whiteness... And, our lives will shrink, but they will
be the lives of superior beings.” (Paton, 1948, pp. 110–
111)
Introduction
By the turn of the millennium, only about 1% of char-
tered accountants in South Africa were from the black
majority of the population. In examining this severe un-
der-representation, this paper analyzes the structures of
closure based on race, and the dynamism in these struc-
tures over time as the political and social context in South
Africa changed dramatically with the dismantling of apart-
heid. Following Annisette (2003) and Sian (2006, 2007a,
2007b), we study the process of closure in a country in
which the majority of the population – rather than the
more commonly marginalized minority (e.g. Gallhofer,
Haslam, Kim, & Mariu, 1999; Hammond, 2002; Kim,
2004; McNicholas, Humphries, & Gallhofer, 2004) – was
virtually excluded from the accounting industry until
major political upheavals made continued exclusion
unsustainable.
In examining the demography of the South African
chartered accounting industry, we consider several ques-
tions. What were the processes, not simply the products,
of closure in the apartheid era (Anderson-Gough, Grey, &
Robson, 2005; Chua & Poullaos, 1993; Chua & Poullaos,
1998; Uche, 2002)? Why did race remain a salient feature
of professional closure within the South African accoun-
tancy industry after the 1994 transition to majority rule?
And, most importantly, how does the South African experi-
ence contribute to our understanding of the relationships
between racial ideologies, economic class, and the pro-
cesses of professional closure and credentialing?
To address these questions, this study draws from
archival sources and the oral histories of 38 of the ?rst
220 black South Africans who quali?ed as chartered
accountants during the period 1976 – when Wiseman
Nkuhlu became the ?rst black South African chartered
accountant – to the end of the century. This period roughly
coincides with the transition from apartheid – beginning in
1976 with the Soweto uprising and ending in 2000, six
years after Nelson Mandela was elected President in South
Africa’s ?rst free elections. The study analyzes black char-
tered accountants’ ?rst-hand accounts of their experiences
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.09.002
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 415 338 6283; fax: +1 415 338 0596.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T. Hammond), bruce.clayton@
deakin.edu.au (B.M. Clayton), [email protected] (P.J. Arnold).
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
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within an historical and theoretical context. The theoreti-
cal framework is provided by Murphy’s (1984, 1988) in-
sights into the relationship between various modes of
social closure, including the relationship between social
closure based on race and/or class, and professional closure
based on education and credentials.
Our ?ndings indicate that, paralleling Murphy (1984,
1988), several modes of closure were at work which com-
bined to effectively exclude indigenous black South Afri-
cans from full participation in the chartered accounting
industry. During our period of study, the number of black
chartered accountants in South Africa increased from one
person in 1976 to 220 people by the year 2000 – a mere
1% of all chartered accountants in South Africa, despite
the fact that black South Africans constituted approxi-
mately 75% of the population. Notwithstanding the busi-
ness sector’s professed support for economic reforms and
the token creation of a black middle and professional class
after the Soweto revolt in 1976, the processes of profes-
sional closure served as such an impermeable barrier to
black advancement that by 1987 there were only 11 black
chartered accountants in all of South Africa (Van Greuning,
1987). In the early 1990s, with the freeing of Nelson Man-
dela, the unbanning of the African National Congress, and
the country’s ?rst free elections, accounting ?rms in-
creased their efforts to hire black trainees. Nonetheless,
the experiences of black African trainees during this period
belie the appearance of inclusion. Our research indicates
that the process of professional closure merged with sys-
temic inequities and bigotry to limit opportunities for
aspiring black chartered accountants after the end of apart-
heid and the transition to majority rule in South Africa.
The ?ndings of this study support those of other studies
in the accounting literature that document practices of clo-
sure and exclusion from the accounting profession on the
basis of race, class, ethnicity and gender (e.g. Grey, 1998;
Hammond, 1997, 2002; Hammond & Streeter, 1994; Kirk-
ham & Loft, 1993; Lehman, 1992; McKeen & Richardson,
1998; Miranti, 1988, 1990; Poullaos, 2007; Ramirez,
2001; Richardson, 1988; Walker & Shackleton, 1998). More
speci?cally, it contributes to a growing body of research
(e.g. Annisette, 2000, 2003; Sian, 2006, 2007a; 2007b; Wal-
lace, 1992) that is beginning to examine how racial ideol-
ogies in?uence the processes of professional closure
within post-colonial settings. Like Annisette’s (2003) study
of the racial legacy of British imperialism in the accoun-
tancy industry in Trinidad & Tobago, this study indicates
that in certain post-colonial settings, the British dominated
accounting industry discriminates against majority popula-
tions on the basis of ‘‘race” and that inequities persist after
disenfranchised groups have won political freedom and
citizenship.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section pre-
sents a theoretical framework for understanding the rela-
tionship between racial ideologies, social class, and
professional credentials. The following section describes
our methodology. After the description of methodology,
the empirical sections of the paper show how both the for-
mal structure of apartheid and the informal processes of
professional closure based on language and other ‘‘cultural
competencies” (Murphy, 1984, 1988) served to exclude
black South Africans from the ranks of the accounting pro-
fession. The persistent role of social closure based on class
in the post-apartheid era and its in?uence on black char-
tered accountants is then analyzed. The ?nal section dis-
cusses the conclusions and implications of the study.
The structure of social closure
Social closure theory originated with Max Weber as an
attempt to develop a general framework for understand-
ing all forms of exclusion within society. Codes of social
closure are, thus, de?ned broadly as the formal and infor-
mal rules governing the practice of monopoly and exclu-
sion on any basis, whether it be race, ethnicity, gender,
religion, citizenship, property, education or other creden-
tials such as professional licensing. Conventional wisdom
and some interpreters of Weber hold that the historical
development of capitalism has been accompanied by a
progressive transition from modes of social closure based
on collectivist criterion (such as cast, family lineage, race,
ethnicity, and gender) to closure based on individualist
criterion (such as education and credentials). Moreover,
while collectivist criteria of exclusion are ascribed, indi-
vidualist criteria are often viewed as achieved; therefore,
exclusion based on individualist criteria is deemed more
acceptable or morally superior. Murphy’s (1984, 1988)
writings on the structure of closure challenges the notion
that modern capitalist societies are meritocratic in the
sense that social closure is based on merit and achieve-
ment, rather than ascribed traits. To the contrary, accord-
ing to Murphy’s reading of Weber and neo-Weberian
theorists (Collins, 1979; Parkins, 1979) analyses of the
processes of social closure can demystify the notion of
meritocracy and ‘‘lead us to be wary of hasty assumptions
of moral progress” when interpreting historical transi-
tions from ‘‘aristocratic domination or ethnic and racial
strati?cation to bourgeois individualistic liberal domina-
tion based on property in the market and credentials”
(Murphy, 1988, p. 167).
Drawing from Murphy’s (1984, 1988) work, it is possi-
ble to identify four shortcomings in the view that the his-
toric trend away from ascribed criteria of exclusion (race,
caste, ethnicity, etc.) and toward individualist achievement
(education and credentials) constitutes a progressive
development. First, as Murphy (1988, p. 180) observes,
individualist criteria (education and credentials) have not
necessarily superseded collectivist criteria; from a ‘‘world
systems perspective” the collectivist criterion of citizenship
remains a major, if not the main, basis of exclusion from
economic opportunity. Second, the notion that individual
achievement is a morally superior basis for selection and
exclusion is itself a historically contingent social construc-
tion, rooted in the Protestant ethic, rather than a universal
legitimizing rationale for inequity. Third, education and
credentials are ‘‘sources of status culture” (akin to Bour-
dieu and Passeron’s (1973) concept of cultural capital)
which, ‘‘like race and ethnicity, often have little relation-
ship to job performance” (Murphy, 1988, p. 162). In this
sense, credentials are more a re?ection of cultural back-
ground than ability or achievement.
706 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
Finally, capitalism itself is an exclusionary practice: the
appearance of free competition in the marketplace belies
the monopoly on economic power held by the owners of
capital/property. In capitalist societies, Murphy (1984,
1988) contends that ownership of capital/property often
constitutes the principal form of exclusion, while other
forms of social closure (such as education and credentials)
are ‘‘derived from” or ‘‘contingent upon” the primary form
of social closure. Thus, even when collectivist criteria for
exclusion (such as apartheid laws based on race) are for-
mally eliminated, they continue to operate indirectly be-
cause the ‘‘advantages of whites are maintained . . .
through their accumulated ?nancial and cultural resources
resulting from their head start in the individual competi-
tion of the market and the educational system” (Murphy,
1988, p. 190).
Murphy’s (1984, 1988) unique contribution to social
closure theory is the idea that codes of social closure exist
in a structured relationship to one another. Whereas We-
ber (1978) and some neo-Weberian (e.g. Parkins, 1979)
theorists see both education and property as more or less
equal determinants of high social class and privilege, Mur-
phy maintains that there is a hierarchy within types of so-
cial closure. In most capitalist societies, property
constitutes the principal form of closure while credentials,
including educational and professional licensing require-
ments, are either derived from or contingent upon the
principal mode of closure. For example, property rights in
capitalist societies give employers (such as the major
accounting ?rms) the right to specify job quali?cation
requirements; this right is then used to impose additional
rules of exclusion (beyond necessary technical skills), such
as attendance at elite schools, possession of the appropri-
ate social manners, or other ‘‘cultural and linguistic com-
petencies.” Murphy argues that closure based on
credentials (including professional licensing) is, thus, de-
rived in the ?rst instance from the closure based on prop-
erty. While derivative forms of exclusion may have a legal
basis, as in the case with apartheid laws, much of the social
strati?cation in contemporary capitalist societies is,
according to Murphy (1988, pp. 71–72), based upon the
‘‘differential historical accumulation of private property. . .
