Merging the Profession: A Social Network Analysis of the Consolidation of the Accounting Profession in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The merger of Chartered Accountants (CAs), Certified General Accountants (CGAs) and Certified Management Accountants (CMAs) in Canada to create the Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) designation is analyzed, using social network theory. The analysis examines the conversion of market power into political power through the legislative apportionment of council seats among the three legacy bodies. It then documents how political power affects the hiring of former senior association staff from each of the three predecessor bodies to run the merged association. Social network theory suggests that these appointments could be used to fill “structural holes” to ensure effective integration of the profession postmerger or could be used by those gaining political power within the network to reinforce their control over the merged association. The analysis shows that (i) the legislation consolidating the profession converted the market dominance of the formerCAs into political dominance, (ii) formerCAinstitute executives were disproportionately appointed to runCPAassociations, and (iii) in some provinces, no connection to the knowledge base of other legacy bodies through staff appointments at an executive level was maintained. The results raise concern about the loss of social capital through the hiring process and the effects of the continued use of political power to structure the merged association on the profession's stability and resilience given the diversity of its members.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".