Professionally qualified accountants command considerable attention in the academic accounting literature, even in the critical accounting literature, at the expense of the majority who work in the industry. The "non-qualified"/clerical employees continue to be excluded from serious academic research. This is a glaring omission given the centrality of these human resources to both organisational efficiency and the quality of accounting. Notwithstanding Crompton and Sanderson's (1990) valuable contribution there is still no thoroughgoing analysis of this majority employee experience. This paper aims to redress this imbalance. It is concerned with the changing work practices of non-professionally-qualified workers in accounting clerical roles. The paper charts the changing work practices of accounting clerks through Braverman's (1974) work, then continues where Braverman left off in 1974 by studying the skills required by employers of accounting clerks from 1974 until 1996. Braverman's work is well known in the critical accounting literature. However, the narrow focus of accounting research which typically considers "accounting labour" to equate with "the accounting profession" means that Braverman's work has not been exploited to the full in the accounting literature. For example, Hanlon (1994), dismisses Braverman when he writes that he, "will argue that the deskilling thesis is an inappropriate theoretical framework for examining accountancy, and most likely the professions in general."

The theoretical framework used in the paper to analyse the work practices of accounting clerks draws strongly on the theoretical foundations of Marx, and, the subsequent development by Braverman. We have two main reasons for choosing these frameworks. Firstly we would like to debunk the myth proposed by such politicians as Thatcher, Reagan and more recently Blair, that people cannot find jobs because they "do not have the necessary skills", that we are living in an age which requires a workforce with greater skills than any previous generation. Our analysis using Braverman's work will present a contrasting picture. We will show how the majority of work in the accounting industry has been deskilled according to Taylor's "Scientific Management" principles. This has several serious implications for the clerical workers in accounting (as for the majority of workers under Monopoly Capitalism). As we demonstrate later in the paper, the deskilling of clerical work has meant that wage levels have been driven dramatically downwards. Our second reason for using Braverman is more unorthodox. We will argue that the degrading of clerical accounting work to a factory like production line process could potentially have important implications for the quality of accounting information.

The paper is structured as follows. The following section assesses the progress of the debates provided by the publication of Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital. The next section outlines the principles of Taylor's version of Scientific Management and how deskilling of work is organised in practice. Then a history of bookkeeping is presented. The following section takes up where Braverman left off and analyses accounting clerical and bookkeeping job advertisements from the (Glasgow) Herald for the period 1974 - 1996. Our conclusion draws out some policy implications and gestures towards possible futures for the accounting industry.

Braverman and the Labour Process

When Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital (Braverman, 1974) first appeared a quarter of a century ago no one could have imagined the breadth and intensity of debate which this pathbreaking account of the capitalist labour process would stimulate. A recent summary (Noon and Blyton, 1997) of the current state of the debate divides Braverman's critics into "sympathizers" and "agnostics", those, on the one hand, who accept his general approach with qualification, and those, on the other, who consider it inadequate as an explanation of the capitalist labour process. The litany of criticism is now commonplace; that Braverman ignored workers' resistance (Edwards, 1979) or alternatively, workers' accommodation and consent (Burawoy, 1979), that he "privileges" the extraction of surplus value at the expense of the realisation of that surplus (Kelly 1985), that he overestimated the universality of management "control" strategies, neglecting, for example, the possibility of "responsible autonomy" strategies (Friedman, 1977, 1990).

Space prohibits a full assessment of these criticisms but one line of argument "in defence of" Braverman appears to the authors to have even more validity now than when written in the late 1980's. Peter Armstrong (1988), in urging a re-reading of Labour and Monopoly Capital, resurrected the rich and subtle, non-deterministic Braverman who is not guilty of many of the charges made against him, not least of which the accusation that he erected an invariant law of deskilling consequent on capitalist development. Armstrong effectively demonstrates that Braverman does allow for a range of skill outcomes following technological innovation. Notwithstanding the importance of much of the post-Braverman critique (Thompson, 1989) we agree with Armstrong that the enduring strengths of Braverman can be mostly viewed through a long lens.

The explanatory power of Braverman's analysis lies in the appreciation of the long-term consequences of the separation of conception and execution in the labour process and the accretion of management control. Deskilling tendencies are, therefore, best understood as a "system-wide dynamic or 'law of motion' in capitalist economies which could, temporarily and locally, be interrupted or reversed by a variety of factors..." (Armstrong, 1988, p 157). If one comprehends the "deskilling" thesis as an overall tendency and if one disregards its application as a "universal law" applying in all cases at all points in time, and finally, if one adopts a broad temporal perspective then Braverman's essential validity comes into view. Over a period of, not years, but decades, one would expect to find, if Braverman is correct, that work in the overall majority of occupations has become progressively deskilled, subdivided into routine and fragmented tasks, subject to increasing amounts of managerial control.

In his consideration of clerical workers, Braverman argues for the necessity of a "long time span" (Braverman, 1974, p 293) when assessing the evolution of occupations. In our analysis of the transformation of occupations of "non professionally qualified accountancy workers" we will similarly apply a broad temporal method.