[A]nd upon the resulting monopolization of opportunities
in the market through the formation of networks, alliances,
and the imposition of the owners’ language and cultural
assumptions concerning competence for positions and
career.”
Unlike other social closure theorists who have ne-
glected the relationship between different rules of closure
(such as the relationship between social closure based on
race and/or class, and professional closure based on cre-
dentials), Murphy (1988, pp. 70–77) proposes a methodol-
ogy that rests on an analysis of how modes of social closure
are structured within the particular society under study. In
the case of South Africa under apartheid, he postulates that
a ‘‘dual or paired structure of exclusion” existed in which
society was organized around two ‘‘complementary”, prin-
cipal forms of closure: race and property. Extrapolating
from his methodology, we can further postulate that after
the abolition of apartheid, a ‘‘tandem” structure of exclu-
sion, characteristic of other capitalist societies, emerged
in which property alone remained as the principal mode
of exclusion. In both cases, professional credentialing was
a second-order mode of closure that was derived from or
contingent upon the principal mode or modes.
The extent to which closure based on professional cre-
dentials is derived from closure based on property is evi-
denced by the obvious similarity in the ethnicity,
educational and class background, tastes, language and
cultural competencies that are found between chartered
accountants and their clients. As Johnson (1972) and Ann-
isette (2003) observe, the accountancy profession is more
dependent on clients’ patronage than are many other pro-
fessions (such as educators or physicians), and this depen-
dence on corporate patronage increases the likelihood that
accounting ?rms will recruit individuals who share to
some extent the social background and characteristics of
the propertied corporate class. As we shall see in the oral
histories, both during and post-apartheid, in addition to
overt racism, the major accounting ?rms and their clients
enacted codes of exclusion based upon cultural and lin-
guistic competencies, including ‘‘vocabulary and in?ection,
aesthetic tastes, sets of values and manners, materials for
conversation, sociability, athletics, and shared activities”
(Murphy, 1988, p. 162) that posed barriers to black train-
ees’ success in completing the apprenticeship require-
ments for certi?cation as chartered accountants. In many
cases the requisite knowledge and cultural competencies
(such as the ability to converse about cricket) needed to
‘‘compete in the market for credentials” were unrelated
to the technical requirements of the work, but rather were
derived from the ‘‘status culture” of white elites who held
the monopoly on economic power in South Africa.
Methodology: race and the South African accounting
industry
Annisette (2003, pp. 643–646) examines the salience of
‘‘race”, while simultaneously demonstrating that race is a
social construct. As elsewhere, in South Africa, ‘‘race”
may be a biological ?ction, but it is a ?ction that underlay
the very structure of society: apartheid laws de?ned peo-
ple on the basis of race, and opportunities for everything
from living conditions to health care to jobs and burials
were based on racial classi?cation. We recognize the dan-
ger that a focus on race poses: it can perpetuate, reify, and
lend legitimacy to an arti?cial construct (Annisette 2003).
Nevertheless, because of the entrenchment of race in the
structure of South African society – during the apartheid
period’s peak, 60% of the country’s laws were related to
race (Pruitt, 2002, p. 554) – no study of South Africa would
be possible without an examination of the regime’s racial
classi?cations. Given its history, South Africa offers the
most clear-cut example of the salience of race and of its
prominence in social structure available (Bonilla-Silva,
1996, 1999; La Guerre, 1993, p. 13, cited in Annisette,
2003, p. 644).
Like Trinidad & Tobago and Kenya, the majority of the
South African population consists of people of color. How-
ever, as Chua and Poullaos (2002) note, despite the fact
that the majority of South Africans were indigenous blacks,
the profession there functioned more like a settler colony
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 707
than a colonized country. While whites constituted a small
minority of the population, they formed their own associ-
ation of chartered accountants well before the colonized
lands of, for example, Kenya, Nigeria, and Trinidad & Toba-
go (Annisette, 2000; Sian, 2006, 2007a, 2007b; Uche,
2002). In this sense, despite the fact that South Africa
was more like Kenya, Nigeria and Trinidad & Tobago in
the fact that settlers were the minority of the population,
the structure of the South African accounting industry
was more akin to that of Australia or Canada than it was
to other African countries (Chua & Poullaos, 2002).
Moreover, South Africa provides a very different case
than Trinidad & Tobago, Kenya, and Nigeria, because, de-
spite apparent parallels between South Africa’s 1994 tran-
sition to majority rule and the other countries’
achievement of independence, unlike in the other coun-
tries, in South Africa white dominance of the accounting
industry persisted after transition. As Chua and Poullaos
(2002) underscore, white South Africans were and are
South Africans, not British (or Dutch) subjects. (South Afri-
ca left the British Commonwealth and became a Republic
in 1961.) While, as in Kenya (Sian, 2007a), many white
accountants left South Africa after the transition, in con-
trast to Kenya, the governance structure of the profession
did not change after majority rule was instituted. While
the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants has
had black presidents since 1998, the structure of the orga-
nization remains essentially unchanged and the industry
remained ?rmly in the hands of white chartered accoun-
tants throughout the period of study.
1
In contrast to Sian (2006, 2007a, 2007b) and Annisette
(2000, 2003), we focus on the experience of only one –
the largest – group of South Africans: black South Africans.
South Africa is a multi-racial society, with a population
that is approximately 75% black, 13% white, 9% mixed race
(Coloured), and 3% Asian (mostly Indian) (Department of
Statistics, 1976). In contrast, Annisette (2003) examines
the experiences of both East Indian– and African–Trinida-
dians (who, combined, constituted 80% of the population)
simultaneously, and Sian’s studies of Kenya (2006, 2007a,
2007b) examine the differences in experiences among
Europeans (less than half of 1% of the population), Africans
(98%), and Indians (less than 2%) (Population census,
1969).
In both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa,
‘‘black” is often used to mean all ‘‘non-white” South Afri-
cans. In order to avoid eliding the differences in experi-
ences among people of color, and to recognize that
closure worked most viciously against black South African
advancement, this study uses ‘‘black” only to refer to the
group of people most oppressed by the apartheid regime:
‘‘black” (indigenous, native or African) South Africans.
While Coloured and Indian South Africans were brutally
marginalized by the apartheid regime (Cell, 1982, pp.
253–256; Coombes, 2003, pp. 116–148; Marx, 1998, pp.
191–216; O’Malley, 2007), there are several reasons that
we focus on black South Africans rather than on the all
the major ethnic groups in South Africa. First, black South
Africans constituted the vast majority – 75% – of the pop-
ulation throughout the period under study. Second, despite
that majority, black South Africans had the smallest repre-
sentation of any group in the chartered accounting indus-
try. For example, even in the transitional decade of the
1990s, whites (13% of the population) constituted 88% of
new members of the South African Institute of Chartered
Accountants (SAICA); Asians (3% of the population) consti-
tuted 7% of new members, and blacks (75% of the popula-
tion) constituted only 3% of new members (see Table 1).
Third, the con?ation of all marginalized groups into one
can lead to insuf?cient attention to separable, identi?able
axes along which closure is enacted – in this case, the dra-
matic under-representation of black South Africans (see
also Hammond, 2002, pp. 140–141).
2
The differences
among various groups of color in South Africa are illustrated
by the following quote about Vassi Naidoo, an Indian South
African who, in 1983, became the ?rst partner of color at
Deloitte. Despite the fact that Naidoo faced many barriers
to professional progress because he was Indian, in re?ecting
on that time from the vantage point of 2004, a white partner
reports:
I found Vassi’s input. . .quite amazing actually, because
he was saying that Indians should be excluded from
the target groups for black advancement. He felt that
they were already relatively privileged. Of course a lot
of whites were saying that was bullsh
*
t: ‘keep them in
there,’ they clamoured – mainly because they counted
as ‘black,’ adapted easier to the environment and were
easier to retain (Schneider & Westoll, 2004, p. 65).
While the described discussion took place in the early
1980s, its implications are borne out by the numbers in Ta-
ble 1. As Naidoo recognized, when people of color began to
be admitted, Asian South Africans were the largest group of
non-white new members of SAICA. Indian education was
better ?nanced,
3
Indians were likely to speak English at
home, and Indians’ economic status was, on average, much
higher than that of blacks (see also Schneider & Westoll,
2004, p. 52). Despite the fact that black South Africans had
25 times the population as Asian South Africans, new en-
trants to the industry in the last decades of the 20th century
were more than twice as likely to be Asian as black. As apart-
heid waned, the ?rms and the industry’s professional journal
often preferred to use the term ‘‘black” to include all persons
1
Other factors distinguish South Africa from the objects of previous
studies. The industry in South Africa is much larger than in many other
studies, with 13,000–20,000 Chartered Accountants in the country during
the period under study. While the changes accompanying the United States
civil rights movement also occurred in a large profession – there were
approximately 100,000 CPAs in the country (Hammond, 2002), both in
1960s Kenya and 1980s Trinidad & Tobago, there were only a few hundred
members of the relevant accounting industry associations (Annisette, 2003,
pp. 652–657; Sian, 2007b).
2
Conversely, differential treatment of blacks, Coloureds, and Indians in
South Africa in the apartheid era was often designed by powerful whites to
fragment the opposition. Led by Steven Biko, in 1969, the Black Conscious-
ness movement promoted uniting all groups of color opposing apartheid
and advocated the cross-ethnicity use of the term ‘‘black” to denote all
groups of color in order to ?ght this fragmentation and express solidarity
(Marx, 1998, p. 201).
