On being professional in the 21st century: an empirically informed essay

Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory American Accounting AssociationVol. 34, No. 2 DOI: 10.2308/ajpt-50698May 2015pp. 167–200

On Being Professional in the 21st Century:An Empirically Informed Essay

Mark W. Dirsmith, Mark A. Covaleski, and Sajay Samuel

SUMMARY: The purpose of this article is to reflect on the ongoing transformation of the

Big 8/6/5/4 public accounting firms, with the intent of helping primarily doctoral students

and junior faculty engaged in developing their own research programs. Drawing on a

variety of theoretical research traditions that we have employed in our field research

spanning over 30 years, we will briefly reconsider three ‘‘moments’’ through which the

phenomenon of the multi-discipline (or, as termed in the sociology of professions

literature, the ‘‘entrepreneurial’’) professional service firm has shaped both accounting

firms and accountants: Moment I, in which administrative partners implemented centrally

orchestrated control systems to better direct the actions of audit team members, and the

response of the latter to resist, deflect, and transform such efforts; Moment II, in which

the profession attempted to rebrand itself as a professional service delivery system that

could offer ‘‘higher platforms of service’’ to a global business community, in a legal and

political context shaped by regulators, U.S. presidential and congressional politicians,

the lay membership of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA),

and such laws as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; and Moment III, in which the concept of

professional entrepreneurialism became internalized within and acted upon by both

individual professionals and firms, although in a manner not wholly controlled by

administrative partners nor practice partners. Impressions gleaned from this reflective

exercise are explored, and implications for researchers who may be contemplating field

research using qualitative methods are sketched.

Keywords: qualitative field studies; entrepreneurial professional; audit firm culture;

mentoring; formal control methods; politics; power.

Mark W. Dirsmith is a Professor at The Pennsylvania State University, Mark A. Covaleski is a Professor at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, and Sajay Samuel is a Clinical Professor at The Pennsylvania StateUniversity.

We thank the Deloitte & Touche Foundation for its support for this ongoing program of research, as well as the hundredsof auditors, especially the ‘‘informants,’’ who have participated in our fieldwork. We also thank Yves Gendron andMichael K. Power (editors), as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their insightful suggestions.

Editor’s note: Accepted by Yves Gendron and Michael K. Power under Senior Editor W. Robert Knechel.

Submitted: October 2011Accepted: December 2013

Published Online: January 2014

167

INTRODUCTION

Society and its organizational and institutional infrastructure are widely thought to be going

through fundamental transformation. Such terms as ‘‘knowledge society,’’ ‘‘global business

community,’’ and ‘‘virtual corporation’’ reflect the many efforts to make sense of the

contemporary changes in organizational and human arrangements (e.g., Drucker 1993; Zuboff

1988). As a result of this transformation, knowledge has become ‘‘a strategic resource of social

power and control’’ (Blackler, Reed, and Whitaker 1993, 851), making ‘‘expertise one of the

primary arenas in which struggles to control the organization and management of work are fought

out’’ (Reed 1996, 574). Theorists of the professions have suggested a related transformation of

professional identity: from that of the disinterested expert driven by a ‘‘service ideal’’ to that of a

‘‘knowledge worker’’ producing services sold by a ‘‘managerial professional business’’ (Abbott

1988; Reed 1996; Cooper, Hinings, Greenwood, and Brown 1996).

Within a research program spanning more than 30 years, we have attempted to understand the

transformation of the Big 8/6/5/4 public accounting firms into entrepreneurial, multi-discipline,

professional service firms. Admittedly, our work did not start out with grandiose aspirations of

developing a program of research nor of mapping this transformation. Some three decades ago, we

only wanted to better understand the social dimensions of audit practice. The research ‘‘program’’

and our recognition of the ‘‘transformation’’ of the accounting profession emerged from the process

of conducting the fieldwork. Consistent with this orientation, our focus of inquiry was not on the

theoretical traditions we used, which included the sociology of professions (Dirsmith and Covaleski

1985; Dirsmith, Heian, and Covaleski 1997), symbolic interaction (Fischer and Dirsmith 1995;

Dirsmith, Samuel, Covaleski, and Heian 2009), structuration theory (Dirsmith et al. 1997),

Foucauldian analyses (Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, and Samuel 1998), and deconstruction

(Dirsmith et al. 1997). Nor was our research driven by a prior commitment to using qualitative,

naturalistic research methods (Covaleski and Dirsmith 1990). Instead, our research efforts have

been shaped by the desire to better understand the social context and, indeed, political dynamics

within and surrounding accounting firms. The aim of this paper is to describe both our research

practices and findings, and to thereby suggest avenues of investigation for accounting faculty

studying the auditing profession in the 21st century. Toward this end, we will, for example, reflect

on our field observations to offer younger academics directions as to themes they might explore in

their own research, detail key research questions we have asked that may be used by others in the

field, suggest two specific ways in which an orthodox, quantitatively oriented dissertation or paper

may be augmented with qualitative forms of evidence, and offer suggestions for generating

publications and external research references.

The remainder of this paper is organized into three sections. In the second section, we discuss

our concern for studying the social dynamics of the public accounting profession that allowed us to

better appreciate its transformation. The third section offers a very brief description of the various

theoretical traditions we have used, centered on their common focus on the interplay between the

structural and social features of organizations, followed by a discussion of the three ‘‘moments’’ by

which the profession is being transformed, as revealed by our field observations: Moment I, in

which administrative partners implemented centrally orchestrated control systems to better direct

the actions of audit team members, and the response of the latter to resist, deflect, and transform

such efforts; Moment II, in which the profession attempted to rebrand itself as a professional service

delivery system that could offer ‘‘higher platforms of service’’ to a global business community, in a

legal and political context shaped by regulators, U.S. presidential and congressional politicians, the

lay membership of the AICPA, and such laws as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; and Moment III, in which

the concept of professional entrepreneurialism became internalized within and acted upon by both

individual professionals and firms, although in a manner not wholly controlled by administrative

168 Dirsmith, Covaleski, and Samuel

Auditing: A Journal of Practice & TheoryMay 2015

partners nor practice partners. These ‘‘moments’’ represent dimensions or aspects of the phenomena

studied that may overlap and run parallel to one another, rather than as a temporally ordered

sequence of events. The fourth section explores possible lines of investigation for future

researchers.

TRUE CONFESSIONS AND THE PROFESSIONS IN TRANSITION

True Confessions

As is true for most accounting academics today, we began our doctoral studies in programs

aimed at preparing researchers to publish in mainstream journals. In part, this entailed drawing on

Finance as a supporting business area and Economics as a supporting outside discipline, although it

also included some experimental psychology literature aimed almost exclusively at optimizing audit

judgments in the context of rational decision making. But given our prior experience as practicing

auditors, with a subset of the coauthors having experience with ‘‘A’’ offices of the then-Big 8 firms

and conducting audits of Fortune 25 clients, we did not see that a predominantly Finance and

Economics orientation was useful to better understand that lived reality. In the field, we almost

never had sufficient information to make fully ‘‘rational’’ decisions, but instead sought enough

evidence to ‘‘get our arms around’’ a nagging audit issue in order to develop a position we ‘‘could

live with’’ or ‘‘get a good night’s sleep with.’’ Nor did we sit at our desks combining ‘‘distal cues’’ to

form optimal judgments, but rather talked with fellow auditors at our own ranks so as not to look

overly foolish, and if deemed still a problem, discussed the matter with the next higher-ranking

audit team member, and so on up through the engagement and concurring partners, office Director

of Accounting and Auditing, national office, and possibly the Securities and Exchange Commission

(SEC). In short, doing auditing seemed to be a lot of talk, suggesting to us that auditing was

predominantly a social, rather than technical, process. Thus, as freshly minted Ph.D.s, we saw a

need to emphasize auditing as a social practice. This was something of a ‘‘eureka moment.’’According to Brinberg and McGrath (1982), there are three interdependent domains that

comprise a typical research project: (1) the conceptual domain, which includes concepts and

relations expressed in a theoretical template; (2) the methodological domain, which includes test

instruments and techniques for gathering observations and analyzing data; and (3) the substantive

domain, which includes the processes, states, and events of some real-world phenomenon to be

studied. They argued that studies typically bring together two of these three domains to form a basic

orientation, and then add the third domain to complete the design. Thus, two domains assume a

position of primacy, while the third is deferred to a secondary position, thereby creating three

possible research strategies. As illustrated in Figure 1, the first strategy, Path A, combines the

conceptual and methodological domains to yield a research strategy to better understand the

phenomenon of interest by refining the theory and methods of study. Brinberg and McGrath (1982)

concluded that this path generally dominates within most disciplines, a position we assert is

particularly true of auditing and accounting research. With time and repetition, there is even a

tendency for one of the two primary domains to dominate the strategy, while the other becomes

stylized as the various nuances of the now-subordinated domain become better known by the

research community, making possible its abbreviated expression. In accounting, this dominant

domain would appear to be the methodological domain, as researchers attempt to refine the

methods/instruments/datasets/statistical techniques deployed, with each incremental step taken

becoming increasingly small as the law of diminishing returns sets in.

In contrast, the strategy depicted by Path B first combines the conceptual and substantive

domains, yielding a mapping between theoretical constructs and events. In turn, the selection,

development, and use of research methods are shaped by the concepts and substantive domain

being examined. As opposed to Path A, Path B focuses on better fitting the phenomenon of interest

On Being Professional in the 21st Century: An Empirically Informed Essay 169


to the theory. Path C combines the methodological and substantive domains, and focuses on

mapping observational techniques onto observable events and relating sets of observable data. The

overall orientation of Path C is the construction of a dataset, although perhaps a more descriptive

term is that Path C reflects a pre-theoretical orientation, possibly suggestive of a grounded theory

perspective.

In our own work, we have followed Path B, in which we have mapped events onto theory, with

the substantive domain of audit practice dominating our orientation. But what would be an

appropriate conceptual domain? The disciplines of Finance and Economics did not offer obvious

ways of examining the ‘‘talk’’ of auditing, but rather the areas of Management and Sociology

offered promise. One key source that shaped our conceptual framework early on was Berger and

Luckmann (1966) (see, also, Lincoln and Guba 1985; Power 2003), who reasoned that social reality

is constituted through social interactions. In this perspective, the perceptions of individuals are

formed by their interactions with each other. When social interactions settle into habitual patterns

through repetition and stable expectations, the social world takes on an ‘‘objective’’ form, appearing

as a structuring force ‘‘out-there.’’ This overall perspective has influenced our choice of the theories

we used to help interpret the substantive domain of interest. Our commitment to understanding the

lived realities of audit practice made us theoretical agnostics; i.e., theories were useful if and to the

extent they helped us understand the substantive issues in the world of public accounting.

FIGURE 1Three Research Paths in Social Science Research

Source: Brinberg and McGrath (1982).



To illustrate, one central concern was to understand how professionals are managed, who,

because of their very professional status, believe that they are simply above that sort of thing, that

being managed would compromise their autonomy and expert judgment in serving the client.

Anthony Hopwood suggested Foucault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish, as well as deconstruction

(e.g., Derrida 1976a, 1976b) and symbolic interaction (e.g., Strauss 1993; Hall 1997), would help

illuminate our work with auditors; Mayer Zald suggested that Abbott’s (1988) System ofProfessions would forever change the way we looked at professions; and David Cooper suggested

we apply Giddens’ (1984) structuration framework to unpack our field observations. Continuing the

example, one coauthor did not ‘‘get’’ Foucault’s relevance until a coauthor suggested Foucault’s

(1983) ‘‘Afterword,’’ a sort of Cliff’s Notes to his work. Viewed through the lens of fieldwork, the

coauthor came to better grasp Foucault’s relevance, to both interpret the field observations and to

more fully understand the study participants’ world. Thus, informed by our fieldwork, we

continually reread key scholarly works to sharpen our theoretical insights, and then reread field

notes to cast our observations into clearer conceptual relief in a process that Van Maanen (1988)

describes as ‘‘tacking back and forth between the study participant and academic worlds.’’ But since

the substantive world of auditors remained dominant in guiding our work, our use of differing

theoretical perspectives to interpret that world is perhaps aptly explained by Alvesson (2003, 14,

25):

I propose a reflexive pragmatism view . . . This approach means working with alternative

lines of interpretation and vocabularies and reinterpreting the favored lines of

understanding through the systematic involvement of alternative points of departure . . .Jumping between paradigms is a very difficult sport, but it is not impossible to widen and

vary one’s horizon, looking self-critically at favored assumptions and lines of inquiry.