A broad historical perspective also informs the most effective theoretical analysis of class structure. In following both Marx and Erik Olin Wright (1978), Callinicos (Callinicos and Harman, 1987) we argue that, given the central importance of a person's place in the relations of production, three groups of white collar workers must be distinguished. At one extreme there exists, "a small minority who are salaried members of the capitalist class, participating in the decisions on which the process of capitalist production depends" (Callinicos and Harman, 1987, p 7). Secondly, and occupying managerial and supervisory positions between labour and capital, which might be termed "contradictory class locations", there is the "new middle class" of well-paid salaried employees. Thirdly, there is the majority of white-collar workers, the mass of unproductive wage-earners, whose numbers have grown massively this century. This latter group includes the mass of clerical workers and those in the "lower professions" (Callinicos and Harman, 1987, p 17).

In arguing for a broad definition of the working class which included both productive and unproductive workers, Callinicos quotes Wright,

We would argue that the mass of accountancy workers must be regarded unequivocally as part of the working class. These workers who constitute the clerical ranks are distinguished, firstly and obviously, from senior accountants who may be part of, or close to, the capitalist class. They are distinguished also from qualified professional accountants, who as a "contradictory" layer performing managerial and supervisory functions, stand above the mass of clerical accounting labour.

Accountancy workers, as distinct from accountants, neither own the means of production nor can exist without selling their labour power. They will be subject to control by senior management or, more likely by managers and supervisors who directly execute policies on behalf of owners and senior management. If Braverman is correct then we would expect to find the mass of accountancy workers to have been effectively divested from control over their labour process. We would further expect a progressive, if not wholly linear, tendency to deskilling to have occurred over a long time span. Our belief in the centrality of the deskilling aspects of Scientific Management to the contemporary work practices of accounting clerks and bookkeepers requires that we spend some time explaining its concepts and principles. This more in depth consideration of Taylorism is the subject of the next section.

The Introduction of Taylorism and Scientific Management

The Scientific Management movement was initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the last decade of the 19th century. Basically scientific management's task was and is to find ways of controlling labour in rapidly growing capitalist organisations. Capitalism is central to scientific management because the antagonistic social relations created by capitalism are taken by scientific management as natural and inexorable. Scientific management enters the workplace "as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science" (Braverman, p 86). The driving force behind scientific management came from three major changes which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. These were the enormous growth in the size of enterprises, the beginnings of monopolistic organisation of industry, and the purposive and systematic application of "science" to production. Although, as we will see later the introduction of new technology (especially computerisation) adds synergy for the capitalist to a Tayloristic work process, that Taylorism belongs to the chain of development of management methods and the organisation of labour. Scientific management took the level of technology as given.

This paper takes the view that scientific management played and continues to play a central role in shaping the capitalist work process. We do not believe that Taylorism or scientific management have been superseded by newer "management schools" or by Human Resource Management. The successors to Taylor are found today in engineering and work design (especially in such things as "total quality management", ISO 9000 corporations and Business Process Re-engineering). More recent management theorists like Mayo and Munsterberg will find their successors in personnel departments and university departments of industrial psychology and sociology. It is certainly the case that Taylorism and scientific management are rather unfashionable today, and are associated with the early part of the 20th century, but their contribution to the control of workers continues today. Writing in the 1950s, Peter Drucker (1954, p 280) was insistent that

Indeed, Scientific Management is all but a systematic philosophy of worker and work. Altogether it may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.

Scientific Management is very much more than a straightforward study of work to produce efficiency gains. The self-use of experimental methods in the study of work by the craftsman is and probably always has been part of the practice of the craftsperson. But the study of work by managers came with the capitalist system and is wholly concerned with wresting control over work practices from labour. Capitalist managers, from the outset were interested in controlling workers. Burrell (1987) describes how workers were physically removed to factories where they could be more readily surveyed and controlled. But Taylorism took capitalist control to an entirely new level by asserting that, an absolute necessity for adequate management, is, the dictation to the worker of the precise manner in which work is to be performed. Taylor insisted that management could only be a limited and frustrated undertaking so long as workers were left with any discretion in the implementation of their work. To totally alleviate management's frustration, Taylor created a revolutionary division of labour.

Taylor's basic concern was that workers should produce "a fair day's work." Taylor said that this meant all the work which a worker could do without injury to his health, at a pace that can be sustained through his working lifetime. A close reading of Taylor's case stories would lead you to believe that in practice his definition of a "fair day's work" meant working at a crippling level of activity at an extreme limit, choosing a pace that only a few could maintain, and then, only under strain. To Taylor there were two basic factors (which he called soldiering) which prevented workers from producing a fair day's work. The first was pure laziness (or natural soldiering) and the second was more conscious, deliberate, collective and universal (systematic soldiering). Taylor turned his attention to systematic soldiering which was created by workers' relationships with each other. Systematic soldiering is carried out with the deliberate object of keeping management ignorant of how fast work can be performed. Taylor recognised that since wage rates were determined chiefly by market, social and historical factors, that there was no incentive for workers to work harder. Management probably thought that they had dealt with this problem through the introduction of piecework systems. But Taylor found that it was under piecework systems that workers produced the most advanced types of systematic soldiering.

Taylor's thinking evolved when working as a foreman in Midvale where he "fully realised that, although he was the foreman of the shop, the combined knowledge and skill of the workmen who were under him was certainly ten times as great as his own" (Taylor, 1911, p 53). The source of the control problem lay "in the ignorance of the management as to what really constituted a proper day's work for a workman" (Taylor, 1911, p 49). The historical antecedents of skilled workers or craftspeople being repositories of knowledge spanned from earliest times to the Industrial Revolution. In each craft the worker was presumed to be the master of a body of traditional knowledge, and methods and procedures were left to his or her discretion. The apprenticeships of traditional crafts ranged from three to seven years. In the mid 19th century bookkeeping too constituted a craft. It would not be easy to take control of these skilled workers' knowledges. But this was the task Taylor set himself. Taylor set out three principles which underpin his system. These are seldom publicly acknowledged.