3
In the early 1980s, for example, primary school teacher-student ratios
were 1:18 for whites, 1:24 for Asians, 1:27 for Coloureds, and 1:39 for the
black South African majority (Byrnes, 1996).
708 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
of color, which had the effect of cloaking the abysmal num-
bers of black CAs – the group that was most impacted by
professional closure.
To identify the black South African CAs we targeted, we
sent requests for interviews to SAICA, which forwarded our
request to all black chartered accountants for whom it had
addresses. The recipients were asked to contact the
researchers directly. The 38 interviews, which represent
approximately seventeen percent of those black South
Africans who quali?ed as chartered accountants by the
year 2000, were conducted in 2000 and 2002 in Johannes-
burg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, Mafekeng, and Wind-
hoek. See Table 2 for some demographic characteristics
of the interviewees.
4
Our use of oral history has several methodological
advantages: it enables researchers to view events from
the perspective of marginalized people whose voices are
typically silenced, to look beyond the ?rms’ rhetoric of
inclusion and examine the lived experiences of black South
African accounting trainees, and to expand our under-
standing of the dynamics of closure through their ?rst-per-
son accounts (Hammond & Sikka, 1996; McKeen &
Richardson, 1998; Sian, 2006).
In addition to the oral histories, we interviewed leaders
(both black and white) in the South African Institute of
Chartered Accountants (SAICA), white accounting profes-
sors and others involved in the education of black CAs,
and participants in the 2004 and 2005 annual meetings
of the Association of Black Accountants in Southern Africa
(ABASA). We examined histories of the accounting profes-
sion in South Africa, including Experiences in Transforma-
tion, an interview-based history of changing
demographics at Big-Four ?rm Deloitte (Schneider & Wes-
toll, 2004) and reviewed issues of SAICA’s main profes-
sional journal, contemporaneous news reports, and other
written records.
Through these sources, we, like Anderson-Gough et al.
(2005, p. 470), examine the ‘‘micro-organizational pro-
cesses that structure” closure. Paralleling their work study-
ing gender in the UK accounting industry, we show that
‘‘race” is not something that exists separately from occupa-
tions but is also constructed through relationships at work
and through treatment of trainee auditors. Those we inter-
viewed faced barriers imposed by the apartheid govern-
ment, their universities, the ?rms – including those that
refused to hire blacks, the clients of the ?rms – including
multi-national corporations, and the professional body.
Several of the most salient axes along which this closure
was operationalized are analyzed next.
Apartheid: the legal color bar
Apartheid has deep roots in South African history.
5
As
Callinicos (1988, p. 10) notes, exploitation of indigenous
Africans has been a feature of South African history since
the ?rst Dutch settlers (later to be known as Afrikaners)
established a settlement on the Cape in 1652. Racial discrim-
ination, however, did not take a modern capitalist form until
after the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886,
after which British capital ?owed into South Africa. The
introduction of British imperialism and capitalist relations
of production, in turn, transformed the indigenous popula-
tion into a black proletariat; thereafter, class as well as race
became a primary mode of social closure. Africans were
forced off their lands and onto ‘‘reserves” by the 1913 Native
Land Act, where, deprived of other means of economic sub-
sistence, they provided a source of cheap labor for the mines
and domestic services. Color bars were established to ensure
white workers a monopoly over skilled mining jobs, and the
pass system was created to control the movement of black
labor long before the apartheid system was formally consol-
idated in 1948 (Magubane, 1990).
‘‘Homelands”
After the victory of the (Afrikaner) Nationalist Party in
1948, the state began to implement the policy of apartheid,
which consolidated and extended the separation of the
country along racial lines. The Population Registration
Act of 1950 created the racial categories that would serve
as the basis for dividing the population by race. The Bantu
Education Act of 1953 and its companion, the Reservation
of Separate Amenities Act, legally forced segregation in
education and public facilities (Marx, 1998, p. 105). Most
importantly, an elaborate series of laws created and en-
forced a migrant labor system by legally restricting the
vast majority – 75% – of the population, de?ned as ‘‘black”,
to 13% of the country’s land – mostly rural, undesirable
land (the ‘‘Homelands” or Bantustans), and extending the
pass laws to rigidly control and restrict the movement of
Africans in ‘‘white” urban areas.
Murphy identi?es race and class as the two primary
axes along which closure was enacted under apartheid
South Africa’s ‘‘dual structure” of social closure. He also
notes the importance of citizenship in exclusion from
Table 1
New admits to the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants by
decade
a
White (%) Asian (%) Coloured (%) Black (%) Other (%)
1930s 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
1940s 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
1950s 99.9 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1
1960s 99.6 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.1
1970s 97.7 1.9 0.2 0.0 0.1
1980s 94.1 4.4 0.8 0.4 0.2
1990s 88.3 6.9 1.7 2.9 0.2
Population 13 3 9 75 –
Source: SAICA data emailed from SAICA to Bruce Clayton.
a
This is of known race – some are unknown, though few in recent
decades (e.g. in 1990s, less than 2% were of unknown race).
4
The interviewers were both white professors: one a male South African
(and current Australian citizen) and the other a female citizen of the United
States. The authors believe that the following quote re?ects a sentiment
common among our interviewees: ‘‘The main thing that made me
participate in this is purely for the bene?t of trying to ?nd a solution of
the current problem, getting more [black] people into the profession” (CT).
5
This description of the political economy under apartheid draws
primarily from work of Alex Callinicos, including Callinicos and Rogers
(1977), Callinicos (1988, 1992, 1993).
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 709
occupations. The Nationalist Party developed a unique ap-
proach to exclusion on the basis of race by denying citizen-
ship to black South Africans. Thereafter, the policy of
‘‘separate development” served as the ideological rational-
ization for apartheid. ‘‘separate development” contended
that black South Africans occupied their own self-govern-
ing ‘‘Homelands” – based not only on ‘‘race” but further di-
vided by ethnic group, such as Zulu and Xhosa. The ?rst
‘‘Homeland” (the Transkei, a Xhosa ‘‘Homeland”) was
granted so-called independence in 1976, providing the jus-
ti?cation for denying black South Africans political and so-
cial rights as citizens of South Africa. But ‘‘separate
development” was a ?ction
6
: most black South African
workers lived and were employed within the boundaries
of South Africa, where they were treated as ‘‘guest workers”,
who – in the words of the Deputy Minister of Bantu Admin-
istration and Development – had ‘‘no rights whatsoever in
South Africa. Their rights are in their own Homelands, and
they are in South Africa only to sell their labour” (Desmond,
1971, p. 27).
Apartheid law mandated that persons of color not re-
garded as essential to the South African labor market must
be removed and resettled in the Homelands. A 1967 lawde-
?ned such non-essential persons as Africans who could not
provide labor, including mothers of young children, the el-
derly, the disabled and ‘‘[p]rofessional Bantu such as doctors,
attorneys, agents, traders, industrialists, etc.” (Desmond,
1971, p. 37, emphasis added). This is consistent with
Murphy’s identi?cation of race as a primary mode of clo-
sure in South Africa: in addition to those who were poorest,
the small numbers of well-educated blacks were speci?-
cally targeted for deportation to the Homelands. Thus,
unlike in other countries in which class constituted the sole
primary mode of closure, being of a relatively higher socio-
economic status made no difference in the constrictions
placed on the lives of blacks in South Africa under apart-
heid. In fact, while working-class blacks were employed
in major South African industries, and lived – often in bar-
racks-like conditions – in townships near the major South
African cities, blacks with professional aspirations were
explicitly targeted as unwelcome in South Africa.
The apartheid system was one of the most effective clo-
sure apparatuses in history. The black population was sub-
ordinated to the position of low-paid, unskilled workers.
The policy of separate development, restrictions on the
movement of blacks within urban areas, language differ-
ences, segregated and unequal education and other sys-
temic inequities merged with the ruling racial ideologies
to prevent the development of either a black middle class
or a black bourgeoisie. The same factors stymied the
growth of a black professional class in the urban areas of
South Africa, while the impoverished economies of the
‘‘Homelands” were unable to sustain development of a
black business and professional class.
In 1976 South African police attacks on the Soweto
uprising brought increased condemnation – both internal
and international – of South Africa’s policies. P.W. Botha’s
administration (1978–1989) vacillated between cracking
down more ?rmly and introducing ameliorative ‘‘reforms”
designed to calm criticism, preferably through adjustments
that did not undermine the apartheid system. Among oth-
ers, the reforms included the legalization of black unions,
the establishment of limited political rights for the ‘‘Col-
oured” and Indian populations, and the extension of lim-
ited land holding rights to residents of the black
townships. These actions were not designed to dismantle
apartheid, but rather to lessen opposition to white rule
by extending limited concessions to the segments of the
disenfranchised majority in order to fragment the opposi-
tion and rationalize the apartheid system.
This system of exclusion in housing and education had a
direct impact on all of the black chartered accountants
whom we interviewed. The ?rst black CA in South Africa,
Wiseman Nkuhlu, earned his credential at just about the
time of the Soweto uprising in 1976. He was educated at
the University of Fort Hare, the university designated for
Xhosa-speaking persons. Somewhat ironically, he was able
to obtain a position in an accounting ?rm because of the
Homeland Policy. He knew it was ‘‘useless” to try to ?nd
a position at one of the mainstream ?rms in South Africa
in 1972. He reports:
I went out to do articles arranged by the department [at
the University of Fort Hare] in East London with Hook,
Wiehan and Cross. They were an Afrikaans ?rm and
Table 2
Demographic characteristics of interviewees
Period in which CA was earned Location of articles/training
Johannesburg Umtata Other South African cities Outside South Africa
1976–1993 6 3 2 0
1994–2000 11 2 12 2
University granting Certi?cate in the Theory of Accounting (CTA)
Transkei ‘‘Coloured” or Indian Universities UNISA
a
distance learning Historically white universities
1976–1993 0 0 7 4
1994–2000 3 4 10 10
Country of origin Gender
South Africa Other Men Women
1976–1993 10 1 11 0
1994–2000 21 6 20 7
a
University of South Africa.