We strongly urge future researchers to join us on Path B, to develop research programs anchored in

the substantive domain of public accounting and understood through the use of multiple theories.

We should briefly discuss our qualitative, naturalistic research methods, whose relevance we

better appreciated as we immersed ourselves in the substantive domain of the public accounting

firms. According to Lincoln and Guba (1985, 37), qualitative methods are preferable to quantitative

techniques when: ‘‘1) realities are multiple, constructed and holistic; 2) knower and known are

interactive and inseparable; 3) only time- and context-bound working hypotheses are possible; 4)

all entities are in a state of mutual, simultaneous shaping, so it is impossible to distinguish causes

from effects; and 5) inquiry is value-bound.’’ In general, qualitative research methods, although

rooted in the lived world of practitioners, may take on a variety of forms. Multiple short

engagements, each lasting a few days or a week, or immersion in the site of study, well-designed

surveys, and surveys of key participants backed by interview data, telephone conversations,

including online conference calls, are all legitimate techniques to gather the necessary data for

conducting qualitative research.

Our own research may be generally described as an ongoing interpretive field study, within

which we implemented an array of strategies designed to ensure the trustworthiness of observations

and interpretations (Berg 1989; Lincoln and Guba 1985, Chapters 1, 11). These strategies included

prolonged engagement with the auditing substantive domain, triangulation across sources of

evidence, interviewer debriefing upon exiting the field, separation of evidence gathering from its

interpretation, member checks with participants to ascertain if they agreed with our interpretations

of their lived experiences, and separating first-order interpretations (those of participants) from

second-order interpretations (those of the researchers). We have focused on examining certain

facets of structural and social change, and resistance to this change, using the native language of the

participants and conducting analyses in a largely inductive, descriptive manner. Our reliance on

qualitative methods also seemed appropriate given the uncharted waters we were embarking on.



The profession has been undergoing fundamental transformation and qualitative methods are open-

ended and, therefore, lend themselves to exploring emergent phenomena. Moreover, the broad

spectrum of qualitative methods permits the researcher to observe divergent opinions, contested

positions, and complex social dynamics at play.

The organizations we primarily studied were each of the international public accounting firms.

These firms are among the largest professional services firms in the world and are perhaps still the

most under-researched professions associated with commercial enterprises (Abbott 1988). Our

interviews have been semi-structured with individuals across all ranks within the firms, but

primarily senior managers through senior managing partners and international directors, that often

involved repeated interviews with key informants over a number of years. We used a theoretical

sampling plan (Lincoln and Guba 1985, 199–202) whose purpose is to ‘‘maximize information, not

facilitate generalization . . . and depends on the ebb and flow of information as the study is carried

out rather than on a priori considerations.’’ Within this sampling plan, adjustments were made in

individuals selected for inclusion in the study as we gained more understanding of the phenomena

we were probing, as well as the theories we were invoking, as each informed the other. Not only did

we use our own emerging understanding of the social domain being examined, but also that of those

interviewed to select participants who they believed were especially knowledgeable about the

phenomena being studied. Interviews have ranged from one to seven hours (this latter was a

recently retired national office managing partner who was eager to share his experiences days

before his death), averaging more than two hours, although one participant was accompanied

throughout his professional engagements and civic involvements across four non-consecutive

workweeks. Unusual, but very productive, settings included subway rides, hikes, basketball games,

bars, and a yacht voyage. Questions asked were invented in vivo—close to the point of origin (Van

Maanen 1988)—and often were precipitated by unique opportunities (cf. ‘‘Top Gun’’ scenario in the

final section of the paper). This form of evidence dominates Moments I and III in the third section.

Data collection also included self-reported life histories and daily diaries recorded on

participant-controlled tape recorders over six months, direct observation, and an extensive review of

archival material, such as individual partner plans and practice office business plans expressed in

terms of U.S. and international firm goals. The archival materials also included publicly available

material and internal firm documents, such as firm policy statements, firm websites, marketing and

recruitment material, conference calls, video clips describing the AICPA’s ‘‘Vision Project,’’AICPA material on its proposed IGC (Interdisciplinary Global Credential), SEC regulations and

speeches on trends in the profession, extensive press coverage of lawsuits, proposed regulations,

audit failures, the demise of Arthur Andersen, as well as the Congressional Record. We also

examined regulator and congressional investigation hearing minutes and resulting proposed and

passed regulations, as well as campaign contributions from the firms to key congressional and U.S.

presidential candidates (Center for Responsive Politics 2007a, 2007b) (the Big 5 were among the

largest ten organizational donors).

While accounting research is employing what has been termed manifest content analysis using

ethnographic software packages, we have once more taken a qualitative approach by subjecting

archival material to latent content analysis. According to Berg (1989, 107), such an analysis reveals

the symbolism and structural meaning behind the data. A potent technique when used on archival

materials (Merton 1968, 366–370), dangers nevertheless attend drawing interpretative conclusions

from such symbolism. However, using multiple sources, achieving high inter-researcher consensus,

and presenting detailed archival evidence to substantiate interpretative conclusions are ways to

reduce these dangers. Archival evidence dominated observations in Moment II in the third section

of the paper.

For the uninitiated field researcher, the variety and amount of evidence we collected might

seem to be comprehensive, even overwhelming, but in practice, it simply happened in an



incremental, step-by-step manner over a long period of time. Our focus steadfastly remained on the

substantive domain being examined, and we would try to assemble evidence that would enable us

to better understand that domain. For example, we would begin interviews with partners whom we

were already familiar with—possibly alums of our universities—to begin probing the issues we

were tracking; frequently, they would indicate during interviews that ‘‘you’d probably be interested

in examining my own performance report for this year’’ and then provide us with that

documentation, or ask ‘‘are you aware of the AICPA’s efforts to . . .’’ and point us in the direction of

obtaining relevant information. During interviews, we would ask whom did they think would be

particularly knowledgeable about the area and what questions we should pose of them that the

interviewees would themselves be interested in hearing the answers. We formed the distinct

impression that the participants wanted to talk to us and wanted us to share our results with them, as

well as share them with students, even calling well after what we thought was the end of the study

to share their own emerging observations and interpretations that might lead to a new wave of

research on our part. The research process turned out to be highly stimulating and the evidence

accumulated, even though we started on a modest scale and despite the fact that the academic

community and even our own universities were not always receptive to our work. Perseverance

proved key.

Focal Substantive Domain: The Accounting Profession

That auditing is now practiced and studied as one product in a suite of services sold by

entrepreneurial professional service firms reflects historical changes in the concept of

‘‘professionalism.’’ Kimball (1995) describes six historical stages in the development of our

understanding of the professions: (1) derived from the Latin root ‘‘profession,’’ meaning oath or

vow, in sixteenth-century English, a profession referred as much to the ‘‘group of those who made

the vow’’ as it did to the act of avowal; (2) that one could both ‘‘make a profession’’ and ‘‘join a

profession’’ in religious settings underscored the migration of the term to secular occupations such

as law and medicine; (3) the theological roots of the term ‘‘profess’’ emphasized the ethic of selfless

service over that of self-interest and personal enrichment; (4) the influence of legal thought during

the nineteenth century introduced the notion of paid-for ‘‘professional services’’ and self-regulating

‘‘professional associations’’; (5) educators, who became the only ‘‘professors,’’ underwrote the

attachment of the professions to formal, scientific learning; and (6) the forces depicted in the first

five stages produced the modern professional, who required the credentials of formal learning to

certify expertise in serving others and was controlled by associations that regulated the supply and

quality of its members and products. As it specifically concerns the auditing profession, this

historically informed understanding of professional endeavor finds considerable resonance within

the extant professional literature, such as the International Standards of Auditing (ISA) 200 2009

definition of professional judgment: ‘‘the application of relevant training, knowledge, and

experience, within the context provided by auditing, accounting, and ethical standards, in making

informed decisions about courses of action that are appropriate in the circumstances of the audit

engagement’’ (International Federation of Accountants [IFAC] 2010, 77).

Yet, on all three fronts of the historical constitution of professionalism—formal training,

selfless service, and self-regulating associations—it would seem that the accounting profession is

undergoing a period of profound crisis marked by the emergence of a new era whose consequences

remain to be seen and studied, which we interpret as the seventh stage of professional

development.1 On this theme, Abbott (1988, 102) reasoned that unlike occupations, the professions

1 The principle of self-regulation by a profession constitutes a unique characteristic in the Anglo-Saxon context. Incontinental Europe (e.g., France), different models of regulation have been followed wherein much strongerrelationships have evolved between the profession and the state.



‘‘expand their cognitive dominion by using abstract knowledge to annex new areas.’’ This impulse

was mirrored in auditing, for example, in the implementation of statistical sampling methods

(Carpenter, Dirsmith, and Gupta 1994; Power 1997) and expert systems (Fischer and Dirsmith

1995) to formalize human judgment, and the AICPA’s Vision and Horizons projects (discussed in

Moment 1 in the third section of the paper) to offer ‘‘higher level platforms of service.’’ While such

systems of abstract knowledge enable a profession to define the societal problems it addresses, to

develop services addressing these problems (defined as a profession’s jurisdiction), and to defend

its jurisdiction against competing professions, Abbott (1988, 324–325) underscored the resulting

threats to professionalism, observing that ‘‘[P]rofessionalism itself competes with alternative forms

of structuring expertise, in particular with commodification and organization . . . Multi-professional

firms in accounting, information and architecture, the team concept in medicine and social services,

elaborate professional bureaucracies in engineering and law, all encode professional knowledge in

the structure of organizations themselves.’’The notion that professionalism entails a large element of unstructured judgments rooted in

specialized knowledge, Larson (1977) describes as processes characterized by a low ‘‘technicality/

indeterminancy ratio,’’ meaning that judgment cannot be reduced to preprogrammed standard

operating procedures, but rather that the individual professional must retain sufficient discretion to

cope with unforeseen problems. Therefore, to retain its distinctiveness from a mere occupation, a

profession must extend its knowledge base as existing knowledge stock becomes standardized.

It is by the very fact that with time, professional judgment becomes standardized through

codification that it is rendered into a commodity. Refining this insight, Alvesson (1993) argued that

the symbolic claims to knowledge are more important than the technical application of knowledge;

that the rhetorical constructing of a jurisdiction is central to the success of a profession. Whereas

traditionally this rhetoric has centered on trumpeting the scientific rationality of professional

practice, Alvesson (1993, 1,013) speculated that recent strategies tend to focus on more abstract

themes such as ‘‘intuition, flexibility, creativity, and social skills’’ appropriate for knowledge

entrepreneurs (see, also, Cooper and Robson 2006; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006; Suddaby,

Gendron, and Lam 2009). Pursuing this theme, Reed (1996, 576, 581) observed that a new

understanding of expertise is called for because ‘‘it is the putative universality, codifiability,

neutrality, and mobility of modern expertise that sets it apart from the localism, particularism and

stability characteristic of traditional expertise.’’ The claim of a universally applicable expertise, and

of the ability to quell socioeconomic turbulence, gives the knowledge entrepreneur the ability to

comfort the anxious client who faces the uncertainties and complexities of globalized and

borderless commerce. Such globalized expertise ‘‘offers the entrepreneurial professionals the

opportunity to exploit the potential for cognitive expansion, material advancement and socio-

political enhancement that these developments present’’ (Reed 1996, 588). Brint (1994, 17–19)

theorized that the economic and social forces favoring globalization may have contributed directly

to the general decline of traditional professionalism marked by a ‘‘service ideal’’ in favor of

commodified, readily transferrable expertise that wields knowledge as a commercial resource,

although Cooper and Robson (2006, 423) have wondered if the traditional service ideal represents

only a ‘‘fantasy of nostalgia.’’ The existing literature has, however, tended to conflate the concepts

of commodification and commercialization, as well as entrepreneurial professional and knowledge

worker, which we will attempt to disentangle in the third section. Briefly, our fieldwork suggests

that: commodification entails the standardization of professional endeavor, commercialization is a

corresponding response that entails a recognized need to regenerate the abstract system of

knowledge by developing new audit products and expanding the profession’s jurisdiction to new

practice areas, and entrepreneurial professionals are those firm members seeking to develop new

audit products and firm practice areas, while knowledge workers apply new systems of knowledge

in specific clients.



