Les trajectoires de construction de légitimité ou de délégitimation des contrôleurs de gestion

The main purpose of this article is to understand how management accountants build their legitimacy, or fail to do so. To explore this process in depth, we analyzed the cases of several management accountants and the discourses of some of their interlocutors through 51 interviews in three different organizations. Five types of trajectories are brought to light: the experienced management accountant, the management accountant with substantial potential, the management accountant who aims to move to operational management, the management accountant who is unfamiliar with operational processes, and the unsuccessful management accountant. This article shows that not all legitimation strategies used by management accountants enable the latter to obtain legitimacy. Our findings reveal that the individual legitimacy trajectories of management accountants lead them to obtain certain preferential natures of legitimacy, namely functional and cognitive legitimacy, pushing the management accountant towards a business partner role.