First Principle

The managers assume

Braverman described this first principle as the dissociation of the labour process from the skills of the workers. Taylor demonstrated this principle with both simple and complex tasks and found that it was possible in either case for management to collect at least as much information as is known by the worker who performs it regularly, and very likely more. The manner of obtaining this information brought into being new methods such as can be devised only through the means of systematic study. Arnold (forthcoming) describes a contemporary study of the way in which knowledge is obtained from labour.

Second Principle

This removing of brainwork - the separation of conception from execution is perhaps the centre of Taylor's work. In short, management must take total control of the workers actions. Braverman (p 113) puts it like this

This dehumanization of the labour process, in which workers are reduced almost to the level of labor in its animal form, while purposeless and unthinkable in the case of the self-organised and self-motivated social labour of a community of producers, becomes crucial for the management of purchased labour.

Clearly if a worker's execution is guided by her conception then management will be unable to impose its own efficiency norms. Thus work always had to be studied by management and never by workers themselves. There was never a question of having scientific workmanship rather than scientific management.

In his testimony before the Special Committee of the House of Representatives (1912) Taylor made the point that the systematic study of work would be paid for by management since workers did not have the resources to fund their own studies of work. Since management paid for these studies then management should own that knowledge in the same was as they owned other assets like land and buildings. Braverman makes the telling point that the conclusion of this is that not only is capital the property of the capitalist but labour itself thus becomes part of capital. The advent of the Industrial Revolution ensured that workers lost control of the means of production, Taylor then compounded this by ensuring that they also lost control over their own labour and the manner of its performance. But even this wasn't enough for Taylor who asserted that any knowledge possessed by workers' alone was not useful to management. This would be the case even if a worker devised a way of working more efficiently since this particular worker would keep the information to herself.

Finally pay reduction rears its ugly head. The purpose of scientific management is not to train workers in scientific knowledge; its purpose is to cheapen the workers by decreasing their training and enlarging their output. Taylor (1903, p 105) was forthright about this stating that the potential of his system will not have been realised until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller calibre and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system

The separation of conception and execution serves two purposes. It cheapens labour and ensures easy management control.

Third Principle

Thus, the third principle involves using the knowledge taken from the worker to control each step of the worker's day. Thus Taylorism ensured that as crafts declined, workers would sink to the level of general and undifferentiated labour power, adaptable to a large range of simple tasks, while as science grew, it would be concentrated in the hands of management. The next section demonstrates how these three deskilling principles have been and are applied by management to bookkeepers and accounting clerks.

A brief history of the labour process of bookkeeping

Many different histories of accounting have been written using various theoretical frameworks. Among these are African-American oral histories (Hammond and Streeter, 1994, Foucauldian histories (Hopwood, 1987; Hoskins and Macve, 1986; Loft, 1983; Miller and O'Leary, 1987), "new" histories (Miller et al, 1991) feminist histories (Kirkham and Loft, Lehman), Marxist histories (Bryer, 1992; Tinker and Niemark, 1987; Crompton, 1987; Armstrong, 1985, 1987), histories concerned with sexuality (Burrell, 1987) and more traditional histories (Nobes,1982; Parker, 1981; Johnson, 1981; Mills, 1990). The history presented in this section considers the actual work practices of typically non-qualified, bookkeeper, or accounts clerks drawing extensively from Braverman (1974). The central theoretical perspective of Braverman was Marxist so we count this as a Marxist history.

The history of accounts clerks presented by Braverman begins in the mid 19th century. Braverman draws from examples from the USA and Europe. We recognise that it is necessary to bear in mind the different rates of capitalist development between different countries (Armstrong, 1985). Probably over a long time span UK companies are several years behind their US counterparts especially in terms of the persistence of family capitalist enterprises and multi-divisional forms of organisation. Given these factors, this history presents a general developmental pathway.

Clerks of this period appeared to be the predecessors of modern middle management rather than the army of clerks found in the modern workplace. The antecedents of contemporary clerical labour arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century with the creation of a new class of clerical workers, which had little continuity with the mid 19th century small and privileged clerical stratum. The change from the mid 19th century clerk to the clerk of the turn of the century was emphasised by two fundamental changes: composition by sex, and relative pay. The gender composition of the new clerical layer moved from men to women - hence to Mrs Taylor. Relative wage levels also fell, so that in the US in the 1950s clerical workers pay was less than the pay of manual workers. Lockwood (1958, p 22), reported that

...the gross change in income relativities is unmistakable. The main result is that the average clerk is now very roughly on the same income level as the average manual worker, or perhaps even slightly below.

But clerical work in its early stages had the characteristics of a craft (Shepard, 1971). Master craftspeople like book-keepers maintained control of their work which basically was to keep the current records of the financial and operating condition of the enterprise, as well as its relations with the external world. These craftsmen learned their crafts in office apprenticeships. But with the advent of larger scale organisations and monopoly capitalism the accounting functions of control and appropriation, expanded enormously and themselves became a labour process with wage labour purchased on a large scale in a labour market and organised into huge "production machines according to the same principles that govern the organisation of factory labour". Braverman (p 301) puts it like this

Here the productive processes of society disappear into a stream of paper-a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed like a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meatpacking line, the car assembly conveyor, by workers organized in much the same way.