Following the arguments of Abbott (1981), we see that the emerging entrepreneurial

professions justify their necessity partly by helping their clients address the dramatic change,

complexity, and disorder that they face. Thus, experts appear as mediators between clients and an

increasingly complex world, who promise, with their specialized knowledge, to guide clients safely

through difficult situations. In part, this is necessitated by the ever-present forces of standardization/

commercialization that undermine the claim of ‘‘expert’’ service, discussed in Moment III in the

third section.

ILLUSTRATIVE FIELD OBSERVATIONS RECURSIVELY INFORMED BY THEORY

Within this section, we will briefly describe field observations from prior studies (especially

Dirsmith et al. 2009) as they relate to our focus on the transformation of the firms and their

members. We have organized this discussion into three ‘‘moments’’ understood as dimensions or

aspects of the phenomena studied, which can run parallel and overlap one another, rather than as a

temporally ordered sequence of events: (1) the rise of the entrepreneurial professional; (2) the

attempted codification of the entrepreneurial profession; and (3) the continued transformation of the

global knowledge entrepreneur. These moments are then followed by a subsection offering

impressions gained from the fieldwork.

Anchored in the social world of auditing practice, we began our long-term fieldwork with

neither any particular theoretical perspective nor research method in mind. In order to better

understand our field observations, we immersed ourselves in diverse theoretical literatures,

including the work of Foucault (for further discussion of how Foucault has been used in accounting

research, see Gendron and Baker [2005]), the sociology of professions (e.g., Abbott [1988], referred

to earlier in the paper), symbolic interaction (e.g., Strauss 1993; Hall 1997), structuration (e.g.,

Giddens 1984), and deconstruction (e.g., Derrida 1978a, 1978b), especially as applied by Frug

(1984). While each of these theoretical perspectives brings into sharp relief differing facets of

substantive domains, they share a common focus of emphasizing the interplay between social/

interpersonal actions and structural/organizational forces. For instance, Foucault (1979) emphasized

how ‘‘disciplinary power’’ (the structural/organizational) works through the action of the norm

exemplified by such surveillance techniques as examinations, dossiers, and what he called the

‘‘capitalization of time,’’ in which objectives are to be achieved within specified time limits using a

productivity rating index (MBO, in our case); this is set against ‘‘pastoral power’’ (Foucault 1988)

(the social/interpersonal), in which the individual who speaks to a guide (the mentor, in our case)

identifies with and avows what is being said, thereby constituting his/her self-identity. Similarly,

symbolic interaction focuses on the constitution of social realities in and through such interactional

strategies as negotiation, conflict, manipulation, coercion, and power brokering (the interpersonal),

which are influenced by existing rule systems, norms, laws, and societal expectations (the

structural). In turn, it examines the interplay of applying power by individuals (the social, and refers

to the control of resources, including information, by individuals), and meta-power (the structural,

and refers to those strategic activities that establish or modify the rules of the game by which social

actors have to play to attain their ends). Within the structuration account, focus is placed on

examining the production, transformation, reproduction, and dissolution of social institutions by

specifically incorporating both the concepts of structure (such as the codes, rules, and standard

operating procedures) that influence and are influenced by social actions of organizational actors in

their day-to-day activities. Here, the social and the structural are intertwined with one another such

that structures are understood to inhere in social relations that are at once constrained and promoted

by organizational routines; according to this perspective, structure, broadly construed, influences

the social interactions, even the sanctioned language forms used (e.g., in public accounting, a focus

on ‘‘realization rates’’), taking place within organizations, which are nevertheless transformed

through the social actions of individuals, who, in applying facets of formal organizational structure,



subtly modify them over time. Within an especially telling deconstruction of the discursive

rationalizations of contemporary organizational forms, Frug (1984) emphasizes two forms of

rhetoric—the formalist model (the structural) and the expertise model (the social). Within the

former, such organizational attributes as ‘‘instrumental rationality,’’ ‘‘technocratic efficiency,’’

‘‘neutrality,’’ and ‘‘objectivity’’ are valorized, relying on machine-like, impersonal, rationalist,

neutral mechanisms to support organizational functioning whereby objectivity is inserted into the

structure itself. In the latter, the subjectivity of the expert plays a central role in that the exercise of

discretion by the individual (the social) is necessary to organizational functioning, but where this

discretion is informed and channeled by a scientifically structured knowledge base (the structural).

Frug (1984) proposed that the use of both models might also give rise to the ‘‘super expert,’’ who

could strategically exploit the strengths and weaknesses of both models to their advantage. While a

full discussion of each theoretical perspective is beyond the scope of our paper, we will attempt to

unveil bits of each as we interpret our field observations that are organized into three moments.

Appendix A lists our prior research that has probed each of the three moments, although we confess

that we did not fully recognize the existence of these moments in our earlier research.

Moment I: The Rise of the Entrepreneurial Professional Individual and Firm

Consistent with traditional expressions of professionalism, the public accounting profession

traditionally adhered closely to the rhetoric of ‘‘client service ideal,’’ the ‘‘judgment of experts,’’ and

the inviolable ‘‘autonomy of professionals’’ (Kimball 1995). Although the firms continually

extended their abstract systems of knowledge that practitioners applied to solve client problems, it

remained audit practitioners who judged what and how specific audit tests were to be performed.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the accounting profession was buffeted by significant

disturbances, including: stagnation in the audit market; heightened competition among the firms;

an increased emphasis on audit efficiency, often involving computerization; extraordinarily high

staff turnover; the promotion of managers to partners with less experience; and increased lawsuits

and regulations (Wall Street Journal [WSJ] 2000a; Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation of

the Committee on Energy and Commerce 1985; WSJ 1985a, 1985b, 2000b). This composite of

forces presented a new configuration of economic, social, and regulatory forces in which the

accounting profession operated. And yet, to some degree, the perception of an altered environment

was correlated with the professions’ increasingly economic self-understanding; only when the

profession saw itself as predominantly a profit-making service did its competitive landscape emerge

as a force to be addressed. Thus, the accounting firms sought to cut costs and increase revenues by

implementing centralized control orchestrated by administrative partners over practice office firm

members—forms of meta-power that, in essence, altered the types of games practice firm members

were to play (from symbolic interaction, e.g., Hall [1997]); this effort also altered the structural

features of the firms with the hope of strategically altering the behaviors of their members (from

structuration theory, e.g., Giddens [1984]). The distinction between practice and administrative

partners is somewhat blurred depending on whether the positions are seen from below or from

above. For example, a practice office division head stated that his office managing partner was

clearly an administrative partner, while his own division members thought that this division head

was an administrator. Similarly, the perception of whether a position is practice or administrative is

affected by whether it is self-reported or reported upon by other members. For example, an

international director of accounting and auditing saw himself as a ‘‘client-centered partner,’’

reporting that he still attended important meetings for his own former key clients in his former

practice office, while subordinates reported that he had clearly been an administrative partner for

well over a decade. In general, however, administrative partners are concerned with running the

business of the firm, developing new technologies, and representing the firm to external



constituents, while practice partners are primarily concerned with serving their clients and

generating new clients (see, also, Freidson 1986).

In order to establish better control over partners in garnering new business and running audits

of existing clients, the firms tended to situate partners’ actions in a larger whole, for example, by

arranging firm, office, and individual goals into a hierarchical structure in which each partner’s

objectives were nested in the local office’s general business plan, which factored in the local

business environment and client base, thus suggesting the dual logics of bureaucratization andcommercialization. This effort represented a capitalization of time (Foucault 1983). Related yearly

and sometimes monthly counseling sessions were held between supervisors and subordinates to

discuss the latter’s performance in such quantitative terms as specific dollar sales targets, targeted

realization rates, client billings, and ‘‘profits per partner,’’ with one regional managing partner

observing that ‘‘by changing the words used to describe the practice partners’ activities, or even to

change the meaning of familiar words, the firm hoped to change their behavior.’’ Thus, meta-power

was exercised in that the rules of the ‘‘game’’ were being altered (Hall 1997). Similarly, the local

office plans were nested in the firm’s overall plans. The formalist voice used by administrators

stressed objective measures of performance (Frug 1984). These efforts established hierarchical

norms that induced practice partners to conform to them in the hope of homogenizing qualitative

differences among partners, service areas, and business environments through quantitative

comparisons (Foucault 1979). These administratively orchestrated efforts were continuous and

also spanned space—quantitative norms were omnipresent—as one regional managing partner

proclaimed that he even sent comparative partner performance metrics home to spouses and

discussed at luxury family retreats in order to ‘‘put a little more pressure on the partner’’ (Giddens

1984).

These performance metrics were fortified by the trend toward organizing client-based, rather

than office-based, service teams. Moreover, partners were rotated through assignments to

standardize audit practices worldwide and assure globally distributed clients of the same quality

of service. The emerging ‘‘one firm concept’’ proposed that it was the firm and not the practice

partners that rendered client service, which struck at the core of practice partners’ principal means

of exercising power—proprietary knowledge of the client (Hall 1997). One participant who was

assigned as a ‘‘turn-around’’ managing partner for a troubled office informed the practice partners of

the office’s new strategic financial goals that had been specifically ‘‘targeted’’ for them by the

national office. He told them that if they could not ‘‘buy into’’ and achieve these goals, they should

consider themselves ‘‘counseled out’’ of the firm, thereby ‘‘right-sizing’’ it. Consequently,

‘‘controlling’’ the number of practice partners was redefined by administrative partners as improving

the ‘‘financial leverage’’ of each surviving practice partner for the partner’s own financial good and

the greater good of the firm. Those who did not conform to the new norms were treated as abnormal

and excised from the now ‘‘right-sized’’ firm (Foucault 1979), perhaps suggesting that this is one of

the primary hallmarks or even drivers of the ascendancy of commercialization in large public

accounting firms.

Practice partners believed the agenda of administrative partners to exercise centralized control

was secondary to their own client service demands. Thus, in symbolic interaction terms, there

existed multiple viewpoints and multifaceted notions of what constituted the firms’ realities (Strauss

1993). Practice partners used the expertise voice of ‘‘client service’’ and ‘‘professional-bureaucratic

conflict’’ to reaffirm their autonomy and professional stature, arguing that their exercise of

subjective judgment, guided by relevant firm and profession-level standards, was essential to

professional endeavor (Derrida 1978a, 1978b; Frug 1984). In turn, practice partners’ attitudes

toward the centralized control of practice partners ranged from lukewarm acceptance to disdain.

Practice partners used mentoring relationships to articulate their resistance to formal control

systems applied within the firms in a social process similar to that which Foucault (1988) calls



avowal. They discussed intimate details of career and personal difficulties in face-to-face

encounters between mentors and proteges, largely off the record and in an environment of trust. In

such settings, the mentor’s guidance and advice could be highly specific and ‘‘gritty,’’ covering the

protege’s relations with clients and key partners, the commercial aspects of the firm, and how these

translated into the protege’s agenda, the protege’s appearance and behavior, and the politics of

practice. The economics of auditing influenced the language used in mentoring relationships by

emphasizing the importance of ‘‘the business’’ to proteges, using such phrases as ‘‘new audit

products,’’ ‘‘homogenization of services,’’ ‘‘value added auditing,’’ and ‘‘globalization of practice.’’

Herein, the multiple points of resistance were expressed ‘‘in the same vocabulary, using the same

categories,’’ resident in the formal appraisal system, but in a manner serving proteges’ and mentors’

agendas (Foucault 1986, 101).