6
See also Lelyveld, 1985, pp. 17–19.
710 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
the main reason, of course, they were interested in me
was that it was part of the apartheid separate develop-
ment set up.. .. There was a major development organi-
zation in the Eastern Cape, Xhosa Development
Corporation [XDC] and the XDC controlled a number
of businesses including garages, wholesalers, manufac-
turing and so on, and they were required, by govern-
ment, to actually employ blacks in those companies.
In order to preserve the ?ction of separate and indepen-
dently operating Homelands carved out of South Africa, a
very few professional positions were available to black
South Africans in the Homelands, and Nkuhlu was able to
earn his CA because of those restrictions. He became a
magnet for aspiring black CAs and Umtata, the largest city
in the Transkei Homeland (though a small town compared
with Johannesburg, Cape Town, or Durban), attracted a sig-
ni?cant segment of the earliest black CAs
7
(Anonymous,
2002b; Jennings, 1994, pp. 17–19; Nkuhlu, 2000; Van Greu-
ning, 1987, p. 177).
In addition to the unique conditions it created in Umta-
ta, the more pervasive effect of the Homeland policy on our
interviewees was the recurrent theme of the absence of
parents during childhood. Much of the black majority of
the South African population was displaced during the
childhood years of our interviewees. The government
seemed to endlessly displace various groups as it re?ned
its policies of segregation (Desmond, 1971). In the 1970s,
OH’s
8
experience of being moved and separated from his
father was not unusual:
My father was a farm laborer. . . My school was inter-
rupted because I couldn’t speak Zulu; I’m a Sotho. . .
[W]e had to come back to the Orange Free State –
because of the problems of language – to the. . . Home-
land for Sotho-speaking blacks under the old apartheid
government policies. . . Then [because he could ?nd no
work in the Homeland, my father] had to migrate to
come to Joburg to look for work. . .[the family stayed]
in the Homeland. We only saw him once, maybe twice
a year.
While blacks in South Africa could hold positions in the
pseudo-independent Homeland governments, skilled posi-
tions in South Africa’s government were impossible to ob-
tain under apartheid. In contrast to South Africa, East
Indian– and African–Trinidadians (Annisette, 2003) held
positions of leadership in the government before they were
admitted in any signi?cant numbers to the accountancy
industry. In Kenya, the earliest Indian quali?ed accoun-
tants often worked in government positions (Sian,
2007b). This was similar to the situation for the United
States in the 1940s and 1950s, when many of the best-edu-
cated African–Americans worked in government, including
the post of?ce (Hammond, 2002). In the South African case,
these positions, and even more menial ones, were legally
restricted to whites. In an example of the microprocesses
of the explicit and primary mode of closure based on race,
OH was stymied when he attempted to make a career in
the South African post of?ce.
Then if you had a JC [junior certi?cate – a tenth grade
education
9
], they would give you a job, and I was sorting
letters. [In the 1980s] I couldn’t get promotion – remem-
ber it was in those dif?cult times – promotion for blacks
was almost impossible. . . They wouldn’t promote me
because that would mean I would have white people
reporting to me which just didn’t happen. I asked: they
said this was the reason.
He continued to ?nd that apartheid policies controlled his
opportunities as he later tried to become a CA. OH found
that he could not get articles ‘‘because it was still dif?cult,
especially in the Orange Free State,” a mostly Afrikaans-
speaking province that was especially strong in its pro-
apartheid stance. He then tried to get a position in another
province, but, due to the apartheid Group Areas Act, he
could not move without government approval, which he
could not obtain. Due to another apartheid structure, ‘‘In-
?ux Control,” Soweto, the black township near Johannes-
burg, was off limits to him.
You can’t even go to Soweto because I don’t have Sec-
tion 10A [a pass with permission to live there], which
would have allowed me to stay in Soweto. I’ll be illegal
there; so it was a catch-22 situation. You can’t [get arti-
cles] in the Free State but if you come to Johannesburg,
there was the Group Areas Act and In?ux Control.
[When he interviewed with two accounting ?rms,] they
said they would like to give me articles, but ‘You tell us
where you’re going to sleep.’
10
Those black South Africans who were Xhosa were slightly
better off than OH, because the Xhosa Homeland of Trans-
kei was the only one with a large enough city, Umtata, and
a large enough (apartheid government) business structure
to provide clientele for public accounting ?rms. In the
1980s, Umtata had a disproportionate number of black
CAs and black auditing trainees (Anonymous, 2002b; Jen-
nings, 1994, pp. 17–19; Nkuhlu, 2000; Van Greuning,
1987, p. 177). Even those who worked in Umtata, though,
noticed that opportunities were circumscribed. In the
Umtata of?ce of a large accounting ?rm in the early
1980s, SZ reported:
When there’s a good client. . . it wouldn’t be given to us,
in Umtata. It would be given to the East London of?ce
[which was virtually all-white] to do. . . even if the cli-
ent was in [the Homeland]. . . The few white companies
that we had in the Transkei were mainly audited by the
7
In 1990, for example, the population of Umtata was approximately
100,000 whereas the major ?nancial centers of Johannesburg (including
Soweto), Durban, and Cape Town each comprised over 2 million residents.
8
In order to preserve con?dentiality, we use ?ctitious initials for most of
our interviewees.
9
This was an exceptional accomplishment under the Bantu Education
system. See SAIRR., 1983.
10
In 1986 South Africa ended the pass laws but the laws (including the
1991 Abolition of Racially Based Land Measure Act) provided no enforce-
ment mechanisms and landlords continued to discriminate against black
tenants without fear of penalty (Royston, 1998, pp. 1–3).
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 711
East London Of?ce, you see. . . But most of the clients
that we had [in the Homeland] were blacks.
Within Umtata, aspiring black CAs’ opportunities were se-
verely limited, but outside of this one city, they were virtu-
ally non existent. Unlike in the US, where the earliest black
CPAs served African–American clients in the few black
business centers such as Chicago, New York, and Atlanta
(Hammond, 2002), under apartheid, black South Africans
were legally prohibited from owning businesses large en-
ough to require the services of a chartered accountant. It
was extremely dif?cult for blacks to get a license to sell
merchandise, and even when the license was granted, the
merchandise could not be ‘‘luxury goods” – which included
items most would consider staples, like clothing. In the
townships, the black majority was only allowed to sell
items that the government identi?ed as necessary to sus-
tain the black ‘‘migrant” workers who lived in dormitories
in the townships while their families lived in the Home-
lands. Black accountants could not open of?ces in any city
in South Africa (see van Rooyen, quoted in Schneider &
Westoll, 2004, p. 153). Into the 1980s black lawyers who
tried to work in the central business districts of South Afri-
ca’s major cities were prosecuted and expelled from the
areas near the courts – exactly where their clients needed
them.
Education
Apartheid policies of exclusion in education and resi-
dence structured the lives of those from the majority-black
population who wanted to become CAs, thus cutting them
off from obtaining ostensibly meritocratic credentials.
South Africa’s chartered accountancy quali?cation require-
ments include some unique characteristics, but are rooted
in the British model, which was spread throughout the
British colonies in the nineteenth century (see Chua &
Poullaos, 2002). Entrance requirements consist of the typ-
ical three criteria for admission to the profession: (1) an
education requirement, (2) an experience requirement
and (3) a requirement to pass a board examination.
11
Fol-
lowing the British model of professional self-regulation,
these quali?cation standards are set by industry associa-
tions
12
that are independent of government, ensuring that
the accountancy industry maintains control over entry to
the professional workforce.
Aspirants to chartered accountant status in South Africa
are required to study accounting for three years at the uni-
versity level to earn a bachelor’s degree, and must then
take a fourth year to obtain a Certi?cate in the Theory of
Accountancy (CTA). This fourth year culminates in an
examination covering four or ?ve topics; if all topics are
not passed, the entire year must be repeated. Whereas
educational credentials pose as merit-based hurdles (Mur-
phy, 1984, 1988, 1991), in the South African context differ-
ential access to education based on race and class de?ned
opportunities in the ?rst instance. South Africa’s educa-
tional system created a formidable barrier to entry for
black chartered accountants under apartheid; and, after
the transition to majority rule, systemic economic inequi-
ties continued to limit educational opportunities for black
South Africans.
Black universities (now known as historically disadvan-
taged universities) located in the Homelands were not
authorized to offer the CTA quali?cation because SAICA
did not deem them ?t for accreditation. As Murphy
(1984, 1988) theorizes, this legacy, which continued into
the post-apartheid era, is derived fromeconomic inequities
that limit educational opportunities in the ?rst instance. As
apartheid waned, educational quali?cations retained their
legitimacy as reasons for exclusion of blacks from the
accounting profession, despite the oppressive conditions
that led to starkly unequal educational backgrounds be-
tween whites and blacks. (In the early 1980s, per-capita
expenditure on white education was ten times that spent
on black education [Byrnes, 1996].) In the last quarter of
the twentieth century, the only black university that of-
fered the CTA was the University of the Transkei, which
SAICA accredited in the mid-1990s for only a few years be-
fore the accreditation was revoked. The University of the
Western Cape (a ‘‘Coloured” university), and the University
of Durban–Westville (an Indian university) did offer the
CTA. Under apartheid, these universities provided black
South Africans with one route to educational quali?cation
because black South Africans faced lower barriers to
attending ‘‘Coloured” and Indian universities than white
universities (Probert & Munro, 1995).
