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This paper examines how rank-and-file practitioners react to and negotiate uniformized professional standards imposed by the elites of their profession in order to embody their professional ideal.

We explore this topic through the specific case of the Canadian independence rule. We mobilize Freidson’s and Becker’s conceptual tools to make sense of our data, generated through 55 interviews with rank-and-file practitioners.

We found that most rank-and-file practitioners override the (spirit of the) independence rule and engage in a process of secret deviance to pursue their professional ideal of accompanying their client in their business. Specifically, our analysis underlines how they find pleasure in fulfilling their professional ideal, seek to protect the secrecy that allows them to pursue this ideal while avoiding sanctions, and convince themselves of the morality of breaking the (spirit of the) rule in order to embody their conception of professionalism.

Our analysis expands fieldwork on rank-and-file practitioners by offering an analysis of struggles they experienced in their daily practice and by bringing to light their path to secret “professional” deviance.

Our study points to the necessity for better consideration of the realities of professional segments when developing rules or standards.

Our study develops a distinctive conceptual construct – the professionalism conception gap – to explain how secret “professional” deviance can unfold within a profession. This construct could be mobilized to further understand the divergences that can exist within broader professional spheres.

This paper aims to examine how auditors make sense of the ill-theorized and contentious notion of other comprehensive income (OCI), specifically by uncovering their use of metaphors to make OCI plausible and intelligible.

This interpretative paper draws on a collection of 21 interviews with experienced auditors. The analysis first uncovers metaphors that naturally surface within the talk and sensemaking of auditors about OCI (elicited metaphors). The authors then encapsulate these elicited metaphors into second-order constructs (projected metaphors) to synthesize and further explain auditors’ practical sensemaking.

Auditors conceive OCI as a “safety” that ensures the well-functioning of fair value accounting, metaphorically qualifying this notion as a “necessary evil”, a “passage obligé”, and a “parking lot” resolving fair value-related issues and aberrations. Auditors also metaphorize OCI as a “purifier” that allows “polluted”, “noisy”, and “unloved” items to be “parked” outside net income.

The study’s findings further the understanding of auditors’ tendency to remain uncritical throughout their sensemaking process. Making sense of professional standards of practice through metaphors indubitably involves shadowing and silencing other worldviews.

This paper extends knowledge of auditors’ sensemaking, specifically showing how auditors easily make sense of complex notions even in the absence of conceptual grounds. This study also highlights that metaphors are a powerful sensemaking device that auditors mobilize to render complex notions intelligible and mitigate IFRS inconsistencies.

This paper investigates the strategic processes surrounding the development, in accounting firms, of office (re)design projects and their overarching objectives.

The authors’ investigation relies on a series of interviews with individuals from different accounting firms involved in the decision process related to office (re)design projects. A triangular template made up of strategy, space and time informs the analysis, which the authors complement by relying on a strategy-as-practice integrated framework.

The authors found that accounting firm office (re)design projects are characterized by a strategic spatial agenda that aims to define and create present organizational time, in ways that embed a particular vision of the future. The analysis brings to light the interrelationships between strategy practitioners, strategy practices and strategic work through which the future is actualized. Office design processes involve not only the physical transformation of office space; they also promote a prominent agenda to modify, in the long run, office members' minds. Hence, office (re)design processes may be conceived of as a significant device in the socialization of accounting practitioners.

This study underscores that spatial strategizing constitutes a major device through which the future is brought into the present. As such, the analysis provides insights not only into the processes through which space transformations take place, but also into their underlying agenda. The latter promotes the advent, in present time, of the organic office of the future.

This analysis brings to the fore a concrete illustration of how the strategy-space-time triangle operates in organizational life. The authors underline the key role played by strategists in charge of designing the office of the future.

This study extends the burgeoning literature whose analytical gaze is informed by the strategy, space, and time triangle.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative cultural shift from professionalism to commercialism in the accounting profession, based on an analysis of the promotional brochures used by the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Québec), over the last 40 years, to attract new members.

The study's specific objectives are: to examine accountancy's cultural representations depicted in promotional brochures; to evaluate the extent to which these representations are indicative of the commercialist shift as documented in the literature; and to establish whether the representations under study provide further insight into the nature of the cultural shift. Drawing on the semiotic approach developed by Roland Barthes, the authors' analysis is predicated on the idea that promotional brochures and advertisements, though often simple in appearance, constitute complex representations that convey meaningful information about influential values and cultural change.