More specifically, mentors asserted that mentoring necessarily involved instruction in practical

politics and revolved around the issue of power. Helpful mentors instructed proteges on office and

firm politics and advice, and contributed to raising their visibility with important partners so that

proteges may enjoy a favorable image. Elements of advantageous visibility included assignments to

the ‘‘right’’ clients and bringing in significant new business—significant in terms of both revenue

and prestige. Thus, according to an office managing partner, effective mentors had to ‘‘look after the

numbers [generated by the formalized control system] of his disciples and defend them against the

higher-ups in the promotion process.’’ The mentor helped orchestrate the all-important partnership

promotion proposal—similar to the promotion dossier in academics, so important and omnipotent,

so close to their lived experience and tied to it, that the candidate becomes the proposal (dossier)—it

became the candidate’s very identity (Foucault 1986). In other words, a mentor informally

communicated and translated the political aspects of the control system practices—a form of meta-

power (Hall 1997) and norms applied to the practice partner (Foucault 1986) to give the

appearance of complying with them, but in so doing, engendered effects that extended beyond

mere surface appearance. Mentoring consequently became a metaphorical ‘‘double-edged sword’’

for the firm—at once politicizing or recognizing the covert political climate and strategic

orchestration of the rules of the game for what they were, and encouraging proteges to gain an

appreciation for the business, ironically, by gaming the formalized system (see, also, WSJ 2010).

A retired regional managing partner reported in an exit interview that he, too, was changed by

the mentoring relationship as proteges informed him of emerging social/structural dynamics that did

not exist when he was at a lower rank, and the perceptions among lower ranks of his and other

partners’ reputations, as well as of firm action strategies. In talking through the changing forms of

firm structure (or forms of meta-power), mentoring relationships augmented the power of the

mentor as more of the mentor’s proteges gained promotion, thereby strengthening the social

network and power of the mentor (Giddens 1984; Hall 1997). While the intent was to assist the

protege to develop as a knowledge worker and become tied to an emerging entrepreneurial

professional services firm, in the act of listening, verbalizing, and making visible partner-like

behavior, not only was the protege incited to become an entrepreneurial professional, but also the

mentor, who could be transformed in the act of talking about the commercialization of practice, in

which the quantitative categories became internal and not just external to them (Giddens 1984, 25).

According to Foucault (1988, 61), ‘‘the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement’’—the

one who speaks identifies with what is being said and thereby avows. In this way, the speaker

becomes known and tied to the intentions, thoughts, and deeds avowed in the discourse, thus

constituting the speaker’s self-identity (Foucault 1988, 240). Here, a number of both practice and

administrative partners recognized the forces at play and worried about their effects. These partners

came to see that the meta-power of the quantitatively expressed norms constrained what had been

professional judgment and autonomy, but, properly transformed, also enabled career progression of



the protege and themselves in that they were better networked with those who were gaining an

ability to wield power.

Administrative partners, of course, knew of the resistance to and gaming of the control

practices they advanced, having themselves resisted them in their previous identities as practice

partners, and also recognized that the strategic actions of practice partners impacted the structural

transformations administrators were seeking (Giddens 1984). As a senior managing partner

suggested:

The major aspect of a partnership that hinders management is the need to build a higher

level of consensus than in other organizations, arising from the feeling on the part of the

partners that they should be involved in managing all segments of the business. Progress

and the accomplishment of what we are trying to accomplish has a price. The price is for

existing partners to give up some of their control, power and freedom for the greater good.

On balance they tend to resist doing this.

The one area that constantly plagues me in my day-to-day management is the difficulty in

managing a business composed of owners, professional prima donnas, if you like—where

everything involves strong consensus building.

Our Moment I field observations suggest that both the structural and social features of the

firms became negotiated as the firms sought to move to the entrepreneurial professional form. More

specifically, as the new rules of the game were applied by administrative partners, they became

transformed by practice partners serving as mentors who translated firm objectives in a manner

useful for proteges in progressing within the firm. However, in the act of translation, the identities

of the proteges and, indeed, the mentors tended to become transformed in a subtle manner as both

protege and partner moved incrementally toward becoming knowledge workers and entrepreneurial

professionals, albeit as also influenced by the sedimented layers of the traditional profession.

However, this transformation and the firms’ structural apparatus were controlled by neither the

administrative cadre nor practice partners. But instead, the structural and social became mutually

constituted, and was recognized as such by the partners as the firms did indeed grow and the

individual partners who remained made more money.

Moment II: The Proposed, Resisted, and Transformed Codification of the EntrepreneurialProfession

The decreasing profitability of auditing fueled attempts not only to reduce costs, as described in

Moment I, but also to discover new sources of revenue, principally by regenerating the underlying

systems of knowledge and confronting new forms of the nagging uncertainty facing global clients

(AICPA 1999). This effort was supported by the report of the Commission on Auditors’

Responsibilities as early as 1978 (AICPA 1978, 56), which observed that ‘‘while traditional

boundaries of professional endeavor usually develop as a result of long periods of trial and error to

generate workable conditions, these boundaries should be abandoned when they can be

demonstrated to have outlived their usefulness or when compelling reasons take precedence over

them’’ (emphasis added). Traditionally, the Big 4 firms’ portfolio of services was expanded by

offering consulting services. Consulting and other forms of service became so prominent that one

regional managing partner asked during a 2001 interview, ‘‘How many international public

accounting firms are there? Trick question. Answer: None. We are all now professional service

firms!’’ (see, also, WSJ 2000b; Journal of Accountancy 1996, 111)—this on the same day he openly

worried about the effects of this master trend (Davis and Zald 2005).

However, the contentiousness of consulting services became apparent with the increasing

threat of regulation and adverse press coverage. SEC Chairman Levitt (2000), for example,



lamented the ‘‘monetization’’ of the profession and how partners had become client ‘‘relationship

managers’’ protecting their ‘‘reputational capital,’’ and how ‘‘too many auditors are being judged not

just by how well they manage the audit, but by how well they cross-market their firm’s non-audit

services.’’ He concluded that ‘‘it’s no wonder that the Big 5[4] now position themselves globally as

multi-disciplinary professional service organizations rather than as accounting firms’’ (Levitt 2000,

2–3), and sounded a cautionary note that the status of a self-regulating profession that had been

granted by the SEC may be in jeopardy (see Zeff 2003a, 2003b; Freidson 2001). In response, some

firms first attempted to restructure internal operations to be separate firms under an international

firm shell, and then began to divest themselves of consulting. Nevertheless, on June 27, 2000, the

SEC proposed extensive new regulations that would ‘‘force a restructuring of the accounting

profession and radically alter independence requirements for accounting firms that audit SEC

registrants’’ (Journal of Accountancy 2000). For example, the proposed regulation would prohibit

firms from simultaneously performing audit services and ten categories of non-audit services.

However, after a very aggressive effort mounted by the profession to defeat the proposed regulation

through strategically placed political campaign contributions to members of the Senate Banking,

Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee (Center for Responsive Politics [CRP] 2007a) and House

Banking and Financial Services Committee (CRP 2007b), which oversee the SEC, as well as the

Republican U.S. presidential candidate, the SEC withdrew its proposal (see, also, Radcliffe 2012).

Following this political capitulation, Levitt resigned and the profession-friendly Harvey Pitt was

appointed as SEC Chair by incoming President Bush (WSJ 2002a). Power may sometimes be

effectively exercised to combat new regimes of meta-power at multiple points of resistance (Hall

1997; Foucault 1986).

The AICPA (1999, 4) sought with renewed vigor to regenerate its abstract system of

knowledge (Abbott 1988) by proclaiming the ‘‘Vision Project for the third millennium’’:

The increasing complexities of the global environment and the commodity characteristics

of traditional [audit] services mandate that the profession migrate up the economic value

chain. Commodification and technology are challenging the economic viability of the

profession. Information-based products and services are losing value in the marketplace

and are rapidly being replaced with knowledge-based products and services that command

higher fees.

The AICPA proposed developing a new credential, eventually entitled the Interdisciplinary

Global Credential (IGC), which would escape the licensing restrictions imposed by governments

worldwide and rise above the rule of law by being controlled by a multi-national professional

association to be named the International Institute of Strategic Business Professionals (IISBP)

(AICPA 2001). In essence, the profession sought to transform its structural properties by adopting

innovative norms of professional services to promote new forms of social relations between

auditors and their clients spanning national boundaries (Giddens 1984). The AICPA sought to

develop a ‘‘super expert,’’ who, supported by new forms of knowledge embedded in higher-level

platforms of service developed by the IISBP, would exercise a more refined level of professional

judgment signaled by the IGC credential (Frug 1984; Power 1997). Moreover, this new

international institute would, hopefully, enable its newly credentialed professionals to escape

governmental regulation by any single nation (see, also, Loft, Humphrey, and Turley 2006). In

support of this effort, AICPA Chairman Robert Elliott (1999, 5–6) specifically saw the need to

continually regenerate the profession’s abstract systems of knowledge through the IGC and what he

called ‘‘knowledge science’’:

I foresee that these efforts, together with the work of our members in the academic world,

will redefine the body of knowledge that is the de facto stamp of an accounting



professional. Every profession is defined by the body of knowledge that differentiates itfrom nonprofessionals and from other professions . . . What is important is that the body ofknowledge successfully establishes a claim to expertise deserving recognition as aprofession . . . For our profession to realize the great opportunities within its reach, we

must have a clear goal, sufficient resources, and effective leadership. Let me restate that

more precisely: we need the vision, the power, and the courage. We certainly have the

vision: our members have provided a powerful, forward-looking vision. And, as a

profession, we have the power, because the half million CPAs in America produce nearly

one percent of total value added in our economy. (emphasis added)

Despite the AICPA’s carefully orchestrated efforts, the AICPA’s lay membership voted against the

IGC in the belief that it would ‘‘water down’’ the traditional CPA credential and jurisdiction

(AICPA 2002; Covaleski, Dirsmith, and Rittenberg 2003; Fogarty, Radcliffe, and Campbell 2006).

Thus, once more, power may be exercised to resist new regimes of meta-power through multiple

points of resistance (Hall 1997; Foucault 1986).

Despite the apparent victory by the Big 5(4) in resisting the SEC’s regulatory efforts and

preserving their ability to perform multiple services for their clients irrespective of the AICPA’s

defeat with the IGC, things quickly unraveled with the collapse of Enron involving an estimated

$75 billion loss in market value due in part to $3.8 billion in financial misstatements, and questions

as to the efficacy of its audit and the eventual demise of Arthur Andersen. This was followed by the

collapse of WorldCom, then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and also an Andersen client

(WSJ 2002b, 2002c), with more major corporations restating financial statements than ever before

(WSJ 2002c), and 18 of the top 20 litigation settlements in 2001 entailing accounting

misstatements. Such systemic problems created an ‘‘accounting crisis’’ associated with trillions

of dollars of stock market decline (Fortune 2001; WSJ 2002b).

In response, the U.S. Congress proceeded with legislation designed to directly regulate the

accounting profession, eventually culminating in passage of a new form of meta-power (Hall 1997),

the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Act of 2002, known as the Sarbanes-Oxley

Act. The new norms of professional conduct set forth in this act included: (1) prohibition of 14

specific non-audit services, including financial information systems design and implementation,

expert services unrelated to the audit, and legal services (noteworthy, these restrictions apply

globally for multi-national clients, thus potentially impacting the emergence of the global

knowledge expert in non-U.S. settings); (2) audit partner rotation every five years; and (3) the

establishment of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which would

presage the demise of the profession’s 70 years of self-regulation, to be appointed by the SEC (see,

also, Wyatt 2004; Zeff 2003a, 2003b; Freidson 2001). With SEC Chair Pitt’s nomination to the

PCAOB of an individual who had served on a board of directors suffering from financial statement

fraud, Bush’s support for Pitt was apparently withdrawn, ending in Pitt’s resignation (WSJ 2002b).

The SEC was subsequently granted a 66 percent increase in its budget to help fight financial fraud

and increase its scrutiny of the accounting profession (WSJ 2002c). According to Foucault (1979),

the normalizing society reaches its zenith when the power of normalization itself becomes

normalized: when the judges are themselves judged, or auditors are themselves subject to

surveillance.

