Being a Successful Professional: An Exploration of Who Makes Partner in the Big 4

The marketization of accountancy

“…If the major global movement to change the nature of accountancy is beyond doubt (Carter & Spence, 2014;Greenwood et al, 2002;Malsch & Gendron, 2013), what the moment of translation suggests is that cooperation between marketers and accountants, previously nonexistent, exacerbated this transformation and pressured accounting firms to change from being a profession service firm to being a business organization with almost only commercial objectives. Indeed, through interactions with marketers who have almost no professional inhibitions and through marketing technique experiments, some accountants gradually transformed their mindset regarding marketing and redefined their identity representation to somewhat put aside their professional grain.…”

Public Professional Accountability: A Conditional Approach

“…Here, we can point at Freidson (2001) who also employs an ideal-type approach to professions with similar characteristics; or Koehn (1994Koehn ( , 1995, Banks (2004), and others, who seem to offer more essentialist descriptions (which include the characteristics of our ideal-type). We can also point at authors who describe 'professional fields' in terms of the different institutional logics they harbor (e.g., Suddaby et al 2009;Carter and Spence 2014;Spence and Carter 2014). One of these logics is what they call a 'professional logic' which covers almost the same characteristics as our ideal-type.…”

Annexing new audit spaces: challenges and adaptations

“…Interestingly, within the Big-4 environments studied by Carter and Spence (2014) and Spence and Carter (2014), partner technical expertise (e.g. auditing skill and knowledge of relevant standards -a form of cultural capital) was considered necessary, but of lesser value in the pursuit of economic capital accumulation.…”