Description
This paper develops an endogenous model of institutional and professional domain change. Traditional
accounts of domain change focus attention on how professional expertise is extended to new areas of
practice. This form of domain extension is typically both deliberate and contested. However, domain
change can also occur in a somewhat quotidian and uncontested fashion when professional expertise
is extended intra-organizationally.
Twittering change: The institutional work of domain change
in accounting expertise
Roy Suddaby
a,b,?
, Gregory D. Saxton
c
, Sally Gunz
d
a
Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
b
Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK
c
University at Buffalo, SUNY, 331 Baldy, North Campus, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
d
School of Accounting and Finance, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 28 September 2012
Revised 12 May 2015
Accepted 14 July 2015
Available online 25 July 2015
a b s t r a c t
This paper develops an endogenous model of institutional and professional domain change. Traditional
accounts of domain change focus attention on how professional expertise is extended to new areas of
practice. This form of domain extension is typically both deliberate and contested. However, domain
change can also occur in a somewhat quotidian and uncontested fashion when professional expertise
is extended intra-organizationally. We analyze the ways in which the domain of accounting expertise
is reconstituted in new social media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – in Big 4 accounting ?rms.
Using content analysis and interview data we show how social media professionals, in pursuing their
own professional project, generate change in the professional domain of accountancy. Our analysis
demonstrates that the institutional work of domain change occurs through three related activities:
boundary work, rhetorical work and the construction of the embedded actor.
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
How do changes in professional expertise occur? In the ?eld of
accounting, considerable research has demonstrated how ‘‘profes-
sionalism’’ as a construct has shifted over time (e.g.,
Anderson-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 1998, 2000, 2001; Coffey,
1994; Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Samuel, 1998; Empson, 2004;
Grey, 1994, 1998; Pentland, 1993). Much of this research demon-
strates a movement away from professionalism as a
normative-ethical construct and toward professionalism as an
expression of jurisdictional or technical expertise (e.g., Brint,
1996). Similar research shows that these changes occur as account-
ing work shifts to new domains of practice, such as large organiza-
tions (Suddaby, Gendron, & Lam, 2009) or trans-national
organizational ?elds (Suddaby, Cooper, & Greenwood, 2007).
A related stream of research has demonstrated how the domain
of accounting, as jurisdictional claim to expertise (Miller, 1994),
has become reconstituted over time. Much of this research has
focused on the discursive strategies through which accounting
expertise and technology is applied to new areas of practice
(Miller, 1991; Hopwood, 1987; Power, 1997; Young, 1994). A key
insight of this research is that changes in the domain of accounting
expertise do not typically occur as a radical and strategic change
but, rather, occur incrementally as pre-existing accounting prac-
tices and terms are gradually applied to new regulatory spaces
(Young, 1994, 1995).
This line of research offers useful insight into the endogenous
and largely routine ways in which the domain of accounting exper-
tise and techniques of rationalization have become expanded and
elaborated in contemporary society (Meyer, 1986). Indeed, the pro-
cess by which the domain of accounting has become diffused in
modern society illustrates many of the key dynamics of institu-
tional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006), or the process by which
the habitual practices of individual and collective actors engaged
in somewhat routine interactions contribute to macro-level social
change.
But these accounts have been criticized for neglecting the
micro-level dynamics through which domain extension occurs
(Robson, 1991). More speci?cally, as Potter (2005) and West
(2003) observe, what remains unexamined is how small groups
of technical experts can generate changes in how accounting
expertise is represented and legitimated, not through processes
of overt contests over professional jurisdiction (i.e. Abbott, 1988),
but rather through relatively routine commitments from the
day-to-day actions of individual professionals pursuing their own
relatively isolated professional projects at work.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2015.07.002
0361-3682/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
?
Corresponding author at: Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of
Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Suddaby), [email protected]
(G.D. Saxton), [email protected] (S. Gunz).
Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
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j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ aos
We seek to answer this call by studying the process by which
accounting expertise becomes reconstructed and promoted within
the elite Big Four accounting ?rms as a result of the adoption of
new social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (‘‘New
Media’’). The introduction of the Internet in the latter years of
the twentieth century has generated a proliferation of new forms
of media that have radically altered the ways in which human
interaction occurs (Agre, 2003; Castells, 2001, 2009). The adoption
of new communicative technologies, like the adoption of new audit
technologies (Fischer, 1996), creates the opportunity for members
of an institution, such as a profession, to engage in forms of insti-
tutional work, de?ned as the relatively mundane actions of indi-
viduals and collectives to create, maintain or alter an institution
(Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The rapid emergence of New Media
provides a useful natural experiment within which the fabric of a
social institution – i.e. the domain of accounting expertise – is
‘‘torn’’ and reconstructed.
We apply the conceptual lens of ‘institutional work’ to present a
theoretical model of practice-driven domain change in accounting.