Nevertheless, with time, the AICPA recognized the critical need to regenerate its abstract

system of knowledge given the continuing commodification of audit practices (Abbott 1988). While

the creation of a new global knowledge expert credential was denied by the AICPA membership,

the need for and development of such global knowledge expertise still proceeded by transforming

the structural properties of the profession and the services offered by the firms (Giddens 1984). For

example, the AICPA rebooted its Vision agenda in 2011 and 2012, although on a more modest



scale (Journal of Accountancy 2010), and also with developing the new Chartered Global

Management Accountant (CGMA) (2012) credential. According to the then-incoming AICPA

Chairman, Paul Stahlin, ‘‘Technology has changed. The world has changed. Economic conditions

have changed. Regulation has changed. And certainly, people have changed as well as market

demands. The refined CPA Vision will reach 2024 and beyond’’ (Journal of Accountancy 2010,

24). In turn, the AICPA issued its ‘‘CPA Horizons 2025 Report’’ (AICPA 2012, 4), in which it

proclaimed the profession would continue ‘‘making sense of a changing and complex world’’ while

preserving its ‘‘core values,’’ although its ‘‘core competencies had evolved to reflect the 21st

century,’’ while recognizing ‘‘the services provided by CPAs have become so varied and diverse

that the concept of core services is no longer representative of the profession.’’ While still lacking in

specific structural properties, the need for such ‘‘low technicality/indeterminancy ratio’’ (Larson

1977) skills as ‘‘intuition, flexibility, creativity and social skills’’ (Alvesson 1993, 1,013) requisite

to ‘‘exploit the potential for cognitive expansion, material advancement and socio-political

enhancement that these [global] developments present’’ (Reed 1996, 588) is evident within this

Horizon.

Our Moment II field observations suggest that the intertwining of the structural and the socialtranscended public accounting firm boundaries to the level of the institutional field. Here, the efforts

of both professional associations across national boundaries and the federal government to develop

or impose new regimes of meta-power were effectively countered by members of the profession to

forestall development of a new global credential and, indeed, new regulations directed at containing

the jurisdictions served by the profession. But then, the press of events beyond the control of the

professional associations and government contributed to both the continued movement toward an

entrepreneurial profession and its containment in the form of regulatory restrictions as the structural

and the social facets of the profession continued to play a role in the constitution of one another.

Moment III: The Continued Rise and Transformation of the Global KnowledgeEntrepreneur

Dramatically impacted, although undeterred by the press of events sketched in Moment II, the

social constitution of the entrepreneurial professional proceeded within the firms. Senior

administrative partners described an inner circle—a cadre of partners who were ‘‘on the bus’’and shared a common vision: transitioning into an entrepreneurial professional services firm by re-

envisioning the strategic direction of the firm as a profit-making enterprise; establishing centralized

control in order to facilitate moving in this direction; and committing to the exercise of centralized

control as being more than just a symbolic gesture to be gamed. Consistent with Reed’s (1996, 587)

speculation of the emergence of ‘‘elite professionals,’’ and of Frug’s (1984) ‘‘super experts,’’mentors actively promoted and even ‘‘paid the fare’’ for proteges who appeared committed to this

new strategic imperative of the firm. Partners at another firm who at first thought the notion of

‘‘being on the bus’’ was ‘‘bush league and garish’’ indicated upon reflection that at their firms, there

was both a ‘‘GM bus’’ and a ‘‘Mercedes bus,’’ the latter with seating for the super, super experts and

standing room for super proteges. This transformed mentoring was primarily directed not at

advancing the careers of proteges, but at motivating them to move themselves and the firm from a

traditional public accounting firm to an entrepreneurial professional services firm to profit from

rapidly changing global business conditions.

A regional managing partner described how his mentor had placed him on the ‘‘Mercedes bus’’by appointing him to the ‘‘Change Management Task Force,’’ whose mission was to dramatically

restructure the entire firm by developing new organizational structures to better serve the needs of a

global business clientele. Based on the super mentor’s observation of the protege’s favorable impact

on the task force, the mentor exerted power to once more arrange for the protege to be appointed to

the firm’s omnipotent policy board. Then, when a new U.S. Management Committee was being



formed to manage this new structure of meta-power (Hall 1997), the mentor wanted this protege to

be on the committee. Given that only one member could represent the Northeast region, and that

representative must come from its New York office, the mentor’s solution was to redefine the

protege’s home office, Philadelphia, as the Southeastern region head office directed by the protege.

The result was that social relations between the super mentor and super protege influenced the

structural properties of the firm by way of the Change Management Task Force, Policy Board, and

Management Committee.

A regional managing partner who had participated in our fieldwork over a 25-year period

indicated that partners in his firm ‘‘pined for the good old days of a culture of partnership,’’ but

cautioned that what they longed for never really existed, implying a ‘‘fantasy of nostalgia’’ (Cooper

and Robson 2006, 423; Jenkins, Deis, Bedard, and Curtis 2008). He indicated, though, that he was

engaged in trying to improve what he called a ‘‘horizontal sense of partnership’’ or ‘‘concentric

circles of partnership’’ by trying to tighten the social bonds and reduce the diameter of the ‘‘circles’’among partners by bolstering ‘‘shared values’’ that he believed had eroded as a consequence of prior

commodification/commercialization of practice and firm debacles. He reported also being engaged

in developing a ‘‘vertical sense of partnership’’ by shortening the distance between practice partners,

not with lower ranking auditors, but with the ‘‘guys at the top’’ with whom they felt disconnected.

Moreover, he expressed the ardent hope that reestablishing such a ‘‘culture of partnership’’ would

offer the promise of providing a ‘‘leverage point to deal with ‘Gen Y’ recruits who do not possess

the work ethic or values necessary to help the firm survive.’’ In essence, he was seeking to modify

social relations in order to repair and fortify the structural properties of his firm (Giddens 1984; see,

also, Brivot and Gendron [2011] for discussion of omnidirectional surveillance among peers in

professional organizations). A senior managing partner added that this leverage could be applied

because ‘‘culture was like a river’’—a flow that could change with the times, with the people caught

within its current.

Another regional managing partner indicated that when she surveyed the partners in her region

on the questions ‘‘What is the key to overcoming our region’s/firm’s problems and moving

forward?’’ and ‘‘What is the one thing you would like to accomplish?,’’ the overwhelming,

unprompted response was ‘‘I would like to reconnect with my fellow partners.’’ Their answer

suggested that these partners wanted to develop a camaraderie with firm members in a less

hierarchical and more collegial manner so that they could, as a senior manager put it, ‘‘ventate

laterally.’’ As the first regional managing partner reported, although establishing this culture was

very hard work, the ‘‘mere act of talking about the issues tended to improve the sense of

partnership.’’ He added that his firm’s divisionalization into four practice areas had created a ‘‘silo’’effect in which information ‘‘corroded’’ as it was communicated downward from, for example, the

executive committee to practice partners within each silo. He indicated that while administrators

cannot effectively deal with this corrosive effect, the firms could build up the sense of ‘‘lower case

p’’ partnership by, for example, developing a local practice office ‘‘service line council’’ or by

holding ‘‘town hall meetings’’ with clients that would cut across the four ‘‘silos’’ in seeking to

emphasize the service needs of each client rather than the existing services offered by each division.

It appears that establishing a ‘‘culture of partnership’’ was an item on the agenda of administrative

partners, who, in centrally orchestrating it, wanted to routinize and encode mentoring relationships

(the previously social) into the firms’ standard operating procedures (the structural), in which power

and meta-power would become comingled. However, control of practice partners remains highly

complex, with conflicting forces emanating from grass roots practice partners themselves and, to

some extent, clients opposing centralized control.

Interviews and a series of studies by one contingent of the coauthors on the effects of an

organic versus mechanistic firm culture on audit planning, control risk assessment, evidence

gathering, and audit reporting (e.g., Carpenter et al. 1994) suggested that firms have strong cultures,



which pervade virtually all phases of the audit. In terms of our ongoing qualitative field study, one

former partner who left to become the CFO and then CEO of a major client reported that when he

left the firm, he ‘‘experienced years of grief, much like that experienced with a divorce or death of a

child,’’ and also that ‘‘belonging to that firm had been a keystone to my very identity.’’ Thus, the

still-active regional partners were trying to reestablish the cohesiveness of the firms’ cultures that

had previously existed. On this theme, Mintzberg (1983) observed that the power dynamics of

organizations represents an explosive, potentially destructive force that may be counterbalanced by

an organization’s culture, which represents an implosive, also potentially destructive force. In the

public accounting setting, it may be that the meta-power (Hall 1997) that was applied to compel the

firms into becoming commercialized, professional services firms (the structural) had reached a

tipping point to render them into a non-profession, and that super experts were seeking to use

culture (the social) as an antidote to this destructive trend (here, Derrida’s deconstruction of

‘‘pharmakon’’ as both poison and antidote offers a model for future research in this area; in

accounting, see Guenin-Paracini and Gendron [2010]).

Administrative partners also reported having to redesign their business/professional service

models to remain viable in the new environment. Part of this entailed refining their evidence-

gathering processes in order to make them more efficient and profitable, and part of it involved

offering clients other non-prohibited, and even complementary, services such as ‘‘forensic

auditing.’’ On this point, an administrative partner reported that while her firm had spun off

consulting services, the non-financial statement audit services that were still offered to clients

around the world were not part of the 14 specific services prohibited by Sarbanes-Oxley. Moreover,

as discussed by Rezaee (2007), the large audit entities in attendance at the 2006 International

Conference in Paris (Global Public Policy Symposium 2006, cover page) redefined themselves not

as firms, but as ‘‘international audit networks,’’ to serve clients that a senior managing partner

described as needing a ‘‘globally networked firm.’’ Tellingly, the consortium’s white paper was

entitled ‘‘Global Capital Markets and the Global Economy: A Vision from the CEOs of the

International Audit Networks,’’ signaling that the profession still possessed a vision of serving the

global business community with a cadre of specialized knowledge workers—super experts (Frug

1984).

A firm senior managing partner observed that what drove his firm’s transformation ‘‘was not

regulation, nor the mounting technical needs of our clients, but the globalization of our clients and

their inherent shortfalls in addressing the problems of this globalization, moving across regulatory

and cultural regimes. Clients do not have the depth and breadth of expertise to deal with this

process. We do, or will.’’Two administrative partners observed that there is a growing need for auditors to become

‘‘proactive’’ and ‘‘preemptive’’ in their audit approaches (e.g., to explore with management the

internal control and financial reporting ramifications of contemplated major transactions before they

are consummated)—in essence, to function as knowledge workers in the information age. They

observed that such ‘‘hard assets’’ as buildings and equipment were becoming increasingly

immaterial relative to such ‘‘intangibles’’ as patents and copyrights that figured more prominently in

being ‘‘value-drivers’’ for clients. They reported that if you ‘‘waited for the outputs of decisions’’—the transactions and their documentation—‘‘it would be too late,’’ that ‘‘last year’s working papers

are a poor indication of what should be done this year.’’ Instead, they reported that auditors had to

focus on providing ‘‘inputs’’ to transactions by having ‘‘a seat at the table for every piece of the

deal’’ before the transaction was entered into, where the auditor would ask, ‘‘What’s your strategic

objective and how do you plan to achieve it?’’ Testing had to progress, they asserted, from

‘‘retrospective to real-time auditing.’’ In this way, social relations between clients and auditors are

tending to cross audit firm boundaries to potentially influence the structural properties of clients

(Giddens 1984). As reported by firm members, such real-time audits had already been implemented



as part of the ongoing reorientation of audits in such technology-rich environments as Internet

banks that have no ‘‘bricks and mortar’’ (i.e., hard assets such as buildings) or even hard cash (i.e.,

since it exists in electronic form).

One problem identified by a regional managing partner was that the preemptive ‘‘technology

behind the technology’’ audits required the exercise of highly seasoned judgment, not performance

of tests by rote—the realm of the elite professional (Reed 1996) or super expert (Frug 1984).

One regional managing partner speculated that the performance of such preemptive audits,

combined with enabling socio-legal forces, is reversing prior trends and rendering the contemporary

audit a ‘‘non-commodity,’’ although she stopped short of stating that it was no longer

commercialized. The second force she described as an ‘‘audit risk,’’ not of the audit per the audit

risk model, but rather of the client, who could ill-afford a defective audit and concomitant threat to

the credibility of its financial statements. She asserted that clients cannot afford to have commodity-

like audits performed no matter what the cost savings might be, thus suggesting that clients may

still require that the judgment of knowledgeable practice partners be applied to their unique

situations, rather than judgments generated by more programmable means. Another regional

managing partner, in cautioning that her firm sought to be ‘‘entrepreneurial in how it served its

clients, [although] it was not entrepreneurial in how it approached standards of professional

conduct,’’ expressed the distinction between the business and the profession of auditing.

