Between anarchy and authority: the New Zealand Society of Accountants’ management of crisis, 1989-1993

The paper discusses the management of a crisis which enveloped the NZSA in the late 1980s and threatened its dominant role in the regulation of corporate financial reporting in New Zealand. Different forms of regulation - external, collegiate and individual - are distinguished, and conditions for the crisis are located in inherent conflicts between them; in particular, in the opposed tendencies of the authority required for effective external and collegiate regulation, and anarchic qualities of the professional freedom presumed for individual regulation. The crisis is shown to have been precipitated by an anarchic rejection of the NZSA’s authority for collegiate regulation, and to have persisted while the New Zealand Government considered proposals for re-assigning the NZSA’s regulatory role to a public sector agency. The NZSA’s management of the crisis is shown to have been a measured co-operation in the construction of a new regulatory regime which provided it with enhanced regulatory authority.