The United Kingdom

The effective regulation of accounting practice is still an emergentphenomenon in the UK. Although there is now an influentialrhetoric of accounting order that, for many, serves to define thestate of practice in terms of aspirations, a careful examination ofthe reality of corporate accounting would show that until veryrecently practice has remained both fluid and diverse. Whilst therehas been a growth of mechanisms and institutions for the standardisationof financial accounting, there equally has been an impressiverecord of accounting innovation and creativity as companieshave sought to play a proactive role in the creation of accountingknowledge and practice (Shah, 1996). Creativity functioning alongsidea rhetoric of standardisation has been an important feature ofcontemporary British accounting, as was evidenced by the concernswith both ‘creative accounting’ and ‘creative compliance’. Thedebates over brand accounting, offbalancesheet financing andaccounting for goodwill all point to the potential of British practiceto push continually at the frontiers of what is acceptable.An interest in accounting autonomy on the part of the corporatesector in the UKhas been (and still is) very real. As circumstanceshave changed, the autonomy that is available has been differentiallyexercised: in good times and bad, in periods of heightened andweakened trade union power, and in relation to different states ofthe market for corporate control. But however corporate discretionhas been and still is exercised, accounting regulation has to be seenas an active and often vigorous attempt to constrain and modifythat very discretion. Hardly surprisingly the resultant regulatoryprocesses have been dynamic, often quite full of conflict and subject