He completed his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics in 1970 and his PhD at the University of Manchester in 1980.
[1] In the early 1990s, he moved from the United Kingdom to Canada, eventually accepting a research chair at the University of Alberta.
[9] Building on the insights of Foucault and Bourdieu, Cooper showed the importance of using accounting expertise to intervene in the public sphere.
[10] More recently, Cooper has served as a board member and resident accounting expert for the Parkland Institute, a Canadian-based public think-tank.
Cooper has supervised and/or acted as mentor to a group of prominent accounting academics.