Our Moment III field observations suggest that the dance of the social and the structural has

continued, but has perhaps experienced a mutation. Herein, there appears to be a shift to a more

important role of the social as primarily administrative partners recognized the need for super

partners on the bus who had been transformed and pledged allegiance to the new firm direction to

advocate the journey to the entrepreneurial professional services firm by enlisting super proteges to

support this effort. Not only did these passengers on the bus seek to regenerate the firm’s abstract

system of knowledge by developing and refining new audit products and developing new business

models, thereby extending the firm’s jurisdiction, but also to fortify the social by regenerating the

‘‘culture of partnership’’ via largely social means, while recognizing that, at least to some extent, the

‘‘good old days’’ may have represented a ‘‘fantasy of nostalgia’’ (Cooper and Robson 2006). The

consequence of this ‘‘dance’’ continued also to spill over the boundaries of the firms as the elite

partners recognized that the nagging uncertainties confronting global clients entailed not just the

structural, in the form, for example, of differing regulatory grids applied across nation-states, but

also the social, in the form of differing national cultures that must be attended to. Thus, the

expanding jurisdictions served were seen as having both structural and social facets.

The Importance of Being Earnestly Theoretical

The social dynamics we observed in our fieldwork across the three moments are summarized in

Figure 2, which represents how we interpret certain features of the public accounting domain.

Although views expressed by other scholars exist, this figure portrays the dynamic interplay of a

number of both social and structural features that are shaping large auditing, or rather professional

service, firms and their members. The relationships shown in this figure and discussed below

represent the outcome of hopefully ‘‘disciplined imaginations’’ (Weick 1989), informed by more

than 30 years of fieldwork. Each of the arrows denoting pushes and pulls on professional endeavor

and their allied consequences may be interpreted as research propositions worthy of scholarly

inquiry.

As depicted in this schematic, individual auditors are found in the middle, where they are

pushed and pulled by a variety of forces, as mediated by the culture and politics of their firms.

Mentoring, in turn, mediates the relationship between culture and politics. Culture can be a

stabilizing force, although at the limit, according to Mintzberg (1983), it may become destructively

implosive by preventing the firm from accommodating necessary change; here, mentors, as but one



type of social actor seeking to influence the press of events, attempt to preserve the traditional

culture of the professional bureaucratic form with its service ideal orientation by teaching proteges

the practical politics of the firm. Meanwhile, politics is seen as a constructively destabilizing force

that compels change, as in ‘‘giving up power for the greater good of the firm,’’ wherein

administrative partners try to modify the culture to reflect more of a commercial orientation,

although it may become explosively destructive at the limit by threatening to denigrate professional

endeavor and generate resistance; here, super mentors politically aid super proteges in ‘‘boarding

the bus’’ to assist them in their commercialization efforts. Combined, they create a dynamic,

reciprocally interdependent tension that pulses in response to the forces at play.

In turn, three organizational forms may be depicted as responses to the variegated forces at

play. The professional bureaucratic form facilitates idiosyncratic expertise having a low

technicality/indeterminancy ratio exercised by practice partners, who tailor services to meet the

needs of the client. In order to preserve sufficient discretion and autonomy of judgment, supported

by the rhetoric of the expertise model of organization (Frug 1984), proteges are brought along by

mentors who ‘‘make themselves visible to their disciples’’ by demonstrating what ‘‘looking like,

behaving like, and being a partner entails.’’ Although understood by practitioners as mere overhead

that does not generate revenue, the administrative component of the firm assists the practitioners in

performing their function by managing the public face of the firm and profession to legitimize them

to society. However, because of a high degree of competition in the profession, practice partners

FIGURE 2The Three Facets of the Big Four Firms

Derived from Mintzberg (1989, 256) and Fischer and Dirsmith (1995, 406, 407).



experience a continuing need to lower audit fees, accomplished in part by standardizing audit

procedures and pushing evidence accumulation and interpretation to lower levels. This

standardization, also useful for the documentation needed to combat lawsuits, fuels the machinebureaucratic form of organization, which is thought best for efficiency and also defensive

systemization in that more documentable, higher technicality/indeterminancy ratio audit techniques

are more able to be displayed in court to the uninitiated, who might suspect the subjective judgment

of ‘‘experts.’’ In essence, such standardization fuels the commodification of the audit and represents

a form of relatively inert meta-power (Hall 1997) supported by the relatively passive rhetoric of the

formalist model (Frug 1984).

But with this commodification arises the issue of whether the work performed is indeed

professional, giving rise to the need for the firm to regenerate its abstract system of knowledge, a

function better orchestrated in the administrative bureaucratic form. The need for this regeneration is

manifested in the development of ‘‘new audit products’’ and in ‘‘ascending the value chain’’ to ‘‘offer

higher-level platforms of service.’’ Thus, there is a response of the commercialization of practice to

develop new products by addressing the nagging uncertainty faced by the global business community.

There is also a need to develop a marketing strategy directed at the overall client community and also

the firm’s own practice partners. In order to engender ‘‘buy in’’ to this new direction, the

administrative component of the firm implements such new forms of control as MBO, or even such

more broadly cast control techniques as ‘‘balanced scorecards’’ to encourage practice partners to

‘‘teach their proteges the ‘hot buttons’’’ to enable them to ride the mentor’s coat tails onto the bus. In

this sense, entrepreneurialism and the commercialization of practice may not be the antithesis of

professionalism, but rather may enable auditors to continue claiming professional status by facilitating

the regeneration of its abstract system of knowledge (see, also, Malsch and Gendron 2013). But

practice partners do retain power in that they would actually offer the new audit products and generate

the revenues, thus circling back to the professional bureaucracy configuration.

There are additional inferences that may be derived from Figure 2 that are worthy of note. First,

while the sociology of professions literature conflates commodification and commercialization of

professional endeavor as being almost the same thing, they clearly are not, as they represent

responses to different sets of forces. For example, commodification arises as a result of the need for

efficiency accomplished in the machine bureaucracy configuration via the standardization of audit

procedures, where ‘‘judgment’’ is increasingly automated in the routines of the firm. But this

commodification, in turn, necessitates a need to regenerate the professional firm’s abstract system of

knowledge, accomplished in part by the administrative bureaucracy developing new products, and

developing and legitimating higher-level ‘‘platforms of service,’’ thus commercializing practice. In

brief, commodification compels commercialization. The same is true for entrepreneurial

professionals and knowledge workers, which the sociology of professions also tends to conflate.

In this case, entrepreneurial professionals are found in the administrative bureaucracy configuration

and, to a lesser extent, the professional bureaucracy configuration; as seated passengers ‘‘on the

[possibly Mercedes] bus,’’ they are focused on monitoring the nagging uncertainty and disorder

faced by the global business community in order to develop new products for which ‘‘it is the

putative universality, codifiability, neutrality and mobility of [entrepreneurial] expertise that sets it

apart from the localism, particularism and stability characteristic of traditional expertise’’ (Reed

1996, 581). But the firm cannot merely speak in the abstract about generic services, it must sell the

potential of these services to practice partners within the professional bureaucracy configuration,

who, in talking the talk of entrepreneurship, come to embody it within their very beings in the act of

working with their subordinate teams (who act as knowledge workers) to tailor services to meet the

local needs of their specific clients. Entrepreneurial professionals and knowledge workers operate in

intricately intertwined settings and respond to distinct, although overlapping, forces.



Perspectives brought to bear, and the forces shaping the firm configurations depicted in Figure

2, suggest that the theoretical research trajectory described in this paper stands in sharp contrast to

most discussions of how the auditing profession may be reformed by means of imposing structural

changes on the profession. All of the theoretical perspectives we have used suggest an intertwining

of the structural and the social, wherein the structural does indeed impact the actions of

organizational actors, but also that the actions of social actors impact structural practices such that

the two interpenetrate one another and thereby become mutually constituted (see, also, Gendron and

Spira 2010; Cooper and Robson 2006).

Moreover, our field observations suggest that the interplay of power among the administrative

bureaucracy, the SEC, and the Senate and House oversight committees is resisted at multiple points,

thereby forming a dynamic field of fluid and uneasily negotiated forces.

With reference to Figure 2, the question also arises as to where structural reform may be

undertaken, for we have observed that fully three shadow forms of professional configuration are at

play. If reform is directed at containing commercialization tendencies, it may well be that the firms

will be limited in their ability to regenerate their abstract systems of knowledge requisite to

professional endeavor; if they are constrained from offering ‘‘new, higher-level platforms of

service’’ or developing new audit products or extending their jurisdiction, the firms may be of

limited use in aiding the global business community in confronting the unfolding, very real

uncertainties they face. If it were directed at containing commodification, audits would be

conducted with less efficiency and auditors may become more legally exposed by lacking defensive

systematization. If it were directed at containing the application of informed professional, albeit

subjective, judgment by practice partners, local, specific, unanticipated client uncertainties would

go unchecked as auditing accomplished via preprogrammed, standardized audit procedures would

be insensitive to the altered client setting. The point is that the accounting profession is situated in

an environment of complex, sometimes conflicting, forces shaping practice. Thus, not only must

there be structural reform, but also attention must be paid to the social dynamics at play, as well as

the role of the auditor’s habitus.

And finally, by the very fact that the accounting profession is situated in a complex

environment and continually faces conflicting forces, the three ‘‘moments’’ that we have used to

organize our field observations emerge as candidates for further research scrutiny. Within our work,

we began with what eventually became Moment I as we probed mentor-protege relationships.

While these relationships persist, we realized that promotion to partner was not the final plateau, but

rather, as informed by our participants who also experienced this realization, that there was an

unanticipated super structure to the firms comprised of the super experts/top guns, which we

examined in what became Moment III. While this Moment also persists, we saw the increasing

codification of the profession described in Moment II, which seemed to subside with, for example,

the AICPA membership’s rejection of the IGC, but then become reenergized with the Sarbanes-

Oxley Act and the AICPA’s Horizon Project. We consequently saw the three moments as running

in parallel, with each having periods of waxing and waning in terms of their impact on professional

endeavor. Consequently, future research may probe such questions as: Does one Moment tend to

dominate other Moments over time? Do the Moments themselves become intertwined, thereby

constituting one another? How does the interplay of the Moments shift over time as the profession

is subjected to the variegated social and structural forces depicted in Figure 2?

REFLECTIONS

Some Open-Ended Worries and Possible Salves

In an earlier paper that helped establish a philosophical perspective for conducting our

fieldwork (Dirsmith, Covaleski, and McAllister 1985), we had proposed ‘‘coping schizophrenia’’



(Campbell 1972) as a relevant action plan for audit practitioners confronting the paradoxes or

double binds of their daily lives, and we do so again here for researchers. Campbell (1972)

observed that this form of coping strategy is directed at responding to conflicting pressures of, for

example, practice partners exhibiting client service ideal and commercializing professional

endeavor; it proceeds by trying to bring forth a new order of expanded consciousness through a

process of continual, albeit uncomfortable, disintegration (of the old) and reintegration of these very

forces to form the new. But we have found that our continuing fieldwork has engendered within us

a schizophrenia that we will seek to cope with in this, the ‘‘Reflections’’ section. We will begin with

our own schizophrenia to explore what this may mean for future auditing researchers conducting

qualitative, naturalistic field research.

We confess to feeling internally conflicted about our field observations, but more or less settle

into two camps. To be sure, differing theoretical commitments, methods of study, professions

studied, and countries or time periods examined generate differences among scholars on the causes,

consequences, and extent of change in the professions (see, also, Willmott and Sikka 1997).

