We use impression management theory to make sense of this evidence. To examine how Big Four auditors react to public scrutiny, we explore their evidence at a public inquiry on the Irish banking crisis. We demonstrate how productivity measures can produce a false sense of clarity and direction and an incomplete representation of an occupational identity, which also renders problematic the transparency and comparability that those measures produce. Overall, by focusing on the ambivalent role of productivity measurement, this study contributes to our understanding of the organizational dynamics that make accountants’ business partner identity fragile. We thus show how accountants resist the very technologies that otherwise form their tools of the trade and shape a crucial part of their occupational identity and status. We further illustrate how, to protect their aspired identity against the entrenchment of such an unwanted self, accountants (subtly) resist productivity measures. We find that accountants’ realization of this ambiguity in productivity measurement can make them recognize the (potential) unwanted self that an unreflective subordination to those measures might give rise to. However, this assumption can contradict their business partner identity, which they perceive as entailing complex, varying, and strategically oriented tasks that are difficult to measure and evaluate in standardized units. How do accountants experience and respond to increasing productivity pressure and a corresponding measurement regime monitoring their work? Drawing on case research in an international technology company, our study problematizes that productivity measurement tends to build on the assumption that accountants perform primarily routinized and standardized tasks that are amenable to quantification. We conclude by examining the implications of this research for analysing stereotyping and the way the stereotype of the accountant has been developing in recent years. This accords with the range of ways the word beancounter has been used as a stereotype of accountants in a database of newspapers and magazines published between January 1970 and June 1995.

In order to explore further the different nuances of the beancounter stereotype, we develop a general model of stereotype generation. These nuances can be affected by the nature of the relationship different groups have with the stereotyped group. Stereotypes may be generated from different sources, transmitted through varied media and associated with a range of subtly different nuances. Evidence is provided from a literature search on “beancounter' that this traditional stereotype is not disappearing, but that it is multifaceted, incorporating several very different nuances. Recently the stereotype has been confirmed as applicable in the past, but some have suggested that this long standing stereotype is disappearing. The image of the beancounter who is single-mindedly preoccupied with precision and form, methodical and conservative, and a boring joyless character has, until recently, been widely recognized as the clear stereotype of the accountant.

Beancounter