Chapter 3: The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity and Class in the UK Accounting Profession

Research on professional identities has primarily explored how organisations and occupations influence and control people's work-related identities (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002) but has focused less on whether or how this control is mitigated by the influence of non-work identities (Ramarajan & Reid, 2013). This chapter is concerned with how minority racial and ethnic individuals experience their ethnic identity in the workplace.¹ More specifically, this chapter will investigate how ethnic identity is enacted through heritage culture and what this means in terms of workplace behaviours. The result is a typology illustrating how an individual's heritage culture intersects with race, class and professional identity to influence their work-based behaviours.