13
However, to earn
their CTAs a plurality of our interviewees attended the Uni-
versity of South Africa (UNISA), a distance-learning program
that admitted black students (though they were often pro-
scribed from attending meetings and graduation ceremo-
nies) but which consisted mainly of independent study
and whose Board exam pass rate was about one-third of that
of the full-time programs (Anonymous, 2002a).
Moreover, South African universities played a major
role in the closure processes of the professions. One of
the ways in which the South African accounting industry
re?ected similarity to a settler colony rather than a colo-
nized country (Chua & Poullaos, 2002) is that the major lo-
cal universities were reserved for whites.
14
In contrast, the
majority of students at the University of the West Indies
were of East Indian or African descent (Annisette, 2000). De-
spite this major difference, white domination of the profes-
sion succeeded in both countries: Annisette (2000, p. 655)
found that the Trinidad & Tobago profession ‘‘marginalized
the indigenous University” and acquiesced in British domi-
nation of educational credentialing – most members of the
accounting industry there were educated in Britain. In South
Africa, the leading universities dominated preparation for
and job paths to the major accounting ?rms. SAICA provided
11
These requirements vary somewhat over the time period covered in
this paper, but this outline is applicable to those we interviewed.
12
Quali?cation standards are set centrally by SAICA, and the examination
is administered by the Public Accountants and Auditors Board.
13
This large black South African population at the formerly ‘‘Coloured”
and Indian universities persisted post-1994. See footnote 19.
14
The few (especially in relation to the population) black universities
were poorly funded and did not offer the required education to become
chartered accountants. Of?cial university segregation ended in 1984, but
the effects persist (Marx, 1998, p. 111).
712 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
stipends to the top (white) universities to supplement fac-
ulty salaries and provide other resources. This hierarchy of
institutions was more similar to pre-civil-rights conditions
in the United States, where southern white universities both
dominated the professions and excluded black students
(Hammond, 2002), who were marginalized into black insti-
tutions that typically lacked resources to provide enough
courses to qualify for CPA candidacy. However, African–
Americans with suf?cient resources were able to attend
northern majority-white schools; in South Africa there was
no region of the country where black students were wel-
come at majority-white institutions. Moreover, black stu-
dents couldn’t choose from among the handful of black
universities: each person had to attend the university that
was designated for his or her ethnic group (Byrnes, 1996).
Speaking of his experiences in the late 1970s, SI reports:
I wanted to come to the University of the North [a black
university designated for a different language group].
But at that time if you were a Zulu you had to go to
the University of Zululand, a Xhosa had to go to the Uni-
versity of Fort Hare, etc... I got an acceptance from [the
black university designated for my language group]
even though I had not applied to them!
Compounding the problems of narrow university opportu-
nities, our interviewees often faced antagonism during
their university educations. Many were threatened with –
or received – expulsion or suspension for participation in
anti-apartheid political activities such as the student walk
outs that became increasingly common in the 1980s. The
antagonism was heightened by the demographics of the
faculty. Because of the severe limitations imposed by Ban-
tu education, few blacks in South Africa had the credentials
to teach, and white accounting professionals often taught
the university courses on a part-time basis. Our research
revealed several instances of unpleasantness between pro-
fessors and students at the black universities. In 2004, the
white partner who had served as Deloitte’s chair of the
black, Indian and Coloured committee in the late 1970s de-
scribes this dichotomy between professor and student as
having been ‘‘nothing out of the ordinary”:
Of course, there were incidents that today make us
cringe – yet when they took place, they were nothing
out of the ordinary. They certainly illustrated the mind-
set and climate of the time. Like one of the [accounting]
lecturers at the University of North who told us quite
blatantly that he thoroughly enjoyed his work at the
University because he had a farm nearby, and whenever
he was short of labour, he would collect a bakkie [truck]
load of students for the day! (John Mowat, quoted in
Schneider & Westoll, 2004, pp. 20–21).
Educational credentialing, therefore, was far from
equally available across races despite its central role in jus-
tifying the high status of the profession (Murphy, 1984,
1988). Until de jure higher-level educational segregation
ended with the crumbling of apartheid, apart from attend-
ing a ‘‘Coloured” or Indian university, the only alternative
to distance learning was to receive a special exemp-
tion from the Minister of Bantu Education to attend a
white university.
15
These were dif?cult to obtain, but two
of those we interviewed – including Wiseman Nkuhlu, the
?rst black CA in South Africa who attended the University
of Cape Town – earned their CTAs this way.
The eventual abolition of segregated education based
on race did not result in equality in educational opportu-
nity because class-based economic barriers to black educa-
tional advancement persisted. Even after apartheid, our
interviewees reported that economic need often forced
black CA candidates to study part-time while working, of-
ten through distance-learning programs (UNISA) that iso-
lated them from the social connections, networks, and
sources of cultural capital available to white colleagues
who more typically graduated as full-time students at ma-
jor universities (Anonymous, 2002c, 2002d. Also see Potter,
1978, p. 8; Van Greuning, 1987, p. 179). This was another
lasting consequence of the economic impact of the racial
delineation in South Africa, and carried over as a form of
closure in the profession after apartheid had legally disap-
peared (Murphy, 1984, 1988).
Professional closure: the informal color bar
Professional credentialing, like education, is in Mur-
phy’s (1984, 1988) view a secondary form of closure that
is derived from primary modes of social closure based, in
the South African case, on property ownership (class) and
race. Whereas professional credentials are often viewed
as evidence of achievement and technical competency,
Murphy shows that rather than rewarding individual
achievement and accomplishment, the process of profes-
sional credentialing often privileges those who possess
the linguistic and cultural competencies preferred by eco-
nomic elites. This theory is borne out in the South African
case where language and other cultural competencies
unrelated to technical competency or ability played a sig-
ni?cant role in professional closure and exclusion.
Language
In the South African accounting industry, closure histor-
ically meant not only that people of color were excluded,
but that only white, male, Christian South Africans of Brit-
ish descent and the correct family background were wel-
comed into the ?rms. As Table 3 indicates, while the
majority (60%) of whites in South Africa are Afrikaners
(Afrikaans speakers of Dutch or German descent), the vast
majority of chartered accountants have been English
speakers of British extraction. The domination by those of
British descent has its origins in the British imperial con-
quest of South Africa in the 19th century. The Society of
the Incorporated Accountants and Auditors of England
established a branch in South Africa in the late 1800s.
16
15
Under these exemptions, which were sometimes granted when black
universities did not provide the desired program, in 1982 only 1.5% of
students at the University of Cape Town – a relatively liberal school with
regard to admissions – were black (Mabokela, 1997).
16
See also Van Rensburg, p. 6.
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 713
After the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, legisla-
tion was passed in 1927 giving the professional societies in
South Africa’s four provinces a monopoly over the use of the
designation ‘‘chartered accountant” (Noyce, 1954). In the
early years there were virtually no Afrikaners in the indus-
try, re?ecting the structure of economic power within South
African society at a time when Afrikaners were engaged pri-
marily in agriculture, while English speakers constituted the
business class. Britain remained South Africa’s largest trad-
ing partner until 1980, when the United States assumed that
role (Parker, 1983, p. 270). Similarly, Annisette (2003, p.
651) found that ‘‘n Trinidad’s colony society, accountancy
was always associated with whiteness or more accurately
‘Britishness.’”
With plenty of immigrants from the United Kingdom
working in the South African accounting ?rms, through
the 1960s – and sometimes much later – the largest ?rms
not only did not hire blacks, Coloureds, or Indians, they
also refused to hire Jews, women, or Afrikaners (Schneider
& Westoll, 2004, pp. 6, 10, 21, 32–33, 59, 137).
17
In the
1950s, the Afrikaner universities and their students were
considered substandard by those in the profession (Schnei-
der & Westoll, 2004, p. 10). Even white men of British des-
cent had dif?culty if they did not have the ‘‘right”
credentials (many of which had nothing to do with account-
ing knowledge) – and the family wealth to support them-
selves while working for little or no pay. Tim Store, a
white partner who joined Deloitte in 1960, reported:
n 1960 in Johannesburg. . .I was the only clerk [of ?ve]
who did not have a private school background – and the
only reason I was accepted was because my father had
been educated at a private school and had done his arti-
cles at Deloitte. In fact, about ?ve years before I joined,
paying articled clerks was not even a remote consider-
ation – quite the opposite – you paid them to take
you in and teach you! (Quoted in Schneider and Wes-
toll, p. 33.)
The combination of exclusiveness in hiring practices and
the absence of remuneration needed by those without
family wealth provided successful – and rarely contested
– closure in the accounting industry through most of its
history. The legacy of British imperialism was re?ected in
the fact that the profession’s qualifying examination was
offered only in English until the 1950s; thereafter, CA can-
didates were given the option of taking the exam in Afri-
kaans. Afrikaners, however, expressed concern that
examination papers were translated by personnel who
had little or no knowledge of Afrikaans terminology and
that inaccurate translations put Afrikaner candidates at a
disadvantage (PAAB, 2001).
