Roots and embeddedness: Exclusivity of credentials in South African accountancy, 1960–2020

Accounting practice inherited from the formal British profession took root in the late nineteenth century and became the dominant accounting tradition in South Africa. This development aligned with other geographies of British colonial settlement, but the trajectory in South Africa entrenched the chartered credentials. Intra-professional contestation from Britain played itself out in South Africa to entrench the domination of a single designation. The chartered accounting profession achieved exclusivity in professional closure using its designation. A second dimension of this development is the sustained political economy of the designation in South Africa. This article explains the institutionalisation of the state–profession nexus as it unfolded towards the complex configuration of the professional accounting landscape of the twenty-first century.