An accounting function which could exactly "shadow" the real production process became increasingly important under monopoly capitalism. This was partly due to the coordination and control of new productive processes through accounting and its paper trail (Armstrong, 1985, 1987; Miller and O'Leary, 1987; Hoskins and Macve, 1986). But it was also due to the social form of products as value separate from their physical form (Tinker et al 1982). The representation of this value to capital is more important than the physical form or useful properties of the labour product. In short, the actual type of commodity being sold means little while the net gain is everything. The value form of commodities separates itself out from the physical form as a vast paper empire which under capitalism becomes as real as the physical world, and which swallows ever increasing amounts of labour. Thus, a portion of the labour of society must therefore be devoted to the accounting of value. Indeed as capitalism becomes more complex and develops into a monopoly stage, the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex.

The battle to realise values, to turn them into cash, calls for a special accounting of its own. ....in some industries the labor expended upon the mere transformation of the form of value (from the commodity form into the form of money or credit)-including the policing, the cashiers, and collection work, the record keeping, the accounting etc.-begins to approach or surpass the labour used in producing the underlying commodity or service. And finally, as we have already noted, entire "industries" come into existence whose activity is concerned with nothing but the transfer of values and the accounting entailed by this.

Braverman (1974, p 302, emphasis added)

One of the basic assumptions which underpinned the expansion of accounting in the early Monopoly Capital period was that employees and trading partners were possibly, dishonest, disloyal or lax (Hopwood, 1987). The accounts of a trading partner would have no standing with its associates. So there was (and is) an immense amount of duplication. The dishonesty or laxity of employees made double entry bookkeeping particularly appropriate since

under this system, every transaction is recorded at birth in two places, and the entire movement of the values that pass through the enterprise is reflected in an interlocking set of accounts which check and verify each other. The falsification of only one single account will usually lead directly to the falsifier, and as a rule the work of falsifying many accounts so they continue in balance with each other is possible only through collaboration of a number of people.

Braverman, p 303

With the rapid growth companies and their paper trials, office work changed from something merely incidentally to management into a labour process in its own right. The characteristic feature of this period was the ending of the reign of the bookkeeper and the rise of the office manager as the prime functionary and representative of higher management. Office management, a product of the monopoly period of capitalism, developed as a special branch of management in its own right. The necessity when the operations side of business grew to employ hundreds of clerks and bookkeepers rather than half a dozen or so forced companies to investigate whether or not clerical employees were producing "a fair day's work" (Galloway, 1918). In the context of the times which this took place, this naturally meant the application of scientific management methods to the office. The following is an extract from the foreword of William Henry Lefingwell's Scientific Office Management, which was published in 1917.

Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory. And after all, since every motion of the hand or body, every thought, no matter how simple, involves consumption of physical energy, why should not the study and analysis of these motions result in the mass of useless effort in clerical work just as it does in the factory.

The first practitioners of scientific management applied Taylor's concepts to the office. This resulted in the breakup of prior work arrangements which allowed clerks to work according to "traditional methods, independent judgement, and light general supervision, usually on the part of the bookkeeper" (Braverman, p 307). New work practices were prescribed by office managers. Work methods and time durations were to be verified and controlled by management on the basis of its own studies of each job. The role of the office manager in terms of supervision was a key to the increased productivity of clerks brought about by the implementation of Taylorism. For example, Braverman (p 309) states that when Leffingwell says, that

"the output of one clerk was doubled merely by the rearrangement of the work on the desk," we may understand this was an effect of close and frightening supervision rather than a miracle of efficiency; this was understood by the managers as well, although concealed beneath as "scientific" mystique.

It is worth noting that the implementation of scientific management in offices around the turn of the century worked (as did Taylor) with existing technology (which typically consisted of typewriters although the instruments for adding, dictating and ledger posting be mechanical means had already been devised). The mechanization of the office still lay far in the future.

The technical division of accounting labour

Management's solutions to the problem of how to control large offices were found firstly in the technical division of labour and secondly in mechanisation. In industrial terms, the work processes of most organisations could be described as "continuous flow processes". Anyone familiar with the accounting processes of a very simple retail company will immediately recognise the paper accounting flow with its articulated work practices described in the following flow chart.

        Order rec'd
        could be by 
        letter, telephone; or from sales person's order book

                                |

        prepare the documentation containing the following
        customer name and address
        billing address and delivery address
        credit standing of customer
        goods ordered
        any discounts?
        shipping costs/tax
        send documentation to other "departments"

                                |
      -----------------------------------------------
      |             |                 |             |
  Shipping       w/house         purchasing     to person
  with           with            dept           who posts
  instructions   instructions    to signify     accounts to
  and copy for   to issue        need (or not)  ledgers
  customer       goods to        to replace     dr debtors
                 shipping and    goods sold     cr sales
                 to record                      
                 stock depln     
                                                                                                      
                            Sales totals appear in P&L a/c 
                            Debtors in balance sheet