18
The black South Africans interviewed for this study did
not speak English in their family homes, and many felt the
effects of closure based on the ostensible ‘‘cultural compe-
tency” of language. The hegemony of English – and in some
regions Afrikaans – did not re?ect the composition of the
country, where the largest ?rst languages are Zulu, with
24% of the population, and Xhosa, with 18%, followed by
Afrikaans (13%) and English (8%). Just as Afrikaners had
protested through the 1960s that their examinations were
not fairly graded, the black CAs we interviewed often noted
that the dominance of non-native languages left them at a
disadvantage, particular because the CA exam, especially
the Audit portion, depended heavily on essays. However,
it was not until after majority rule was instituted that a
group of black South Africans felt empowered to voice
their concerns. SZ and some black colleagues failed the
Board Exam in the late 1990s. They went to SAICA to dis-
cuss the issue
So we came around with the other guys who had failed
and we all went to SAICA and said we don’t understand
this. Why are the blacks failing?. . . We were strongly
believing that we were just being failed because we
were black. . . We went to the same university [as our
white colleagues]; we passed our CTA together; but
why now when we get to the Board, and now there
starts to be a difference. . . f you read a sentence you
can pick up, this one is not an English-speaking person.
You know, how he constructs the sentence. Those kinds
of things, the writing, were the things that we are say-
ing to SAICA.
While at home most black South Africans spoke one (or
more) of the nine African languages that now constitute,
combined with English and Afrikaans, the 11 of?cial lan-
guages in South Africa, throughout the anti-apartheid per-
iod there was a strong preference among the populace for
education in English over Afrikaans. The Soweto uprising,
which began with a student strike, was a result of the Afri-
kaner government’s 1974 ‘‘Afrikaans Medium Decree” that
black students be educated in both Afrikaans and English.
Because the Afrikaner-led government instituted apart-
heid’s most dramatic features, such as the Homelands
and segregated education acts, Afrikaans was strongly
associated with apartheid, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu
gave voice to popular opinion when he called it ‘‘the
Table 3
English vs. Afrikaners admitted to SAICA by decade
a
English
(%)
Afrikaner
(%)
1940s 99 1
1950s 94 6
1960s 92 8
1970s 90 10
1980s 86 14
1990s 83 17
Approximate percentage of white
population
40 60
Source: Email from SAICA to Bruce Clayton.
a
These numbers include only white members of SAICA (e-mail from
SAICA to Bruce Clayton, February 2007).
17
Of course, the exclusion of Jews and women in this era was not limited
to South Africa.
18
After the ?rst Afrikaans-speaking Chairman of the Public Accountants’
and Auditors’ Board (PAAB), was appointed in 1973, he assumed the
responsibility of personally translating and marking all exam papers until
Afrikaans speakers were eventually added to the panels that wrote and
marked the examinations (PAAB, 2001).
714 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
language of the oppressor.”
19
White students, in contrast,
were educated in either English or Afrikaans, based on their
family backgrounds. Language was used intentionally a
political weapon, and when SI arrived at a black university
in the late 1970s, the language of instruction was supposed
to have been English. However, he was surprised to ?nd:
This guy started lecturing in Afrikaans and I sat there for
45 minutes and did not understand a word. There were
these two who would only lecture in Afrikaans.
In this case and cases like these, the black prospective CA
had virtually no recourse to complain about the professor’s
tactics. High failure rates and expulsion were not uncom-
mon. Therefore, the student would get the English text-
book and attempt to learn the material on his or her own.
Language was also a tool of exclusion in work life. While
some black trainees were ?uent in both English and Afri-
kaans, most were not. On the other hand, except in a few
areas, such as Pretoria, the government capital, the pri-
mary language used by whites in business was English. Be-
cause he knew that his colleagues were ?uent in English,
NT interpreted their use of Afrikaans as a sign of hostility.
In the early 1990s in a ?rm in Johannesburg, he reports:
the general atmosphere was hostile. . . You would ?nd
that there are four of us in the job, I am the only black
guy, there are these three white guys. For example, I
don’t speak Afrikaans, they would just speak Afrikaans
the whole day. You can’t say deliberately or not but
you were just excluded from what was happening
around you. . . And now you can imagine if you are in
that sort of assignment for three weeks, that is like
three miserable weeks of your life.
Closure based on language permeated the apartheid and
post-apartheid eras under study. The white power struc-
ture of South African society is also re?ected in the fact
that the main professional journal, Accountancy SA, pub-
lished in English and Afrikaans only. This con?ict was re-
?ected in a letter to the editor of Accountancy SA and the
response, in 1994, a few months after the ?rst national
elections. The writer, an Indian South African, complained
that Accountancy SA was ‘‘totally ignor[ing]” the nine indig-
enous languages and publishing in only English and Afri-
kaans. He or she suggested that the journal appear only
in English, and that the continued practice of including
only Afrikaans as a second language ‘‘will offend a large
number of its members as well as entrench its image as
an executive white organisation.” The Editor’s reply states
that a large number of members requested Afrikaans, and
that the journal was simply meeting members’ needs, be-
cause ‘‘[t]here is no other large group of members who
speak another language’ (Letters to the Editor, 1994). ”
20
These examples indicate how ostensibly functional pro-
fessional quali?cations, such as language competencies,
are rooted in the ?rst instance in the structure of economic
power. The editor at Accountancy SA describes ‘‘meeting
members’ needs” as a benign concept, ignoring the history
that led to the domination of the profession by English-
and, to a lesser extent, Afrikaans-speaking whites. While
some professional quali?cations are undoubtedly essential
to competently conducting the required work, it is easy to
overestimate the functionality of professional quali?ca-
tions given that the thrust of professional ideology is to
portray professional quali?cations as necessary. Moreover,
as Murphy (1988, pp. 182–183) notes, skills are functional
in a relative rather than absolute sense; what is functional
in any given social milieu depends on the ‘‘overall societal
context and its power structure.” In the South African con-
text, for example, the requirement that chartered accoun-
tants speak ?uent English (or Afrikaans if serving
Afrikaans-speaking clients) may be functional in a relative
sense, but on a deeper level it merely mirrors the economic
power structure.
Cultural competencies
Language is one form of ostensible ‘‘cultural compe-
tency” identi?ed by Murphy (1984, 1988), but there are
many others. The accounting literature has shown that
professional closure is not achieved by formal entrance
requirements alone; it also involves subtle forms of exclu-
sion and inclusion based on culture, identity, and boundary
formation. In an analysis of chartered accountants in the
UK, Power (1991) examined the forces that create a sense
of ‘‘community” within the audit industry, and describes
the role of examinations and education as cultivating a
shared experience of hardship that creates a sense of com-
munity and superiority to others, rather than a technical
prerequisite for job performance. Dirsmith and Covaleski
(1985) and Grey (1998), likewise, ?nd that acceptance
and advancement within accounting ?rms is more a mat-
ter of ‘‘?tting in” than of acquiring professional knowledge
or expertise, and that exclusion based on ‘‘?t” is often
rationalized by client attitudes (Grey, 1998). These ?ndings
echo Murphy’s (1988, p. 163) thesis that exclusion and
monopoly based on credentials often masks exclusion
based on ascribed characteristics (such as race or ethnicity)
since credentials depend upon social position within ‘‘sta-
tus cultures” which facilitates access to information and
the formation of alliances and social networks needed for
professional advancement, rather than ability or mastery
of technical skills.
While the shared experience of CTA and board exami-
nation may have reinforced white practitioners’ sense of
community and superiority as Power (1991) suggests, ra-
cial ideologies de?ned the boundaries of professional iden-
tity and community formation. Even when black South
Africans successfully negotiated educational and examina-
19
After majority rule was instituted in 1994, the formerly English
universities enrolled many more black South Africans than did the formerly
Afrikaans universities. For example, the universities of Cape Town, Rhodes,
and Witwatersrand all had a little over 20% black South African enrolment
in 1995, whereas the universities of the Free State and Pretoria had about
10%, and Stellenbosch had only 2% black South African enrolment. The
formerly ‘‘Coloured” and Indian universities of the Western Cape and
Durban–Westville had nearly 50% black South African enrolment (and 3 or
less percent white enrolment) (Probert & Munro, 1995).
20
In 2007, Accountancy SA continued to publish primarily in English,
with some articles translated to Afrikaans.
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 715
tion hurdles, they were excluded from the professional fra-
ternity. All of the interviewees described social barriers in
the workplace; these barriers were intense, and many
blacks felt that their white colleagues considered them
completely out-of-place and unwelcome on the job. HN de-
scribed the personal duality he felt in trying to participate
in the ?rm’s social life:
You go to a business party and say, ‘‘oh, gosh, it’s prob-
ably nine o’clock now, and if I was in the township life
could have been very much better.” Now I’m hanging
around here, speaking English. . . and smil[ing] unneces-
sarily to these rugby and cricket jokes. . . The rules of the
game have been set by the people dominating the busi-
ness, so then you have to play according to them other-
wise they might say, ‘You cannot get promoted: you’re
not ?uent in English.’ I mean they cannot even pro-
nounce my name, telling me I’m not ?uent in English.
HN recognized who held the upper hand in de?ning ‘‘cul-
tural competencies.” Some of the experiences our intervie-
wees related revealed explicit comments on the part of
whites indicating that they did not believe that black peo-
ple belonged in the chartered accountancy industry. Cer-
tain occupations were openly considered more suitable
for blacks. Several black CAs noted that their professors,
colleagues, or supervisors explicitly told them that
accounting was not a suitable profession for black people,
and that they should consider more traditional ?elds in-
stead. But the tools of closure are not always so evident.