Reasonable people may differ. On the one hand, there are those among us that emphasize the darker

side of what the public accounting profession is becoming (see, also, Samuel, Covaleski, and

Dirsmith 2009). Consistent with this view, sociology of the profession’s theorists have suggested a

fundamental and widespread transformation of professional identity: from that of the traditional

disinterested expert to an organization-based knowledge worker or entrepreneur (Abbott 1988;

Reed 1996). For over a century, the professions of medicine, law, and public accounting gained

their social status and authority by offering disinterested, expert service to society (Merton 1968),

and adhered to a ‘‘service ideal’’ in assisting clients (Larson 1977). But here, it has been reasoned

that the claim of service ideal best served the vested interests of the profession in question rather

than the interests of those being served (Larson 1977), or that it represents a fantasy of nostalgia

(Cooper and Robson 2006), or even that significant change in society’s cultural values may be

taking place in that society may now only care about performance and outcomes, no matter the

underlying processes and surrounding conditions of possibility, thus suggesting the ‘‘death of the

guilds’’ (Krause 1994). It is this transformation of professionals into self-seeking knowledge

workers and the commercialization/commodification of the professions that has led scholars to

generally speculate on the ‘‘death of the professions’’ (Krause 1994, 3; Brint 1994, 17), and even

audit practitioners to believe that ‘‘commercialization is out of control’’ (Gendron and Spira 2010,

296). Within this literature, the idea of ‘‘professionalism’’ is fundamentally suspect as either a ruse

of self-interested behavior or as a technique of self-presentation, of staging identity and managing

image. In turn, the rising faith in ‘‘governance through numbers’’ (Miller 2001; Porter 1995) and,

more recently, Angie’s List.com in the U.S., which provides user evaluations of service providers,

queries to ‘‘chat rooms’’ to solicit the views of users of technical information or professional

services, as opposed to the opinions of the professionals themselves, have further contributed to the

decline of professional stature and services (Jeacle and Carter 2011). Accordingly, this camp

entertains the possibility that ‘‘professionalism’’ is an idea whose time has passed, or never existed.

The second camp remains hopeful that the profession will reclaim its ‘‘service ideal,’’ but one

marked by reflexivity on the part of professionals, regulators, and society. However, insofar as

numbers are not self-certifying and imply trusting those who produce them, the recent explosion of

auditing (Power 1997) paradoxically exacerbates and amplifies calls for professionalism in

accountants. Over the course of our extensive fieldwork, we only encountered two individuals who

seemed wholly committed to the commodification and, especially, the commercialization thrusts of

the profession’s trajectory (for discussion of critically reflecting on the veracity of interviews, see

Alvesson [2003]). In contrast, many key informants participating in our work over lengthy periods,

including administrative partners up through deputy managing partner, openly worried about the

path the profession and their own firms were taking, with many fretting about their national offices



‘‘betting our firm’s future’’ on commodification qua technology or worrying about commercial-

ization. And yet, our participants reported that they were actively engaged in the commercialization

agenda; they were schizophrenic. In counterpoint, though, Cooper and Robson (2006, 433) reported

that in hundreds of interviews with auditors, none referred to the ‘‘public interest’’ as being a focus

of their activities; this was also our non-observation, but rather, participants spoke in terms of

service ideal for clients, corroborated by Gendron and Spira’s (2010, 296) study of failed Arthur

Andersen’s members, some of whom stayed in public accounting because they were committed to

‘‘serving cherished clients’’ despite their concern that the commercialization of the profession was

‘‘out of control.’’ This second camp is supported by Freidson (2001), who stated that it is ‘‘devotion

to a transcendent value,’’ as, for example, ‘‘Justice, Salvation, Beauty, Truth, Health and

Prosperity,’’ (this camp would add ‘‘Fairness’’—of financial statements) and the right to serve these

values without interference from clients, or the state, that marks professional endeavor. Similarly, in

the accounting literature, calls to renew professionalism have implicated the theological notion of

‘‘covenant’’ (Peace 2006), as well as those of ‘‘virtue’’ and ‘‘gentlemanly conduct’’ (McMillan 2004;

Wyatt 2004).

We now live in a global community where the issues are not regulated by a single national

government. How are global companies to be regulated across space (Giddens 1984) that span

jurisdictions (Abbott 1988)? How is their inherent uncertainty to be tamed in order to comfort a

variety of international constituents in a world devoid of centralized international governance?

According to the AICPA’s Vision (1999) and Horizons (2012) projects, auditors, armed with a

suitably expanded system of abstract knowledge (Abbott 1988), and thereby transformed into

entrepreneurial professionals (Reed 1996) offering higher platforms of service, have that ability.

But are these trends inconsistent with serving the public’s, and not just auditors’ or clients’,

interests? It may well be that auditors believe that serving the client and generally strengthening the

financial reporting process aids market-based exchanges, thereby serving investors and, ultimately,

the public.

Given the existence of the two camps, as well as being internally conflicted as individuals, the

issue remains of how we have coped with our resulting schizophrenia, which may be of use to other

researchers. As we noted in the second section in our discussion of the transition of the accounting

profession, our primary focus has been on the substantive domain of auditing in conducting our

research, with theoretical frameworks, followed by research methods, enlisted to understand this

social context in a recursive process of tacking back and forth between the profession and the

academy (Van Maanen 1988). In a sense, this focus has allowed us to cope with conflict between

our two camps. The substantive domain, however, has only served as somewhat of an arbiter of

conflict because this domain may not exist as an objective reality that stands apart from us, but

rather is a socially constructed reality whose construction we are implicated with (Alvesson 2003;

Cunliffe 2010). To illustrate, we are housed in universities that educate significant numbers of

students who are ultimately employed by the big firms; as part of their agreement to participate in

our research, the firms have encouraged us to share the results of our work with our students to

better inform them of the socio-political aspects of public accounting firm life and thereby enable

them to better survive. Former students have gone on to become seniors, managers, practice

partners, and administrative partners in national offices that have participated in our ongoing

program of research; and portions of our work, which we saw as merely describing the auditors’

world, apparently came to influence the firms as they adopted, for example, ‘‘coping schizophrenia’’as a relevant professional strategy that should be taught in partner CPE programs, ‘‘organic

auditing’’ became discussed in partner strategy sessions as a relevant audit approach that was robust

and cost effective, and formal mentoring programs were adopted as a way of being more inclusive

in who is brought under its umbrella and more controllable by the firms (this despite our own

misgivings). On this theme, Freidson (1986) has observed that professional endeavor is founded on



the three pillars of the practitioner component, the administrative component, and the educational

component, and, thus, we are implicated in advancing the profession’s jurisdiction. But here, in

performing our research, not only did the firms and their members change, but so did we as we

gained insight into this evolving substantive domain, as well as our own professional bureaucracies

and our place within them. Thus, the evolving space that we have probed is inter-subjective in

character (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Cunliffe 2010). In consequence, the paradox arises of how

can we, or the substantive domain that we impact, serve as arbiters of our own conflict and schism?

Reflexivity has come to be part of our coping strategy, with, for example, conducting exit

interviews with the interviewers by other members of the research team as they leave the field sites.

Concerning our second coping strategy, in pursuing the theme that auditing is predominantly a

bunch of talk, we discovered that such firm outcroppings as auditing procedures (e.g., statistical

sampling), management control practices (e.g., MBO), and social processes (e.g., mentoring) exist

on multiple levels. Our recognition of these multiple planes of existence has enabled us to cope with

the conflict among team members—that the positions of both camps have merit depending on what

plane is being examined. On this theme, Fombrun (1986) reasoned that such forms of

organizational structure as management control systems and, for example, auditing procedures,

may simultaneously serve as: technological solutions to the instrumental problems of production

within the organization’s infrastructure; political exchanges among contending organizational and

institutional factions within the organization’s socio-structure of exchange relations; and socialinterpretations inside the organization and with its external, institutional constituents within a

superstructure of shared norms and values. Thus, such formal public accounting practices as MBO

and audit testing procedures, but also such social processes as mentoring, may simultaneously serve

as technical solutions to the problems of fostering rational firm control practices and decision

making—the more traditional province of auditing research—and as political advocacy devices for

representing and advocating the positions of various constituent groups within the audit firm and its

institutional milieu, and as a means of fostering social discourse with a wider society (see, also,

Power 2003). Upon reflection, our research has tended to focus on auditing as a technical solution,

or as a political exchange, or as a means of social discourse. But we have not sufficiently probed

their simultaneous existence at these three levels or, more importantly, the roles they play in

mutually constituting one another. We believe this poses a significant avenue for future research.

By way of example, the concept of client service ideal may exist at concurrent, multiple,

intertwined levels. At a super-structural level, the AICPA’s Vision project urged that the profession

could better serve a global clientele in an information age by ascending the value chain to higher-

level platforms of service and, after being voted down by its members, observed in its Horizons

initiative that the profession could preserve its traditional values while still seeking to develop new

products to better serve clients. Meanwhile, the SEC stated that the profession was granted

monopoly status in order to serve the public interest, but that it was threatened with ‘‘losing its soul’’in the pursuit of ‘‘monetizing’’ its practices. But according to a deputy managing partner, the good

old days of professionalism never existed, while in the academy, it was reasoned that the claim of

client service ideal best served the interests of a profession, while elsewhere it was concluded that it

was a ‘‘fantasy of nostalgia.’’ At this level, as a means of social discourse, client service ideal may

serve as a myth, sometimes denigrated as a mere myth, but also serving as an efficacious myth we

may live by that confers energy and direction to achieve some higher purpose: myths, when

institutionalized, may engender reality. According to Campbell (1972, 206), such mythical forms

serve to inform humans as to the local social order, thereby refreshing and reinforcing them and

bringing about rational consciousness in inherently conflictual social settings. At the same time, at

the socio-structural level, our fieldwork revealed that client service ideal serves practice partners,

and also the AICPA membership in voting against the Vision project, as a form of politicaladvocacy device for resisting efforts by administrative partners to advance the entrepreneurial



professional services firm agenda by, for example, implementing new behavioral norms backed by

centrally orchestrated control devices. At an infrastructural level, the theme of client service ideal

may be used to enculture new recruits into the profession during training sessions as a way of

solving the problem of having them tolerate, even honor, long overtime hours during the busy

season as a way of demonstrating commitment to the client. According to Campbell (1972, 214),

‘‘the critical problem as human beings, of seeing to it that the mythology—the constellation of sign

signals, affect images, energy releasing and directing signs—that we are communicating to our

young will deliver directive message qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment

that is to be theirs for life.’’ In turn, perhaps they are related too richly, as these recruits, encultured

into realizing the importance of time, may direct the ‘‘eating of hours’’ (McNair 1991) toward the

socio-structural level as a political advocacy device to demonstrate service ideal to the firm, thereby

gaining promotion.

As a second example, such computer auditing techniques as expert systems may be interpreted

as existing at the three levels: (1) at the super-structural level, it scientizes auditing and generally

demonstrates to society by administrative partners, and to specific clients by practice partners, that

the firms are committed to continually refining auditing and making it a more objective process in

order to, for example, offer higher-level platforms of service, as in the Vision and Horizons projects

(Covaleski et al. 2003); (2) at the socio-structural level, it simultaneously tends to encode expertise

in elements of formal organizational structure, thereby reducing the ability of practice partners to

exercise power, while increasing the ability of the administrative partners to better control and

centrally orchestrate firm practice (Gendron and Suddaby 2004; Fischer and Dirsmith 1995); and

(3) at the infrastructural level, audit teams apply such techniques as standard operating procedures

and come to take them for granted as what audits should entail, thereby enhancing audit efficiency

(Curtis and Payne 2008; Bedard, Deis, Curtis, and Jenkins 2008), but also increasing the

technicality/indeterminancy ratio (Larson 1977) and, thus, refueling the need to regenerate the

profession’s abstract system of knowledge (Abbott 1988). Even the concept of ‘‘commodification’’can be seen as existing at the three levels: at the super-structural level, the term has been used by

leaders of the profession to persuade the AICPA membership to vote for its Vision project, while at

the socio-structural level, practice partners claim that the encoding of expertise in formal

organizational structure undermines their ability to best serve their clients in that it sets up a

bureaucratic/professional conflict, thereby politically advocating for the preservation of their own

power, while at the infrastructural level, audit teams continue to implement efficiency-enhancing

techniques in order to reduce audit fees while still generating profits.