In its mid 19th century form the entire process outlined above would be the province of the bookkeeper. But with the advent of monopoly capital, scientific management is applied and the process is subdivided into minute operations each operation becoming the task of a worker of group of workers. This would mean that the above diagram would need to be further divided. One necessary division would be the introduction of various ledgers (sales, purchases, nominal). The essential feature of this parcelling out of individual processes is that the workers involved lose comprehension of the process as a whole and the policies which underlie it. With sufficient customers, one worker (or a group of workers) would be left to post, for example, customer orders. This worker would see nothing of the credit worthiness of a customer, their sales history, unusual orders (mistakes?) or anything else which would require skill (or brain work) on the part of the worker. Moreover clerical processes can be checked at various points by mathematical controls. How many invoices per day has a particular worker posted; how many mistakes did they make and so on and so forth. If the flow of work is great enough the application of the principles of scientific management can be applied much more easily to an office than to a manufacturing process. This point is important in a bookkeeping context. Without sufficient flows of invoices it would be impossible for management to parcel out the bookkeeping tasks to clerical workers in a totally Tayloristic manner. We will see in the analysis of more contemporary bookkeeping jobs in the next section that some small organisations still have the old mid 19th century bookkeeping work in place. But the majority of bookkeeping work is under the ongoing dehumanising influence of Taylorism.

The progressive elimination of thought from the work of the office worker thus takes the form, at first, of reducing mental labour to a repetitious performance of the same small set of functions. The work is still performed in the brain, but the brain is used as the equivalent of the hand of the detail worker in production, grasping and releasing a single piece of "data" over and over again. The next step is the elimination of the thought process completely-or at least insofar as it is ever removed from human labour-and the increase of clerical categories in which nothing but manual labour is performed.

Braverman, p 319

The advent of large scale computerisation

Office mechanisation has further accelerated this deskilling of accounting labour. The computer system is the chief, though not the only, instrument for the mechanisation of the office. Its early applications were for large scale repetitive and routine operations which, before the advent of computers, were typically performed mechanically, or almost mechanically by cumbersome machines. Such tasks would consist of payrolls; billing; debtors and creditors; mortgage accounting; stock control, actuarial and dividend calculations and so on. But computers were also applied to other tasks, for example, management accounting, sales reports and so on up to the point where companies' books of record were put into computerised form. Once computerisation has been achieved, such things as the pacing of data input, becomes available to management as a weapon of control. The reduction of office information to standardised "bits" and their processing by computer systems and other office equipment provides management with an automatic accounting of the size of the workload and the amount done by each operator, section or division.

Clearly this increased output due to computerisation would have two implications for management. They would be able to get by with less labour; and the labour which they needed could be less skilled (and therefore cheaper). Ida Russakoff Hoos' Automation in the Office (1961) reported that a woman worker explained

With each reduction in force, the remaining workers are told to increase their output. Automation has reduced the staff in that office by more than one-third, and more mechanisation is in prospect. The union spokesman said that the categories of jobs which have disappeared are those which require skill and judgement. Those remaining are the tabulating and key punching operations, which become even simpler, less varied, and more routinised as work is geared to the computer.

A recent account of the clerical labour process in diverse locations in both the public and private sector spells out the consequences of the introduction of IT to the office; an increase in intensification of effort and the speed, volume ,and intensity of work, as subdivided tasks become subject to unprecedented levels of monitoring and target setting (Baldry et al, 1988).

But what about the myth that with the advent of computerisation companies would need better educated labour? This myth was quickly recognised as such by management. But, it is true that during the transition period from manual or machine based accounting to computerised accounting there was a degree of skilling which went on. Bookkeepers with knowledge of both computerised and manual systems, could for a while, demand higher salaries. But once the new computerised systems went through their initial trial period there was no longer a need for highly skilled bookkeepers.

The most junior bookkeeping staff were most severely affected at first by the advent of large scale computerisation. Their jobs were degraded and frequently transformed into pure data-processing jobs with no promotion prospects. Enid Mumford and Olive Banks in a study of bank computerisation reported that personnel managers were "recruiting girls of too high intellectual calibre for the new simple machine jobs" (p 190). Hoos (1961, p 57) reported the views of a data processing executive as follows

Due to the simplicity of operator training for single pocket proof encoders, the job, as related to our job evaluation scale, has been downgraded three grades, and reduced from an average base of $68 to $53 per week.

The only gal who will stick with this work has to have a husband with two broken legs and five hungry kids. No one else could stand it.

The position of more skilled bookkeepers was also weakened by the advent of computerisation. For example, Braverman gives the example of an US multi branch bank which reported that within eighteen months of installing electronic bookkeeping machines, the bookkeeping staff of 600 had been reduced to 150, and the data processing staff had grown to 122. This was in line with the experience of most banks which achieved labour reductions of between 40 - 50%. Basically many bookkeeping staff were replaced by machine operators, punch card operators and the like (US Department of Labor Statistics, 1966, p 247).

The removal of the "conception" part of a clerk's work is one of the key elements to the implementation of Taylorism in an office. Braverman (pp 347 - 348) puts it like this

The greatest single obstacle to the proper functioning of such an office is the concentration of information and decision-making capacity in the minds of key clerical employees. Just as Frederick Taylor diagnosed the problem of the management of a machine shop as one of removing craft information from the workers, in the same way the office manager views with horror the possibility of dependence upon the historical knowledge of the office past, or the rapid flow of information in the present, on the part of some of his or her clerical workers. The recording of everything in mechanical form, and the movement of everything in a mechanical way, is thus the ideal of the office manager. But this conversion of the great mass of office workers into more or less helpless attendants of that process. As an inevitable concomittment of this, the ability of the office worker to cope with deviations from the routine, errors, special cases, etc., all of which require information and training, virtually disappears. The number of people who can operate the system, instead of being operated by it, decline precipitously.