Professional closure based on socially-embedded pro-
cesses of identity, community formation, and linguistic
and cultural competencies are less visible and more dif?-
cult to transform than formal entrance hurdles, and are
often implicated in exclusion on the basis of race, class,
and gender (Annisette, 2003; Hammond, 1997, 2002;
Hammond & Streeter, 1994; Kirkham & Loft, 1993;
Lehman, 1992; McKeen & Richardson, 1998). As McKeen
and Richardson (1998, p. 501) found when examining the
participation of women in the industry in Canada, screen-
ing criteria may be differentially accessible to men and
women – often the exclusion of women was not openly
speci?ed because it was already woven into the social fab-
ric and thus remained effective in excluding women (see
also Annisette, 2003). These covert closure rules (which
derive from the cultural norms of the white elites who
monopolized economic power in South Africa) ?gured
prominently in the dynamics of exclusion experienced by
black chartered accountants interviewed for this study,
and persisted after, in the 1990s, the industry began to
espouse rhetoric of inclusion.
In the early 1990s, OH was grateful to ?nally ?nd a ?rm
in which he could earn his CA. Despite this, he did not be-
lieve that the ?rm provided equal opportunities at work,
explicitly because he was black:
I used to get all the trash. I knew where we were coming
from and I think I was given an opportunity, and I said,
‘I’m not going to complain.’ [When asked if the white
managers didn’t think OH could do the job, he replied]
I think they knew I could. . . because of my studies. . . I
did pass my [CTA]; while other clerks, white clerks,
couldn’t pass. And even when I did the job, they gave
me good feedback So they knew that I could do it, but
I think the dif?culty was that it was before 1994, people
were still thinking – oh I think even now they still do –
that blacks shouldn’t – not only that they can’t but also
they shouldn’t – be doing better jobs.
As a trickle of black South Africans began to be hired, we
found that the few black trainees who had attended private
schools or been educated outside of South Africa (often be-
cause their families were exiled due to political activism)
were more likely to be accepted by the white professionals
in their of?ces. MK, for example, who immigrated to South
Africa from another African country, noted that ‘‘the whites
are more accepting of blacks who are not from here.” GL,
who had also grown up outside of South Africa and at-
tended an English-style private school, believed that the
?rms preferred blacks from other countries, especially
those with education backgrounds similar to his. While,
post-apartheid, the ?rms were under pressure to hire black
South Africans, they seemed to prefer to hire those most
likely to assimilate into the dominant culture. NL had the
rare opportunity of attending an exclusive private high
school, and had attended university on a scholarship from
a multi-national corporation. While not from a well-off
family, his education had provided him with some access
to the cultural capital (Murphy, 1984, 1988) the ?rms val-
ued. Nevertheless:
We’re not getting jobs; we’re not getting assigned. . . . If
you get assigned, you go and work with other white
clerks. You get into the audit of?ce and you would be
given work and the senior will just give you the job:
‘‘OK, you do this,” and that’s it. The next time you talk
to the senior is when he is reviewing your work. And
with a white clerk [the supervisor says], ‘‘Hey, how
are you? What were you doing over the weekend?”
you know. ‘‘I was doing this and that.” ‘‘And your stud-
ies, who is your lecturer? What are you doing in Tax?” It
was this type of social interaction which we black clerks
never had. . . We just sat in the one side and they never
really interacted with us at a social level.
MZ’s experience illustrates many of the conditions faced by
black CAs. Though South African, he grew up in exile out-
side of South Africa and went to an elite private school
Both of his parents had some college education, which
was quite unusual. In a major ?rm in the late 1990s, he be-
lieved that he was treated better than most of his black col-
leagues. Nevertheless:
[T]he advantage that the white articled clerks got was
that they could easily relate to the ?nancial manager
and director and get along with them and actually
speak about cricket, that kind of stuff – you know,
rugby. What they called the ‘‘soft skills” – what they
called ‘‘client relations.” They give them the edge and
I think that’s what made audit managers prefer them
over the black article clerk trainees. And even though
their skills required no more supervision, they were left
out.
716 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
As a private-school educated and favored black member of
a big ?rm, MZ used his relatively strong relationship with
white management to promote the increased use of black
clerks. He helped develop a cultural exchange program
among the various groups in the of?ce. He also accepted
the status quo more easily than did many of his black col-
leagues. When he talked to them, he took the position that
‘‘Corporate South Africa is very much a white culture, so
you need to try and learn to ?t into that.” He was surprised
to ?nd that some of the ‘‘more political” blacks – in this
post-apartheid era – said, ‘‘that’s nonsense, we must trans-
form the South African corporate culture rather than ?t in.”
Despite the intentions of these new entrants, during the
period under study, we found that ?rm culture continued
to be shaped by the white leadership that had dominated
the accountancy industry in South Africa and by the eco-
nomic elites who constituted their client base.
Professional closure as a derivative of race and class
Class inequities that were created under apartheid con-
tinued in post-apartheid South Africa. Systemic inequities
in education, housing, and economic opportunities (i.e.
institutionalized racism) persisted, making it increasingly
dif?cult to discern whether racial barriers or class barriers
limited opportunities for blacks in public accounting.
Although apartheid laws were abolished, in the South Afri-
can context, race and class were so closely bound together
that integration of the accounting profession meant over-
coming class barriers as well as racial barriers. Class ineq-
uities created formidable obstacles to professional
advancement by black South Africans throughout the per-
iod under study. A late-1980s survey by SAICA, for exam-
ple, found that 62% of black articled clerks had parents
who were illiterate or semi-literate (PDC acts to increase
black accountants, 1991).
21
Economic issues affected those
we interviewed throughout their educations as well as into
their days as accounting trainees.
During the 1976 Soweto revolt, SZ was in high school in
a Homeland that was ruled so autocratically that students
were much less likely to demonstrate against the apartheid
regime than were those in South Africa’s townships. An
example of the dual forms of closure described by Murphy
(1984, 1988), SZ faced impenetrable closure on both race
(his family was restricted to the Homeland) and class (he
was too poor to ?ght racial injustice without jeopardizing
his entire family).
You knew that if you go and toyi–toyi (demonstrate),
you’re just going to get the police behind you. You’re
going to get the batons, you’re going to jail. . . I said, I
come from a home where we’ve got nothing. So then
if I go on to the struggle, it’s going to cost the family
because I think, ‘‘well, I’ve gone this far in the family,
and no one has got this far, and therefore if I were to
drop things now and follow the struggle, it will be a real
drawback for the family.”
Like SZ, many aspiring black CAs did not get involved in the
political movements due to fear of jeopardizing their fam-
ilies’ investments in their educations. In contrast, Wiseman
Nkuhlu, the ?rst black CA in South Africa, was imprisoned
on Robben Island due to his political activism. Inevitably,
he faced tough barriers to attaining a CA because of limited
resources during his articles. He was the ?rst, but not the
only, future black CA to face severe economic disadvan-
tages compared to his white colleagues when he entered
an accounting ?rm in the mid-1970s:
Because with the limited 120 Rand
22
that I started with
as an articled clerk, I had to maintain a car because it was
the only way I could be off to the audits which were
spread from East London to Butterworth in Transkei.
In the 1980s, ZE worked for one of the Big Eight in a
Homeland while completing his accounting education
through distance learning. He described a situation that
we heard repeatedly from our interviewees: the account-
ing ?rms paid quite poorly, as noted above, the ?rms main-
tained that they were providing the treasured experience
required to become a CA and thus did not need to pay sal-
aries that would match other jobs for those with compara-
ble education. This seemingly legitimate justi?cation
further strengthened closure on the basis of both race
and class in South Africa. Even in the Homeland, ZE
reported:
I think all the managers and partners were white; it was
just the clerks that were black. . . [T]he tendency was
that as soon as people ?nished articles they left the
?rm. . . I think most of them left because they felt that
they got the experience that they required and they
needed to catch up on some of the ?nancial rewards
that they had had to wait for a long time.
Although some black prospective CAs worked in the Umta-
ta of?ces long enough to earn their CAs, they could not
make the continued sacri?ces needed to wait to make part-
ner, when remuneration would have increased dramati-
cally. Very few of those we interviewed stayed beyond
the required three years, and most noted either the hostile
work environment or the environment combined with the
need for increased resources as reasons for the change. The
immediate departure upon earning the CA was not the
only result of the economic deprivation of even those
blacks who had obtained university degrees – the lack of
resources also impacted their work lives.
Transportation issues stemming from the inability of
black trainees to afford cars remained as important an is-
sue in the 1980s and 1990s as it was for Wiseman Nkuhlu
in the 1970s. SZ, who also worked in a Homeland, found
that his lack of family resources made it dif?cult for him
to participate fully in the work of the ?rm:
Sometimes I wouldn’t go to certain clients because I had
to wait for the company car. If somebody else was using
it, then I have to do other jobs in the of?ce and those
21
This study included coloured, Indian, and black CAs; an analysis of only
black South African CAs would undoubtedly have indicated even higher
levels of illiteracy.
22
120 Rand (his monthly pay) is approximately 200 Euros in 2008
currency.
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 717
who had cars then would actually go and probably be
given those clients and mainly it was actually the white
people who were given those clients, then they say,
‘‘Sorry, you don’t have a car.”
After the free elections of 1994, when black CAs were more
likely to be found in the major cities of South Africa than in
Umtata, the class divide was even more evident as black
trainees were often the only black professional in their of?-
ces. MZ pointed out that, when he joined a major ?rm in
the late 1990s, the poverty of most blacks impacted their
educational as well as professional opportunities. He said
that most continued to try to do the CTA part-time so that
they could work and earn a salary, and that, due to low
pass rates under part-time study, they often lost ground
in the ?rms. Moreover, the issues of cars – compounded
by the need for laptops – became prominent in the experi-
ences of black trainees:
All of our clients were in manufacturing. . . to get there
you needed to travel. Now a lot of black trainees don’t
have cars. . . The taxi system
23
is only ef?cient in the
mornings and 5 o’clock. So to move between clients dur-
ing the day, you really can’t effectively use the taxi trans-
port, and you also run the risk that if you’re carrying a
laptop, you’re going to get mugged and that became an
issue because then now you ?nd that they, because your
white counterparts had cars, they now issued laptops to
those people who had cars and they could get to clients.
