Competing Evaluations of Worth and Fragile Compromises: Credential-Based Pay in a Public Sector Bureaucracy

This paper examines how credential-based unequal pay is justified, criticised, and sustained within a public-sector accounting bureaucracy, the Controller and Accountant General’s Department in Ghana. It analyses a dual-compensation regime under which chartered accountants receive higher remuneration than non-chartered colleagues despite substantial overlap in tasks and common appraisal criteria. The paper brings institutional logics into dialogue with Boltanski and Thévenot’s orders of worth to explain both the historical emergence of the credential premium and the situated justificatory work through which it is defended and contested. In doing so, it also considers how the postcolonial history of accounting professionalisation has contributed to the institutional authority attached to professionally certified expertise. Empirically, the study draws on more than five years of research engagement in the field, including interviews, participant observation, informal conversations, and documentary analysis. The findings show that chartered accountants justify superior pay through professional logics that emphasise industrial and market principles of expertise, scarcity, professional investment, and external labour-market value, whereas non-chartered accountants advance critiques centred on civic principles of a bureaucratic logic of fairness, equality, and common contribution. The unequal remuneration regime is sustained, however, not because it commands settled legitimacy, but because organisational actors manage critique through fragile compromises, including compensatory allowances, selective accommodations, and deferred administrative and legal reviews, that contain dissent while leaving the differential compensation structure intact, though contested. The paper contributes to critical accounting scholarship by theorising remuneration as a contested technology of valuation through which public bureaucracies classify accounting labour, reproduce professional closure, and manage inequality.