Some Practical Suggestions

We strongly urge researchers to probe the technological solutions that public accounting firms are

implementing, but also the political exchanges they are engaged in and the forms of social discourse

they employ in confronting clients’ and society’s ever-expanding uncertainty. As this expansion

might suggest, we believe that the researcher following this trajectory should not expect to gain

closure, but this is a positive feature of qualitative, naturalistic research. For example, in conducting

our fieldwork, we hoped to eventually reach a point of ‘‘evidential saturation’’ (Lincoln and Guba

1985). However, because of our research strategy, we continually found that new vistas opened

before us as research foci became transformed or were found to exist at a higher level of abstraction

than anticipated. For example, while interviewing a regional managing partner, we noticed a ‘‘Top

Gun’’ cap on a skull on the partner’s window sill and asked about it (we had developed this approach

of commenting on office accessories after noticing many partners had Lucite cubes containing

miniature reproductions of challenging client SEC filings—described by partners as their ‘‘campaign

ribbons’’ for providing client service ‘‘under fire,’’ of which they were quite proud); the participant

became animated and indicated that he had awarded such hats for exemplary performance at a



ceremony in which he had rented the city’s football stadium, invited office member families and

friends, and announced the name of the member and the reasons for which the hat was being

conferred on the stadium loud speakers, whereupon the member would run out of the players’

entrance to join his or her fellow team members; a ‘‘bit over the top,’’ he demurred, but according to

Napoleon, ‘‘Men die for baubles.’’ From this base, the partner proceeded to discuss such matters as

recipients being strong candidates for being ‘‘on the bus,’’ sending performance grids home to spouses

to ‘‘put a little more pressure on partners,’’ and being appointed to especially potent national office

committees. Not surprisingly, this partner was one of the two we encountered who were wholly

committed to the commercialization agenda. Unanticipated observations from other participants

included: reaching the final plateau of promotion to partner and being successful opened unto a whole

new superstructure of differentially empowered partners whose endeavor was to make a difference;

salaries being transformed from merely disposable income for the firm member to a symbol

demonstrating to practice partners and clients that they were being compensated on par with client

CFOs; that being on the ‘‘(GM) bus’’ was to be sought after, but being seated on the ‘‘Mercedes bus’’was a more worthy aspiration, although, depending on the firm, at an even more elite status, even this

aspiration would be seen as ‘‘bush league and garish.’’ And so, one prescription is for those entering

the field to remain vigilant for the unanticipated.

We have found that collecting informative field evidence is more concerned with really

listening to participants than attending to comprehensive interview protocols. Academicians must

become more playful in their research if they are to be creative. Three particularly useful questions

we have used in closing participant interviews are: ‘‘In probing this area, what questions have not

we asked and what are the answers?’’, ‘‘What other people in your firm or other firms should we talk

to, and if you were a fly on the wall, what questions would you like us to ask them?’’ and ‘‘What are

the five most important items on your agenda you wish to accomplish in the next year?’’ Moreover,

once ‘‘informants’’ are found who are willing, even eager, to share sensitive insights, deploying

these insights to reinterview prior participants and future participants may yield a cascading effect

of generating other informants, thereby transforming interviews into ongoing dialogs with social

actors.

We found that in pursuing the simple theme of understanding the social dynamics of public

accounting, in the act of conducting qualitative, naturalistic research, we at once discovered and

forged our own identities as field researchers. We also began to teach auditing, not as a technical

practice in which a rational, comprehensive approach to decision making is the presumed goal, but

rather as a social process in which a boundedly rational approach to incremental, remedial decision

making is more efficacious. But for younger scholars contemplating such a trajectory for their

research, this overall orientation may appear to be a high-risk strategy (see Humphrey 2008;

Radcliffe 1999). Indeed, like our auditor participants, they may be located in an environment

similar to that depicted in Figure 2 and experience their own brand of anxiety. We will close this

subsection with some suggestions that may mitigate the risk of adopting this strategy of research. At

a high, even platitudinous level, this is a largely unexplored, hence target-rich, area for developing a

long-term program of research. It, therefore, promises excellent economies of scale for making the

investment. Then, too, even with some of our research team being in their sixties, such forms of

naturalistic evidence, when linked with theory, continue to generate adrenaline rushes, perhaps

something unusual among accounting researchers; we even experienced this in crafting this paper,

in discussing the efficacious myth of client service ideal and developing Figure 2. At a socio-

structural, political advocacy level, however, there are also benefits to be derived from undertaking

naturalistic research. To begin with, we have always been successful, eventually, in publishing our

field studies. But we also found that just as we did not really reach a point of evidential saturation,

we never reached a point of ‘‘theoretical saturation,’’ that our field observations pushed the frontier

of a given theoretical perspective, thereby suggesting its extension, or they necessitated moving to a



different theoretical perspective in order to better understand the socio-structural dynamics at play.

In consequence, by shifting our focus from auditing, wherein we would publish results in an

accounting journal, to the areas extending a particular field, we were able to publish differing facets

of our results in leading management and sociology journals (see Campbell’s [1969] ‘‘fish scale’’approach to research). Thus, multiple articles may be published from an ongoing field study. In

addition, seeing not just auditing, but research itself, as a social process involving a bunch of talk,

we would share our work with scholars from other disciplines and from whom we drew inspiration

(they have typically been intrigued by the application of their ideas in the public accounting arena

by accounting scholars). We would ask them what other research they were engaged in that they

might share with us, what their doctoral students were working on, and what other scholars were

working in that area that we should contact; not only would this regenerate our own abstract system

of knowledge, but also would lead to highly qualified external references from other disciplines for

our own promotion processes. Furthermore, in probing the issue of, for example, the paradox of

managing professional accountants who simply believe that they are above management control

practices because of their professional status, and that the administrative effort of their firms is

‘‘mere overhead,’’ we have considered the issue of what other forms of professional organizations

may encounter similar dynamics and to which we can apply our now-familiar theoretical

perspectives and qualitative, naturalistic research methods: universities, hospitals, and certain public

sector organizations.

For doctoral candidates uncertain about how to test the waters of doing qualitative research, we

recommend they interview practitioners or regulators visiting campus about their quantitatively

based dissertation research in order to gain institutional knowledge and deepen their understanding

of the problem area they are investigating. Typically, those interviewed would invite the students to

continue their dialog as the dissertation progressed. We would then have such students include a

quote from these interviews in the first page of the proposal and dissertation, thus signaling that this

was a real-world problem rather than a mere research methods exercise. Another strategy was borne

of one research team member’s interaction with his mentor, Donald T. Campbell, co-developer of

the research concerns of internal and external validity. In private conversations, Don voiced disquiet

about the baggage attached to these terms over time, that they were interpreted in too rigid a

manner, and taken as real rather than invented by flawed human beings. Instead, he saw promise in

gauging a study based on ‘‘surplus irrelevancies’’ (akin to a broadly interpreted multiple X

confound) and ‘‘under-representativeness’’ (i.e., the observational methods used do not sufficiently

come to terms with the complexities of real-world phenomenon being examined) (Campbell 1986a,

1986b). It is this latter criterion that has proven useful to students and us. Upon completion of a

study, we would have students share an executive summary of their study with practitioners or

regulators and ask them not only if they saw merit in the findings, but more importantly, how they

may under-represent what these individuals observe in the real world; our students would then

include this commentary as quotes in the implications section of their dissertations and follow on

journal submissions. This effort has the effect of exposing them to a less threatening way of

beginning qualitative work and opening their dissertation research to new avenues of future inquiry,

thereby helping them establish the all-important implications of their research.

The harvest is plenty, the laborers are few. Come with us into the field.

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APPENDIX AOur Prior Research Probing the Three Moments

Moment I: The Rise of the Entrepreneurial Professional

� Carpenter, B., M. Dirsmith, and P. Gupta, ‘‘Materiality Judgments and Audit Firm Culture:

Social-Behavioral and Political Perspectives,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol.

19, Nos. 4/5, 1994, pp. 355–380.� Fischer, M., and M. Dirsmith, ‘‘Strategy, Technology and Social Processes within

Professional Cultures: A Negotiated Order, Ethnographic Perspective,’’ Symbolic Interac-tion, Vol. 18, No. 4, Winter 1995, pp. 381–412.

� Dirsmith, M., J. Heian, and M. Covaleski, ‘‘Structure and Agency in an Institutionalized

Setting: The Application and Social Transformation of Control in the Big 6,’’ Accounting,

Organizations and Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 1–28.� Covaleski, M., M. Dirsmith, J. Heian, and S. Samuel, ‘‘The Calculated and the Avowed:

Techniques of Discipline and Struggles Over Identity in Big 6 Public Accounting Firms,’’Administrative Science Quarterly, June 1998, pp. 293–327.

� Dirsmith, M., S. Samuel, M. Covaleski and J. Heian, ‘‘A Thematic Deconstruction of

Formalist and Expertise Voices in Big Five (Four) Public Accounting Firms,’’ CriticalInquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2005, pp.13–34.

� Dirsmith, M., M. Fischer, and S. Samuel, ‘‘The Social-Political Constitution of Expert

Systems and Global Knowledge Expertise in Big 5(4) Public Accounting Firms,’’International Journal of Technology, Policy, and Management,’’ Vol. 5, No. 4, 2005, pp.

361–387.� Dirsmith, M., S. Samuel, M. Covaleski, and J. Heian, ‘‘The Inter-Play of Power and Meta-

Power in the Social Construction of ‘Entrepreneurial’ Professional Services Firms: A

Processual Ordering Perspective,’’ Studies in Symbolic Interaction,’’ Vol. 33, 2009, pp. 347–

388.� Dirsmith, M., and D. Williams, ‘‘The Effects of Audit Technology on Auditor Efficiency:

Auditing and the Timeliness of Client Earnings Announcements,’’ Accounting, Organiza-tions and Society, Vol. 13, No. 5, 1988, pp. 487–508.

Moment II: The Attempted Codification of the Entrepreneurial Profession

� Dirsmith, M., and M. Covaleski, ‘‘Informal Communications, Non-Formal Communications

and Mentoring in Public Accounting Firms,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol.

10, No. 2, 1985, pp. 149–169.� Dirsmith, M., and M. Haskins, ‘‘Inherent Risk Assessment and Audit Firm Technology: A

Contrast in World Theories,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol.16, No. 1, 1991,

pp. 61–92.� Carpenter, B., and M. Dirsmith, ‘‘Sampling and the Abstraction of Knowledge in the

Auditing Profession: An Extended Institutional Theory Perspective,’’ Accounting, Organi-zations and Society, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1993, pp. 41–63.

� Fischer, M., and M. Dirsmith, ‘‘Strategy, Technology and Social Processes within

Professional Cultures: A Negotiated Order, Ethnographic Perspective,’’ Symbolic Interac-tion, Vol. 18, No. 4, Winter 1995, pp. 381–412.



� Bealing, W., M. Dirsmith and T. Fogarty, ‘‘Early Regulatory Actions by the SEC: An

Institutional Theory Perspective on the Dramaturgy of Political Exchanges,’’ Accounting,

Organizations and Society, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1996, pp. 317–338.� Dirsmith, M., M. Fischer, and S. Samuel, ‘‘The Social-Political Constitution of Expert





388.

Moment III: The Continued Rise and Transformation of the Global KnowledgeEntrepreneur

� Dirsmith, M., J. Heian. and M. Covaleski, ‘‘Structure and Agency in an Institutionalized

Setting: The Application and Social Transformation of Control in the Big 6,’’ Accounting,

Organizations and Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 1–28.� Covaleski, M., M. Dirsmith, J. Heian, and S. Samuel, ‘‘The Calculated and the Avowed:

Techniques of Discipline and Struggles Over Identity in Big 6 Public Accounting Firms,’’Administrative Science Quarterly, June 1998, pp. 293–327.

� Covaleski, M., M. Dirsmith, and L. Rittenberg, ‘‘Jurisdictional Disputes Over Professional

Work: The Institutionalization of the Global Knowledge Expert,’’ Accounting, Organizationsand Society, Vol. 28, No. 4, May 2003, pp. 323–356.

� Dirsmith, M., S. Samuel, M. Covaleski, and J. Heian, ‘‘A Thematic Deconstruction of

Formalist and Expertise Voices in Big Five (Four) Public Accounting Firms,’’ CriticalInquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2005, pp. 13–34.

� Dirsmith, M., M. Fischer, and S. Samuel, ‘‘The Social-Political Constitution of Expert





388.



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