The next section deals with the major empirical input into this paper. At this point it should be made clear that deskilling is an ongoing rather than a once and forever activity. As has already been pointed out, it is possible, even today, to find organisations in various stages of the deskilling process. Moreover, the rate of capitalist development is uneven. It is likely that much of the evidence presented here would have occurred 15 years earlier in the USA.

DESKILLING OF ACCOUNTANCY WORKERS : THE GLASGOW EVIDENCE

Methodology

In order to chart the changing skills of bookkeepers we have used job advertisements. The use of job advertisement to chart changing skills has been used in other studies. For example, job advertisements have been used to study entry-level employment trends (North and Worth, 1996); the impact of automation on the skills required of catalogers and reference librarians (Xu, 1996); changing Information Systems' professionals' skills (Todd, McKeen and Gallupe, 1995); the emergent market for informational professionals (Cronin, Stiffler and Day, 1993); and differences between public and technical services jobs (Reser and Schuneman, 1992). Other studies have pointed to the importance of newspaper advertisements in terms of recruiting new staff. England (1995) examined the processes by which workplaces go about recruiting women workers and found that newspapers and agencies were particularly important. Marsden (1994) found that newspaper advertisements were important for recruiting. Our study captures employers who directly advertised positions in newspapers and employers who use recruitment agencies since recruitment agencies also advertise in newspapers.

All job advertisements for accountancy workers from 1974 to 1996 were copied from the appointments' sections of the Glasgow Herald newspaper. Typically the jobs recorded were those for the more general categories of bookkeepers and accountancy assistants as well as for the more specifically designated ledger clerks and cashiers. A representative sample for each year was then selected giving a total of 1024 separate advertisements for the 23 year period. Care was taken to ensure that each annual sample reflected both the volume and type of job advertisements found in that year. Each advertisement was entered as a separate record on a data base with the characteristics of each job recorded in 26 fields (see Appendix 1). The database was ordered chronologically and then divided into four quartiles each composed of 256 records thus enabling comparisons to be made over broad periods. The periods covered in each quartile are given in Table 1. The results provide a unique temporal perspective on the transformation in the nature of accountancy workers jobs. As we shall see there is powerful evidence to support a 'deskilling thesis'.

Table 1 : The Four Periods

Computer Knowledge and Experience

There is clear evidence of the developing requirement for computer "knowledge" and experience over the 23 year period. As can be seen from Table 2 the proportion of job advertisements which explicitly require computer expertise successively rises across each of our four time periods. The greatest increases in requests for computer experience occurred between the first and second periods and between the second and third periods. What is most striking, however, is the massive change between the first and last period. Between January 1974 and 29 August 1980, only 7.8% of job advertisements requested computer knowledge and experience, while between 15 February 1991 and 6 December 1996 almost two-thirds of job advertisements (66.4%) explicitly requested computer experience. In the first period, very few advertisement specifically stated that the accounting system was manual, but by the third period manual systems were specifically mentioned since these would have been the exception rather than the rule. The same is probably true of the last period where companies may have decided not to include the word "computerisation" in their advertisements since people would expect company accounts to typically be computerised.

Table 2 (n=256 for each period)

These stark figures hardly do justice to the qualitative impact of computerisation upon the labour process of accountancy workers. Firstly, the arrival of computers marks the virtual extinction of older machine technologies like the comptometer. Secondly, and more profoundly, they signify the progressive deskilling of a range of accountancy jobs. As computers arrive the range of specific skills requested in job advertisements declines.

As we shall now see advertisements in the early years of our survey make specific mention of a range of skills and abilities. Typically, an advertisement for a 'bookkeeper' or an 'accountancy assistant' might explicitly require an applicant to be able to take books 'to the trial balance stage', to be experienced in the sales, nominal and purchase ledgers and, additionally, to demonstrate expertise in double entry bookkeeping. Let us now examine the extent of the decline in these skill requirements over the 23 period (Table 3).

Table 3 (n=256 for each period)

If we take the requirement 'ability to take books to trial balance stage' we can see that the percentage of advertisements which make this ability explicit has fallen from slightly less than a half (46.5%) in the first period to slightly less than a quarter in the last period (22.7%). Many small and medium companies in the last two periods required knowledge of either Sage or Pegasus accounting software packages. The use of these types of packages along with the segmentation of the accounting process in many organisations would mean that organisations no longer require that its bookkeepers understand "accounts to trial balance".

The most significant decline occurred between the first and second periods. There seems to follow a period in which the demand stabilises. However, a fairly sharp decline in this skill requirement occurs by the last period. We should note that this statistical profile might conceal a deeper deskilling process. While almost a quarter of advertisements in Period 4 still request the 'ability to take books to trial balance' the skill composition of this ability may well have been devalued by the introduction of software which permits this. Whilst the ability to take to trial balance is still a skill required by a sizeable, if progressively, shrinking proportion of employers, the broader abilities once associated with this process have been, in part, reduced to the manipulation of computer-based software packages.

