This paper explores the role of accounting in the attempted reform of the corporation during the “progressive era” in the United States. Focusing on the activities of three institutional bodies in the early twentieth century, the paper documents how their repeated recourse to “publicity,” which relied crucially on accounting technologies, failed to turn the corporation into an entity more sensitive to the public interest. Specifically, two interrelated contributions are made to existing literature on accounting and corporate governance. Firstly, the paper documents the early historical development of the now taken‐for‐granted phenomenon of accounting and adjudicating at the entity level (Miller and Power 2013). Secondly, the paper offers a rejoinder to present‐day projects of corporate governance which identify better and enhanced accountability as key to the successful reform of the corporation. During the progressive era, accounting expanded and territorialized new spaces, bringing trusts out of a hitherto secretive, private realm and into the view of the public. Yet this was not enough to engender substantive corporate reform.

Recent work has called for more research to be carried out exploring how professional projects develop in conjunction with wider processes of institutional change. We respond to these calls here by analysing the way in which tax professionals have responded to a major disruption at the field level. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's action plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting has proposed far reaching reforms in an attempt to bring corporate tax practice into line with changing moral boundaries in society. Through a combination of documentary analysis, participant observation and qualitative interviews, this paper shows how tax professionals negotiate changing moral imperatives. In doing so, the paper enhances our understanding of tax practice and contributes to extant literature on professionalization and institutional change in three principal ways. Firstly, we show how exogenous field-level changes afford professional groups opportunities for strategic repositioning. Secondly, we illustrate how different professional factions are differentially affected by processes of institutional change, distinguishing between in-house tax professionals and those working in public practice. Thirdly, we demonstrate how this strategic repositioning is made possible by the skillful deployment of the technical-cognitive resources of professional groups.