scholarly journals Between contestation and collaboration: The internal dynamics of multidisciplinary accounting firm responses to institutional pressures

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvette Taminiau ◽  
Stefan Heusinkveld
Keyword(s):  
Professional Service ◽  
Institutional Pressures ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Accounting Firms ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
Big 4 ◽  
Professional Fields ◽  
Firm Responses

Abstract The colonization of adjacent professional fields has been considered as crucial to understand the success and influence of large accounting firms, such as the Big 4. Yet, given the complexities of managing different professional groups, remarkably little is known about the internal dynamics behind large multidisciplinary accounting firms’ external responses to institutional pressures. In this article, we show how exogenous coercive pressure, such as regulation (in this case Dutch accountancy regulations), not only affect the day-to-day work of accountants, but also that of non-accountants such as tax advisors. From the perception of the tax advisors who confront regulations which are not ‘theirs’, we show how their internal responses evolve and tread a fine line between contestation and collaboration with their colleague accountants/auditors. Using a boundary work perspective, we examine this shift in responses and explain how tensions between professional groups may be reduced. Overall, our study not only furthers our insights into the internal dynamics behind professional service firms’ external responses, but also sheds light on why professional groups stay on board despite unfavorable internal conditions.

The interplay between global accounting firms and national institutional contexts: The establishment of the Big Four in China from 1978 to 2007

2021 ◽  
pp. 103237322110581
Author(s):  
Wenjun Wen ◽  
Amanda Sonnerfeldt
Keyword(s):  
Economic Transition ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Accounting Firms ◽  
Audit Market ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Reform And Opening Up ◽  
Big Four ◽  
Opening Up

This paper provides an analysis of the establishment of global accounting firms (the ‘Big Four’) in China between 1978 and 2007. Drawing on the extant literature on professional service firms, and the work of Faulconbridge and Muzio (2015) , this paper examines how the Big Four entered China following the country's ‘Reform and Opening-up’ and evolved from tentative representative offices to established accounting firms in the Chinese audit market. Based on an extensive analysis of archival materials and interviews, the findings of this paper show that the Big Four's establishment in China has been deeply intertwined with the country's socio-political and economic transition. It reveals important conjunctural moments in history that have provided the Big Four with important windows of opportunity to actively shape local institutional change to their own interests. This paper contributes to the extant accounting literature on the expansion of the Big Four in China by highlighting the interplay between their surrounding institutional context and their capacity for agency.

Knowledge Management in Professional Service Firms

2011 ◽  
pp. 1841-1850
Author(s):  
Dieter Fink ◽  
Georg Disterer
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
High Potential ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
Market Pressures ◽  
War For Talent

For professional service firms, such as consultants, accountants, lawyers, architects, and engineers, knowledge is a capacity to act. Knowledge can be used to take action and to serve the client. As market pressures increase, so does the demand for securing and exploiting knowledge for the firm. In addition, a shortage of high-potential professional service providers has increased the ‘war for talent’ in which firms compete in employing the most talented professionals. These situations are exacerbated by the decrease in lifelong loyalty, a traditional value within professional groups, and the departure and retirement of professionals, often the most experienced ones.

Knowledge Management in Professional Service Firms

2011 ◽  
pp. 381-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Fink ◽  
Georg Disterer
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
High Potential ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
Market Pressures ◽  
War For Talent

For professional service firms, such as consultants, accountants, lawyers, architects, and engineers, knowledge is a capacity to act. Knowledge can be used to take action and to serve the client. As market pressures increase, so does the demand for securing and exploiting knowledge for the firm. In addition, a shortage of high-potential professional service providers has increased the ‘war for talent’ in which firms compete in employing the most talented professionals. These situations are exacerbated by the decrease in lifelong loyalty, a traditional value within professional groups, and the departure and retirement of professionals, often the most experienced ones.

scholarly journals Protectionism through legislative layering: Implications for auditors and investors

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Alon ◽  
Oksana Kim
Keyword(s):  
Import Substitution ◽  
State Ownership ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Stock Exchanges ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Big 4 ◽  
Audit Firms ◽  
The Government ◽  
Global Investors

AbstractProtectionism is on the rise. Although it tends to be associated with tariffs on imports, governments are increasingly applying other mechanisms to influence international business. Import substitution initiatives have been used to replace purchases from foreign producers with local alternatives. Russia implemented import substitution through legislative layering where layers of regulation created requirements targeting different industries and companies. Following sanctions imposed in 2014 on Russia, the government responded with additional import substitution efforts. We are interested in effects of such measures on the Big 4, global professional service firms, and the choice of auditors by partially privatized enterprises (PPEs). PPEs have more complex multilevel agency problems because it is less clear who is in charge. We find that companies with state ownership were more likely to switch away from the Big 4, and this was more pronounced for companies in strategic industries. It also contributed to companies switching from the Big 4 to the next tier of audit firms. After 2015, PPEs were less likely to receive a modified audit opinion on IFRS audits. However, auditor changes did not occur at the cross-listed enterprises that are under enhanced monitoring from global investors and foreign stock exchanges.