Table 3 demonstrates that explicit requests for sales, nominal and purchase ledger skills have decreased significantly over the 23 year period. However, the rate of decline varies between the different ledgers. What we are witnessing here is the further deskilling of previously fragmented jobs. In fact the actual picture is probably worse than Table 3 indicates. In the first two periods, many companies required knowledge of all three ledgers. But gradually the number of organisations requiring a broad knowledge of accounting has declined.

Our survey of advertisements also seems to indicate a decline in the desire of employers to engage a layer of accountancy workers able to perform their tasks with levels of discretion and autonomy. A relatively frequent requirement of advertisements in the 1970s was for bookkeepers or accountants' assistants to be able 'to work on their own initiative'. In the first period 11.7% of advertisements requested that ability. The percentage actually increased to 12.9% in the second period. However, only 2.7% of advertisements requested this ability by the third period, with a slightly larger 3.9% in our last period. Employers are now much less likely than they were two decades ago to place importance on the 'ability to work on one's own initiative'. We can perhaps advance this as further evidence that the level of discretion and autonomy held by key accountancy workers has diminished. If the labour process is more subdivided, regulated and computerised then the need to have key individuals who act as the repository of accumulated informal knowledge and expertise will decline as a consequence.

Without explicitly posing a direct causal relationship between the onset of computerisation and the decline in required skill requirements, it may be useful to display in graphical form the increase in requests for computer skills and experience against the reduction in requirements for general and specific skills.

INSERT CHART 1 HERE

Clearly a transformation has occurred in what is implied and understood by 'experience'. If we look at advertisements the requirement for experience shows a decline followed by a rise over the 23 year period. The percentages are as follows : Period 1 - 79.3%, Period 2 - 68.8%, Period 3 - 68.8%, Period 4 - 73.4%. These figures only tell us that employers have been fairly consistent over 23 years in requesting applicants to possess something called experience. What may constitute 'experience' both in terms of what is requested by the employer and what is understood by the applicant is not a fixed definition. In the early period we can posit that it is a broad conception, where experience involves some unity of conception and execution in the performance of a range of accountancy tasks, at least for some of the posts advertised. These posts may well be 'of the own initiative' type and carry supervisory responsibilities. (The important caveat is that there were always a range of junior and segmented jobs.) We may define experience in this sense, then, as a generalised experience of the full range of bookkeeping tasks with perhaps an intimate knowledge and understanding of an organisation's workings.

Experience has come to mean, for very many posts, something quite specific by the end of the period under survey. The job advertisements reveal the change - 'two to three years computer experience in sales ledgers', for example. Experience is no longer broadly defined but is specific and in most cases has become associated with experience of computers.

We can suggest that this redefinition of experience is connected to the age requirements that the advertisements reveal. There is a decline in the demand for older workers in the advertisements over the four time periods. Table 4 shows the results. The proportion of advertisements seeking 'older' workers has fallen by more than a half between the earliest and the latest periods. Significantly, in the earlier periods a number of advertisements specifically request women who are 'mature' or are over 40 years old and possess a full range of bookkeeping skills. Frequently, these women should posses secretarial skills and may also have experience as office administrators. From these required characteristics and abilities we can construct a profile of a type of mature non-professionally qualified woman with a wide range of bookkeeping skills who probably has deep and accumulated knowledge of a particular industry or trade. We suggest, also, it is the arrival of computerisation and the further subdivision of tasks which accompanies it, which erodes the 'craft' of this employee and which reduces the demand for this type of employee.

A new development with respect to experience started during a period 4. A few bookkeeping advertisements required qualifications (mostly, AAT or HND/C). This may reflect a growing societal trend in which increasingly high qualifications are demand for boring and repetitive jobs.

Table 4 (n=256 for each period)

Table 5 below highlights other trends in our survey. It is possible to make some tentative comments about these results. Kalamazoo accounting systems have almost disappeared from use. Day Book's appear to have disappeared too along with manual of machine based accounting systems. The requirement for non-qualified management accountants seems to have remained remarkably constant over the 25 year period. Perhaps one of the most telling changes in table 5 is the decline in the inclusion of salaries in the advertisements.

Table 5 (n=256 for each period)

Pay

Table 5 demonstrates that many of the advertisements were silent about the level of pay. Many advertisements had vague assurances that salaries would be "competitive" or "good" or "according to age and experience". However, a significant proportion did include information about salaries. This allows us to make some more qualitative analysis of pay.

In the early years of the study, a knowledge of computers would have increased salary levels by at least one third. For example, in 1975, typical salaries ranged from £1,600 - £1,800 pa. But, in the 9% of the advertisements which mentioned that knowledge of computing would be an advantage pay ranged from £2,300 - £2,700. Again in 1976, typical bookkeeping salaries ranged from £1,600 - £1,800; whereas in the 10% of "computerised" jobs, salaries were significantly higher, in once case the salary mentioned was £4,000. As companies went through the process of computerising their accounts they typically required "skilled bookkeepers with a knowledge of computing". Indeed companies frequently ran manual (or accounting machine) systems, alongside new computerised ones. But it seems, as if once companies had gone through the process of computerising, bookkeeping salaries remained fairly constant. Indeed, it appears that in real terms they have tended to fall.

