Estereótipos da profissão contábil no Brasil: uma analise dos boletins do CRC SP

Abstract

Since the Industrial Revolution, individuals search for professions which grant them social status. The first current of thought of the Theory of Professions claims that professions were created to meet the society's needs. However, subsequent theories (which have been adopted for this paper), presume that the main objective of any profession is to attain social status. In order to reach this goal, the society must develop a positive representation of the profession and its professionals. The social representations are non-scientific explanations of reality, making common and familiar objects accessible to a whole group through historical insight, full of cognitive approaches and interpretative distortions of individuals about objects. The literature analyzed here shows that the stereotypes created for the accountancy professional are predominantly negative, making the task of recruiting good students more difficult in this field. Professional class agencies are the main responsible for the profession, and their target is the attainment of professional status. Faced with this situation, this paper aims to identify and analyze the stereotypes in the rhetoric of the professional class agency for Brazilian accountants from 1962 to 2014. Through an exploratory and qualitative research, it was possible making a prior selection of stereotypes by means of the analysis of literature extracted from the 285 informative newsletters published by the CRC/SP. The data has been analyzed from the perspective of a historical-economical recapitulation, in parallel with the main accountancy milestones in Brazil. The obtained results confirm what Jeacle (2008) states: there is a relationship between positive and negative stereotypes, since both had the same behavior in many decades and, whenever the negative stereotypes were confirmed, the positive ones were confirmed as well. It was not possible establishing the same relationship with the neutral stereotypes group. The results also indicate that the accountancy professionals adapt themselves to the external changes by changing the signs of representation exposed to the society. It was also possible to observe that, in times of international crisis and threat to the accountancy professional outlook, the CRC/SP kept sharing signs that would depict this professional as competent and trustworthy.