If you didn’t have a car, you didn’t get a laptop.
As the stories in this section demonstrate, even those few
blacks who were able to overcome the class barriers to
education faced other class-based economic barriers to
successful completion of the training programs (articles)
required for certi?cation as a chartered accountant. In
Murphy’s terms, as South Africa transitioned from apart-
heid, it moved from social closure based on race and prop-
erty ownership (a dual structure) to social closure based
primarily on property (a tandem structure). The elimina-
tion of apartheid removed formal race-based barriers to
black advancement, thus opening a path to credentials
for some blacks in the professions. But class barriers per-
sisted as a primary mode of social closure which limited
opportunities for professional advancement for the major-
ity of the blacks in the working and unemployed classes.
Discussion
This paper has several limitations, as is inevitable on a
topic as broad as racial exclusion in a South African
white-collar industry. First, we interviewed only people
who had been successful in becoming chartered accoun-
tants. Although virtually all were economically disadvan-
taged, they had opportunities and educational advantages
not shared by the vast majority of blacks in South Africa,
where housing is abysmal, the unemployment rate per-
sists at nearly 50%, and the rate of HIV infection is one
of the highest on earth. In 1994 whites – 13% of the
population – owned 87% of South African land; over a dec-
ade later whites own 82% of the land (Nolen, 2007). Sec-
ond, we focused only on the experiences of black South
Africans; further research detailing gender, ethnicity (e.g.
Afrikaner, Xhosa, Indian, Zulu), national origin, age, and
educational background in more detail would help develop
a more complete understanding of a wider variety of the
axes that helped determine opportunities for those seeking
to enter the South African accountancy industry. Finally, it
is too early to draw ?nal conclusion about the impact of
the transition to majority rule on professional closure.
We found that while the transition to majority rule re-
sulted in greater visibility for blacks within the major
accounting ?rms, patterns of discriminatory closure con-
tinued to exist within the accounting industry in the
post-apartheid era. However, we examined only the ?rst
few years of transition, and all those we interviewed were
educated at least partly during the apartheid era. South
Africa is a dynamic place and transformation continues
apace. What happens in the next few decades merits close
attention and further analysis.
Notwithstanding these limitations, several ?ndings
emerge from the study. The oral histories gathered in this
study give some insight into how processes of professional
closure created an informal ‘‘color bar” during and after the
transition from apartheid. Accounts of the dynamics of
exclusion experienced by black chartered accountants sug-
gest that closure operated in two ways. First, deeply
embedded racial ideologies de?ned the boundaries of pro-
fessional society, and manifest in individual acts of dis-
crimination and bigotry. Even as apartheid crumbled,
white supervisors’ notions of racial superiority continued
to de?ne the experiences of black trainees and exclude
them from the professional ‘‘community” (Power, 1991)
in much the same way as they did in earlier periods.
Second, while racism was often overt, racial exclusion
also took the more subtle, indirect path of exclusion based
on ‘‘status cultural” barriers (Murphy, 1988) such as socia-
bility, shared social activities, and other cultural and lin-
guistic competencies that, like race or ethnicity, are
unrelated to technical competencies or abilities. Many of
the oral histories of black articled clerks illustrate the close
relationship between assimilation into ‘‘white” corporate
culture and success in completing articles and qualifying
as chartered accountants. Their experiences indicate the
extent to which attainment of the chartered accounting
credential depends on cultural factors that are unrelated
to merit, ability, or achievement. The South African case
further shows that even when overt racial discrimination
becomes unacceptable as it did in the post-apartheid era,
professional exclusion and monopoly based on status cul-
tural barriers perpetuates the continuation of exclusion
based on race in indirect fashion.
The dynamics of exclusion were also perpetuated by
institutional racism, i.e. systemic inequities in education,
housing, and economic opportunities, that persisted in
the post-apartheid period. Economic disadvantages faced
by black trainees, virtually all of whom came from eco-
nomically disadvantaged backgrounds, played a signi?cant
role in the process of exclusionary closure through the
1990s. The long history of white economic exploitation,
23
A series of privately-run minivans that provide most of the transpor-
tation between the townships and the cities.
718 T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721
sustained by South Africa’s ‘‘dual structure of social clo-
sure” based on race and ownership of property/capital
(Murphy, 1988), produced systemic economic inequities
that served as an informal color-bar in the post-apartheid
period in a number of ways. Economic need forced many
black trainees to begin work before they ?nished their edu-
cation; as a result many languished in low-level clerk posi-
tions as they struggled to complete their educational
requirements on a part-time basis. Some black clerks were
unable to afford the computers or automobiles they
needed to perform their work. Inequity in housing was also
a factor: residents of black Townships faced long com-
mutes on public transportation that was unreliable and
unsafe; those who could afford cars found car insurance
prohibitively expensive in the Townships; some found it
unsafe to carry their laptop computers home.
The dynamics of social closure in the South African
accounting profession thus con?rm Murphy (1988) obser-
vation that even when the ruling ideologies and world
views change making exclusion based on the ascribed
characteristics, such as race or ethnicity, unacceptable,
the accumulated cultural and ?nancial resources of whites
continued to give them an advantage in competition for
credentials. Moreover, because class and race are so closely
bound together in the South African context, ?nancial and
status cultural barriers to professional entry based on race
are indistinguishable from those based on class. As such,
the experiences of black trainees illustrate the barriers to
professional advancement faced by members of the work-
ing class. In other contexts where the accounting profes-
sion has been forced by political pressure to lower
employment barriers based on gender, race, or ethnicity,
they have generally drawn new recruits from the ranks
of the middle classes (e.g. US and UK audit ?rms’ re-
sponded to the women’s movement in the 1970s and
1980s by recruiting middle-class women). In the early
years after the transition to majority rule, however, the
black bourgeoisie was too thin to provide a recruiting
ground for accounting ?rms, and ?rms were forced to draw
black talent from the working class (though they preferred
to hire those who had earned scholarships to private high
schools or who were educated outside of South Africa). As
such, the South African context gives us a rare opportunity
to observe from ?rst-person accounts how economic class
position interacts with the dynamics of professional clo-
sure to prevent social class mobility by limiting access to
the cultural and ?nancial capital needed to succeed in
the competition for credentials.
Lastly, our research supports the contention that cre-
dentials are not the principal means of selection and exclu-
sion in contemporary societies (Murphy (1984, 1988)).
Under apartheid, South Africa’s social closure rules were
structured such that race and property ownership were
the principal forms of closure, while professional creden-
tials represented a secondary derivative mode of closure.
The employment experiences of black articled clerks illus-
trate not only that the accounting ?rms imposed codes of
professional closure based on cultural and linguistic com-
petencies, but that these codes of closure were derived
from the cultural preferences of white elites and economic
power of corporate clients. The ?rms’ dependence on cor-
porate patronage (Annisette, 2003; Johnson, 1972), their
deference to their clients’ racial preferences in scheduling
work assignments, the demands for blacks to acculturate
to ‘‘white corporate culture”, and the requirement for ?u-
ency in Afrikaans and/or English in order to write the qual-
ifying examination all derive from the structure of
economic power within society, which enabled the owners
of property/capital to ‘‘impose their own language and cul-
tural assumptions concerning the competencies for posi-
tion and career” (Murphy, 1988, p. 72).
This ?nding has implications for the future of the South
African accounting profession since it suggests that sub-
stantive changes in the demographic composition of the
profession will depend on the extent to which the transi-
tion to majority rule brings about changes in the structure
of economic power within South Africa. Recent scholarship
on neo-liberal economic globalization (Bond, 2000, 2003;
Catchpowle & Cooper, 1999; Harvey, 2005; MacDonald,
2006) contends that the ANC government’s abandonment
of its agenda for radical economic transformation and its
policy turn toward neoliberalism, under pressure from
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, will lim-
it the South African state’s ability achieve desired social
and economic changes. If the transfer of political power
to the black majority is not accompanied by a correspond-
ing change in economic power, our theoretical framework
would anticipate a growth in the numbers of black accoun-
tants within state civil service, as has occurred in other
African countries, but only super?cial changes within the
major accounting ?rms that service corporate elites. If, on
the other hand, the ANC is successful in fostering the
development of black capitalism through its Black Eco-
nomic Empowerment initiatives, substantive changes in
the accounting and auditing profession are more likely.
The growth of a black bourgeoisie within a capitalist econ-
omy, however, does not imply that credentials will open a
path of upward social mobility for the majority of South
Africa’s black working class. To the contrary, a structural
interpretation of social closure theory suggests that in cap-
italist societies the owners of property/capital (irrespective
of their race or ethnicity) impose codes of professional clo-
sure that re?ect bourgeois cultural assumptions concern-
ing professional competencies, and that these codes
create barriers to mobility for un-propertied members of
the working class.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank their interviewees, the
South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, and the
Association for the Advancement of Black Accountants of
Southern Africa for providing data for this project, and Eliz-
abeth Bagnani, Carolin Bouchard, Helen Brown, Elizabeth
Chambliss, Maureen Chancey, Jeffrey Cohen, Christine Coo-
per, Cheryl Lehman, Andrea Roberts, Gregory Trompeter,
participants in the 2006 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Accounting Conference and the anonymous reviewers for
their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Professor
Hammond acknowledges the ?nancial support of Ernst &
Young and Boston College.
T. Hammond et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 705–721 719
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