“GETTING BY” AND “GETTING ON” IN SERVICE WORK: LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE OF ACCOUNTING?

Abstract

The use of educated labour which can multi-task, make decisions and act responsibly facilitates the real subsumption of labour. By presenting data from an ethnographic study of students working in unskilled service jobs in the UK, we show that such workers are not subsumed totally but exhibit a resistant medium by extending their own frontiers of control and developing self-help policies. As many accounting students will have worked in the kinds of jobs reflected in our study, these experiences have important implications for the future of accounting in the USA and elsewhere where work within and outside the profession has been deskilled and educated labour is increasingly used to undertake lower skilled work