Crafting careers in accounting: redefining gendered selves

Abstract

Purpose While women are increasingly in senior positions in accountancy firms, a century after gaining entry to this once exclusively male field, they are still struggling to achieve career success. The concept of possible selves and a model of career crafting are activated in an analysis of how a set of New Zealand professional accountants have pursued their careers. This paper aims to focus on how people actively craft career selves in the context of organisational and gendered constraints, some of which are self-imposed, and therefore, can be modified and revised. Design/methodology/approach Interviews with 36 male and female accounting professionals in New Zealand – 21 working in private firms and 15 in academia identify how careers are shaped by contexts, cultural understandings of gender, organisational structures within which accountants are located and wider environmental factors. Findings Women accountants in this study are both agential and responsive to a range of constraints they encounter. These women challenge the notion that professional achievement requires single minded allegiance to a career; their strategic career crafting demonstrates how career and family commitments are not irreconcilable but can be skilfully integrated to nurture multiple selves. Their strategies are considered alongside those of a comparable set of male accountants. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature on possible selves and the complexity of gendered lives through the application of a career crafting matrix to explore how accounting professionals forge careers and construct multiple selves.

A state-of-the-art overview of job-crafting research: current trends and future research directions

“…Career crafting involves lifelong proactive career behaviors that broaden career-relevant resources and explore career options so that individuals can respond to both the changing nature of jobs and their personal changes in needs, values, and/or interests (Lee et al, 2021). Other researchers have focused on examples of job crafting throughout someone's careeracross jobs and rolesas well as family, organizational and environmental influences on these careers (Vidwans and Du Plessis, 2019;Vidwans and Whiting, 2021). A recent intervention study operationalized career crafting as job crafting, which reflects the short-term career, and career self-management, which addresses the long-term or series of jobs that form the career (Van Leeuwen et al, 2021).…”

GigLawyer and/or BigLawyer? A grounded theory study of lawyer career craft

“…They build on job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001;Tims & Bakker, 2010) literature which focuses on the proactive behaviours an individual can undertake to change elements of their specific job and extend this concept to apply to career. Separate research independently formulates a model of career crafting that explores the linkages between contextual factors and past, present and future career pathways (Vidwans, 2016;Vidwans & Du Plessis, 2020), consisting of an interconnected triad of relational, task and cognitive crafting.…”

Intersections of women’s identities in professional accountancy careers

“…Motherhood is the primary reason for slower career advancement or for a woman to be overlooked for promotion (Cooper, 1992;Kristensen et al, 2017). This situation has been documented around the world, for example, in France (Dambrin and Lambert, 2008;Lupu, 2012), Cyprus (Socratous et al, 2016), Denmark (Kristensen et al, 2017) and New Zealand (Vidwans and Du Plessis, 2019). In addition, maternity is seen as something that could break a career (Lupu, 2012) and a lack of commitment to the job (Dambrin and Lambert, 2008).…”

“…Less than ten papers are identified with an intersectional explicitly approach to analyze gender inequalities in the accounting profession (Castro, 2012; Whiting, 2012; Castro and Holvino, 2016; Hayes and Jacobs, 2017; Adapa et al , 2016; Vidwans and Du Plessis, 2019; Sadler and Wessels, 2019; Vidwans and Cohen, 2020).…”