Networks and networking as spaces of change : Responding to the Diversity Agenda in the Accounting Profession

This paper is positioned within the research problematic of understanding how diversity networking spaces among professional service firms are experienced as giving meaning to the self, as a habituated, socially-productive, ‘networking’ professional. Drawing on insights from the work of Lefebvre, we analyse interview and survey data to explore how diversity networking spaces are perceived, conceived and represented as human-material spatial ensembles for engaging with the diversity imperative. While such spaces are imbued with, and reinforce, a sense of group identity for members, they are strongly professionally-coded rather than places of resistance or activism. Diversity networking spaces appeared fragmented, with an uneven, London-centric geography, operating at the margins of the workplace. The wealth and resource distribution of accounting firms, concentrated particularly within the Big 4 firms, has created a geography of diversity networking spatial practices in their image. The materialisation of successful, sustainable diversity networking spaces appeared to be contingent on a deliverable business plan, where accounting mechanisms play a crucial role in the measurability of impacts and commercial outputs. Ironically, the more successful networks with leadership opportunities that can be leveraged for career progression are highly professionalised, to the extent that they appear more gendered and gendering. We further suggest that there are hierarchies within networks. The socio-material networking spaces that really matter, where power and influence flow within firms at elite levels, remain private and hidden, on a more homogenous, exclusive, invitation-only basis