Dhruva Advisors: Culture as North Star of Growth

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sunil Sharma ◽  
Parvinder Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Organization Design ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
New Members ◽  
The North ◽  
Big 4 ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Founding Team

The case describes the first four years of Dhruva, a tax advisory firm set up by Dinesh Kanabar, ex-Deputy CEO of KPMG. Dinesh and other founding partners had worked with the Big-4 firms and were familiar with some of the tensions in the overall ecosystem of Professional Services Firms. Dinesh wanted to build a distinctive professional service firm driven by values of cooperation, high quality work, transparency and stewardship. Very early in its journey, Dhruva's founding team decided that they would use organizational culture as the North Star for guiding decisions related to growth, internal organization design and even admission of new members including Partners. The first four years turned out to be highly successful for the firm. Since inception, it was ranked as Tier-1 firm in the tax advisory space. It was apparent that the firm had succeeded in building a model of alternate organizational paradigm for professional service firms. The next challenge was to test the scalability of this model as the firm embarked on an ambitious growth journey.

A Study of Value Factors for Adopting Information Technology in Professional Service Industry — A Demonstrative Case of Accounting Firms in Taiwan

2002 ◽  
Vol 05 (04) ◽  
pp. 509-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shi-Ming Huang ◽  
Cheng-Yuan Ku ◽  
Yuan-Te Chu ◽  
Hsiang-Yuan Hsueh
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Service Industry ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Service Industries ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Accounting Firms ◽  
Operational Activities

With the popular adoption of information technology (IT), business models and types of services in industries are strongly influenced. Consider the professional service industries such as accounting firms, services are the main business activities in their daily job. These firms are now facing the critical issue on how to apply IT effectively and improve their service quality. The purpose of this paper is to provide a demonstrative analysis for the evaluation of valuable activities in professional service firms via "Value Shop" model. And then find the strategic benefits of IT invested with corresponding value activities by the case study of accounting firms in Taiwan. The findings indicate that IT investment is indeed helpful for activities in daily business activities in such firms, whether it is strategy-centric, managerial, or operational activities.

Knowledge Management in Professional Service Firms

2011 ◽  
pp. 650-659
Author(s):  
Dieter Fink ◽  
Georg Disterer
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
High Potential ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
Capacity To Act ◽  
Market Pressures ◽  
War For Talent

For professional service firms, such as consultants, accountants, lawyers, architects, and engineers, knowledge is a capacity to act. Knowledge can be used to take action and to serve the client. As market pressures increase, so does the demand for securing and exploiting knowledge for the firm. In addition, a shortage of high-potential professional service providers has increased the ‘war for talent’ in which firms compete in employing the most talented professionals. These situations are exacerbated by the decrease in lifelong loyalty, a traditional value within professional groups, and the departure and retirement of professionals, often the most experienced ones.

Professionalization through symbolic and social capital: Evidence from the careers of elite consultants

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Kipping ◽  
Felix Bühlmann ◽  
Thomas David
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Alternative Pathway ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Dominant Firms ◽  
Professional Field ◽  
Professional Fields ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract This article contributes to the debate about how more recent professions, especially those related to management, might achieve a semblance of ‘professionalism’ in the absence of the conditions that facilitated the creation of the traditional professions such as medicine, law or accounting in the 19th century. Much of the recent literature has either argued that these professions had to rely on some form of ‘image professionalism’ or that the professionalization process was ‘captured’ by the dominant firms within the professional field, with the aim of creating corporate, firm-internal rather than open labor markets for these professionals. Building on Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic and social capital, we suggest an alternative pathway to professionalization in stratified professional fields. We namely argue that a career at one of the ‘elite’ professional service firms (PSFs) can provide privileged access to positions at other firms within the same field. Hence, such a career constitutes a form of closure regime and allows, at least to some degree, the external labor mobility so typical of traditional professions. We explore this alternative pathway to professionalization by analyzing a novel and unique historical data set of former McKinsey consultants, identifying a number of boundary conditions that seem to facilitate such intraprofessional careers and others, which, over time, might weaken it. We conclude by pointing to a number of broader contributions from our research.

scholarly journals The Big 4 in Bangladesh: caught between the global and the local

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ataur Belal ◽  
Crawford Spence ◽  
Chris Carter ◽  
Jingqi Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Markets ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Service Work ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Service Firms ◽  
Professional Service Firms ◽  
Full Member ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Big 4

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the work practices of Big 4 firms in Bangladesh with the aim of exploring the extent to which global professional service firms (GPSFs) can be thought of as being genuinely “global”. Design/methodology/approach Interviews were undertaken with the vast majority of Big 4 partners in Bangladesh. These interviews explored a number of themes related to the professional service work context in Bangladesh and the relationship between local and global firms. Findings The central finding of this paper is that although the Big 4 have a long-established presence in Bangladesh, local societal factors heavily influence the realities of work for accountants there. In most cases the Big 4 firms establish correspondent firms (instead of full member firms) in Bangladesh and tend to offer restricted service lines. Additionally, the paper identifies professional, commercial and cultural barriers to greater Big 4 involvement in the local market. Conceptually, the chief contribution of this paper is to explore how the effects of globalizing capitalism and standardised “best practices” in global professional service work are mediated through the societal effects of Bangladeshi society, resulting in the Big 4 having only a tentative presence in the Bangladeshi market. Research limitations/implications The findings cast doubt on the extent to which self-styled GPSFs are truly “global” in nature. Future work examining the Big 4, or accounting more generally, in the context of globalization, would do well to pay greater attention to the experience of professionals in emerging markets. Originality/value Whilst there has been much work looking at accounting and accountants in the context of globalization, this work has tended to privilege “core” western empirical settings. Very little is known about professional service firms in “peripheral” emerging markets. Furthermore, this study extends the application of the system, society and dominance framework by mapping the interactions and dynamics of these three sources of influence in the setting of PSFs.

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