The difference between skilled bookkeepers and professionally qualified accountants' salaries in the late 1970s was surprisingly small. By 1979 skilled bookkeepers could earn between £3,500 and £4,000. Salaries for qualified accountants that year were in the order of £5,000. The skilled bookkeepers in the earlier period were likely to have been "repositories of organisational knowledge", and an importance source of information for both those within their organisation and those outside of it, for example auditors. Today, qualified accountants tend to earn three times as much as bookkeepers. In London, newly qualified accountants can expect a starting salary of £33,000. A London bookkeeper will earn around £10,0000. We would argue that several factors account for this. Firstly, due to deskilling, bookkeepers in the late 1990s do not have the same prestige, skills and usefulness to employers as their 1970s counterparts, and this has driven down their salaries. In addition to this, the prestige and "professionalism" of qualified accountants (along with their images and so on) has probably increased professionally qualified accountant's salaries in real terms.

Very few bookkeeping job advertisements mentioned management accounts but the ones that did tended to offer significantly higher salaries. This may be because the jobs required bookkeepers who would also play a "lower" management role.

Mid 19th century vestiges

Some small companies, even in the later years' of our survey, used manual accounting systems. These companies advertised for bookkeepers whose conception and execution functions remained intact. For example, a small haulage contractor placed the following advertisement in 1993

Full knowledge of manual double entry bookkeeping, wages preparation, PAYE, VAT returns essential. Minimum supervision.

In 1996, a heating and ventilation engineer required a Expert bookkeeper to prepare manual accounts, VAT, PAYE, payroll, sales, purchase and general ledgers, and bank reconciliation.

This type of advertisement do not in any sense refute the deskilling thesis proposed in this paper. They show that capitalist development in terms of deskilling is uneven. It is fairly difficult, in the case of bookkeeping at least, to segment tasks to the extent required by Scientific Management if the organisation does not have a sufficiently large volume of orders.

Implications and Conclusions

In this paper we have presented a study of the transformation of the bookkeeping craft from the mid 19th century to 1996. The transformation is a dialectical process which seems to take on several (quantities) of changes before undergoing a fundamental qualitative transformation. The transformed "bookkeeper" of the 1990s is likely to be a young woman (hence the use of Mrs Taylor in the title), working in a monotonous deskilled job, with relatively low pay and little prospects of promotion.

What is the implication for accounting of the removal of the concentration of information and decision-making capacity from the minds of key bookkeeping personnel? Our work gestures towards some frightening conclusions. These are to do with the quality of accounting information and the future of professional and nonprofessional accounting labour. Neither of these can be considered in a vacuum and need to be set within the context of other contemporary changes confronting the accounting industry.

Quality of accounting information

Alongside the deskilling processes outlined in this paper during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, other changes were happening in terms of the practice of accounting. The late 1970s witnessed the streamlining of operations through the re-engineering of accounting and clerical processes (see for example, Mills, 1996; Harowitz, 1996 and Vollmers, 1997). A typical recent example of re-engineering occurred at Dunn and Bradstreet, who eliminated many checks and controls in their creditors and purchasing departments.8 They eliminated the requirement for multiple signatures for a cheque request and ceased matching requests with purchase orders (Springsteel, 1997). Further streamlining to the accounting industry occurred with the introduction of the flexible firm and the division of workforces into core and non-core elements. In some organisations accounting has become a non-core element. Indeed accounting has been outsourced like catering and cleaning. Perhaps one of the leading edge examples of accounting outsourcing is BP exploration. In 1991 BP entered into an arrangement with Anderson Consulting under which Anderson's became responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of BP's financial administration services. It has been reported that between 1991 and 1994, costs were reduced by 40% (Singleton-Green, 1996).

Anyone who has ever worked as an auditor will know how faced with a large unfamiliar organisation that their task will be made much easier if "an on the ground bookkeeper" can help them find their way. There are always unusual postings which demand attention. The removal of bookkeepers who could play the role of repositories of organisational knowledge would leave the auditor with no-one to ask about such problems. Moreover, the removal of a knowledgeable bookkeeper in an reengineered company may open accounts to serious fraud.

The deskilling of accounting in a global economy has presented a serious threat to bookkeeping (and probably professional accounting) jobs. British Airways shed 600 accounting staff within the UK and "exported" 200 of them to Bombay where the cost of accounting staff is 20% of comparable British levels (Gribben, 1996).

The Future of the Accounting Profession

The degrading bookkeeping and accounting skills is bound to have a knock on effect on the accounting profession. Over 10 year's ago Armstrong (1985, p 137) wrote that

The involvement of accountancy in key decision-making positions within the global function of capital has, in Johnston's view (1977a, b, 1980), created a horizontal fission within the profession whereby the activities of the elite which creates, installs and supervises control systems have the effect of routinising, fragmenting and de-skilling the work of their nominal professional colleagues.

In the 1990s we have seen several large accounting firms dropping the sign "accountant" from their company names and/or setting up lucrative consultancy wings. Here we may disagree with Hanlon (1994) that Braverman's work can not be used for research into the accounting profession. The non-elite professional accountant's work may well become Scientific Management's next sacrifice. With more revenue coming from "non-accounting" activities, "Big Six" accounting firms already value entrepreneurial skills over and above technical accounting ones. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one Big Six firm is planning on exporting the majority of its tax work to Bombay. International tax codes and laws can be segmented into various "tasks" and allocated to local workers at a fraction of the cost of a UK qualified accountant. If there is a horizontal fissure within the profession we may in the future expect to see a two-tier accounting profession.

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Appendix 1 - Fields