ABSTRACT This paper seeks to understand how insolvency practitioners attempt to build trust with a heterogeneous creditor body during the crisis of formal insolvency and the role accounting information and processes play. Accounting information is mobilized in different ways according to how insolvency practitioners believe the information will be interpreted and valued. This paper suggests specific qualitative characteristics, accounting principles, and processes which appear to enhance trust building in a crisis context. These include perceived objectivity, comparability, cash flow accounting, “matching” of secured liabilities with secured assets, and “crisis” audit. The value ascribed by insolvency practitioners to maintaining specific creditor relationships also appears relevant to trust‐building activities. A “tit‐for‐tat” strategy emerges with secured creditors, whereby insolvency practitioners engage in demonstrable fee write‐offs, but on the implicit understanding that future, lucrative work will come their way. This study points to the importance for researchers and policymakers of understanding the “desirable” properties of accounting through informed understandings of how and why that information is mobilized and received in specific relationships between people.

Drawing on interviews with accountants working at professional services firms (PSFs) in the UK, we explore how reflexivity enables accountants to recognise and negotiate class-based barriers to progression and inclusion. We identify a range of reflexive practices (including conversations with colleagues and clients, observations, mentoring, mulling over, and imagining) and show how these interact with habitus to structure the individual (mis)recognition of class-based barriers in the workplace. We find that reflexivity can engender an awareness of ‘difference’ and sense of inferiority relative to others, primarily for those from less privileged backgrounds. We provide evidence of the enabling role of reflexive practices which lead to purposive action for negotiating class-based barriers. However, we also find that reflexivity can lead to idiosyncratic strategies which support assimilation to (rather than challenging) existing practices in the accounting field. We find contradictory accounts of the effects of class, where class is recognised as a barrier, yet individuals are thought to progress through merit. We explain this tension through the limitations of reflexivity, restricted opportunities for reflexivity, and misrecognition of the effects of class in a seemingly meritocratic system. We provide examples of enduring and unrecognised class-based inequalities in accounting PSFs, including team composition and work allocation, class-segmented service lines, and the long-term consequences for those from less privileged backgrounds of having to work harder to ‘reach the same level’. Our findings suggest that PSFs must facilitate ‘difficult’ conversations aimed at breaking the culture of silence around class.

Advances towards egalitarianism in professional recruitment may be offset by processes of occupational re-segregation. Drawing on gender theory this paper investigates horizontal segregation in the UK insolvency profession, as revealed through the lived experiences of female and male practitioners. It is shown that horizontal segregation pervades at different levels of practice and is undergirded by various elements of gender essentialism. Physical essentialism explains why insolvency practice has been traditionally gendered male. Interactional essentialism combines with the management of work-life balance to define the subfields of corporate and personal insolvency as masculine and feminine respectively. Gender essentialist assumptions also pervade the distribution of roles and the allocation of work tasks. Networks are identified as arenas for the reproduction and perpetuation of occupational segregation. The findings indicate the continuing potency of gender in everyday professional life, the limitations of diversity-orientated policies and the complexities of formulating transformative agendas.