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As academics we write in scholarly and professional journals (what we hope are) reasoned analyses of the actualities and potentialities of accounting practices. We read the similarly crafted endeavours of our colleagues, published in the same medium. There is a considerable temptation to forget that most people neither read this literature nor do they attend academic conferences, much less are they privy to discussions in the council chambers of the profession. For many people their understanding of who accountants are; of what they do; and of what they should do is much more likely to be shaped and indeed modified by more common means and through more informal interaction. Our particular interest is in the popular press as one such conduit for the everyday articulation and dissemination of representations of the roles and responsibilities of accountants. Our purpose is to suggest how and why everyday perceptions of the accountant and their connections to society might proceed along very different lines of logic from our own.

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