The authors found that commercial values are increasingly apparent through the celebration of multidisciplinary services and the emphasis on generous compensation and high dynamism.

Barthes' framework was especially useful to analyze the interplay between images and text to gain insight into the historical emergence of what has become the accountant's representation of today. As such, this study points to promotional representations participating to the inculcation of a cosmopolitan culture, where the internationalization of business is supposedly natural, inevitable, and beneficial to everyone. The authors' research also highlights the increasingly significant role played by marketing experts in designing professional institutes' brochures, consistent with the broader view of marketization as a key trend within the accounting industry.

This commentary reflects on possible disruptions for the accounting profession, accountants and academics in the next 25 years. The traditional and highly valued role of the accounting professional, accountants and academic scholarship is rapidly changing in an intensely networked and interdisciplinary world. The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of AAAJ activities for 2015 and in the next few years, it also delivers a call to action to interdisciplinary accounting researchers to undertake innovative research that reflects on what these turbulent times mean for society, nations, organisations and individual accountants, practitioners and educators.

The paper employs a literature-based analysis and critique to provide a critical reflection on current and future developments in academic accounting research.

In highlighting disruption to traditional accounting practice and research the authors provide a foundation from which researchers should contemplate their motivation, informing theories and values to ensure that their academic endeavours make a contribution to practice, policy and a wider societal good.

It is hoped the practical and research issues explored in this commentary will invoke more interdisciplinary perspectives on accounting and the accounting profession, and assist scholars to reflect on the challenges they face.

Providing a forward looking vision on the important role of academic researchers, the authors urge colleagues not to limit their vision to the narrowness that is an increasing feature of North American economics-based accounting research and to not simply observe, but rather construct an enabling accounting that can benefit society more widely.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on 30 years of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), and contemplates the future. It makes a case for diversity, including a broad range of theories and research methodologies, as a defining feature of AAAJ. As we have done since 1988 in AAAJ’s first editorial, we continue to urge interdisciplinary accounting researchers to undertake innovative research and be both original and creative, avoiding the narrow focus and detachment from society that is characteristic of globally pervasive North American economics-based accounting research.

The paper employs an analysis and critique of trends in interdisciplinary research, drawing upon the previous 29 editorials/commentaries published in AAAJ. It also elucidates the field of scholarship associated with AAAJ in 2016 as evidence of the patterning of recent research and publishing trends.

This paper identifies challenges confronting interdisciplinary researchers in the globalised academic community. These include our obsession with theoretical engorgement and our adversarial rather than cooperative approach to knowledge development. Furthermore, the authors argue that researchers must reflect on their motivation, informing theories and values if they intend to contribute to practice, policy and a wider societal good. Accounting researchers have a responsibility to go beyond observation, engaging in and constructing a more equal and fair society.

This commentary reflects on developments in AAAJ and its community over three decades. The authors also address the wider AAAJ community, including the Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting (APIRA) conference attendees, AAAJ special issue editors, the editorial board, ad hoc reviewers, authors and supporters across AAAJ’s 30 years.

From the perspective of two groups of governance actors, this paper aims to understand how internal audit (IA) achieves and consolidates organizational significance.

Interviews were conducted with audit committee chairs and chief audit executives from multinational corporations, and the participating corporations’ registration documents were analyzed.

The data indicate that IA achieves and consolidates organizational significance by activating the IA effectiveness “building blocks” (Lenz et al., 2014) all together so as to generate organizational learning and positive change. New IA effectiveness drivers also emerged from the field.

This research contributes to the IA literature by establishing a connection, through the IA impact on organizational learning, between the constructs of IA effectiveness and organizational significance. It also contributes to the IA literature by identifying new drivers and illustrating the complementarity and interconnections between the IA effectiveness building blocks.

This paper encourages internal auditors to keep their eyes on the prize (i.e. organizational significance) instead of simply being focused on the mean (i.e IA effectiveness), in order to fight stakeholder disappointment.

The paper proposes a conceptual model of IA organizational significance and gives key insights for setting up effective IA to stimulate organizational learning and fostering positive change in the whole organization.