Our interest is in understanding how new social media creates an
opportunity to recon?gure accounting expertise in new ways. That
is, our interest is in understanding howNew Media creates the lim-
inal space for certain professionals, even non-accounting profes-
sionals, to engage in practices and actions that have the
unintended consequence of extending domain by rede?ning pro-
fessional expertise.
Our theoretical argument differs from existing theories of
domain change in three important ways. First, most prior research
on domain change in accounting has focused on examining how
accounting expertise is extended to new jurisdictions or areas of
practice – e.g., ?nancial instruments (Young, 1996) and environ-
mentalism (Power, 1997). This research adopts the traditional
post-Enlightenment notion of professional expertise as being con-
stituted, largely, by the content and spread of knowledge. We build
on these studies by focusing instead on how our understanding of
professionalism changes when the domain of accounting is
extended, not to a new practice area, but instead to the somewhat
ambiguous public domain of social media. In this case, we observe
that domain extension is less concerned with the substantive con-
tent of expert knowledge and, instead, more concerned with how
claims to professional expertise can be made and who has authority
to make them. That is, we observe that domain change not only
occurs by colonizing new areas of practice, but also occurs by
changing the ways in which claims to professional expertise can
legitimately be enacted.
Second, while most accounts of domain change adopt, either
explicitly or implicitly, the notion of different occupational groups
engaging in overtly strategic jurisdictional con?ict over claims to
professional expertise (e.g., Abbott, 1988), our analysis focuses on
domain change that occurs intra-organizationally in a largely
uncontested and unanticipated manner through the quotidian
interactions of traditional professionals (e.g., accountants) and
non-traditional professionals (e.g., social media experts), each pur-
suing their own professional project in the context of a large orga-
nization. In this case we do not observe overt con?ict over
jurisdiction, but rather a willing secession by accountants of their
autonomy over de?ning professional domain to social media
experts and a concomitant change in how claims of professional
expertise are enacted in new media.
Finally, our analysis demonstrates the critically important role
of large and complex professional organizations in enacting – i.e.,
mediating, enabling, and facilitating – domain change in the
accounting profession. As large professional ?rms have increas-
ingly become the sites of professionalization, so too have large pro-
fessional ?rms become the sites within which domain change occurs.
That is, rather than extending accounting professionalism to assert
new knowledge claims, our analysis demonstrates that accounting
professionalism is extended within the organization by generating
new ways in which claims to accounting expertise can legitimately
be made. This form of domain change is not so much about extend-
ing professionalism to new jurisdictions as it is about extending
the range of performative activities through which claims to pro-
fessional expertise can occur.
We present our paper in four sections. The next section outlines
the theoretical basis for our contention that New Media provides a
disruptive change in the domain of accounting expertise. We
brie?y review the literature on domain change and jurisdictional
competition in the professions, and then review the history of
emerging modes of new media and summarize their various char-
acteristics. In the second section we describe our research design
and methods. Our results are presented in the third section and
we conclude with a discussion of our theoretical insights and the
broader implications of our study.
2. Theoretical context
2.1. Existing approaches to domain change in accounting
A growing stream of research has come to understand account-
ing as a social and highly institutionalized practice (Hopwood,
1992; Miller, 1994). From this perspective, the expansion of
accounting in society does not represent a functional need for tech-
nical accounting skills but rather a form of cultural rationalization
in which the existence of accountants and accounting practices
re?ects cultural claims to legitimacy and rationality (Meyer,
1986). The global expansion of the accounting profession, thus, is
explained by the growing cultural legitimacy that accountancy
represents in an increasingly rationalized society.
An important extension of this research has focused on under-
standing how and why the domain of accounting has been
extended and reconstituted in contemporary society (Miller,
1994; Miller & Rose, 1990). A recurring theme of the research is
that the accounting domain is continually in ?ux, constantly
extending both in ‘‘power and scope’’ (Hoskin & Macve, 1994:
92). Thus, much early research focused on documenting the expan-
sion of accounting rationality to new organizational and societal
settings (Gowler & Legge, 1983; Loft, 1986) including restructuring
individuals as ‘‘calculable selves’’ (Miller, 1992).
More recently, research has turned to understanding the pro-
cesses by which domain expansion occurs. A key ?nding is the
importance of how spaces and issues become framed or problema-
tized in accounting language (Young, 1994). Once issues have been
reframed as accounting problems, they gain legitimacy and entry
into the regulatory space of an organization – i.e., a corporation,
a collective or a nation-state. Such expansion typically occurs
through the adoption of specialized language – vocabularies and
terms that comprise ‘‘rationales’’ that ‘‘mobilize the calculative
technologies of accounting’’ (Miller, 1994: 3). Collectively, these
studies have generated signi?cant insights into why, where and
how the domain of accounting expertise has permeated broad
areas of contemporary society. More importantly, this research
points to the often deleterious and unintended consequences of
domain expansion. What is missing from these accounts, however,
is an understanding of how domain expansion occurs within the
accounting profession itself. That is, while prior research has ably
demonstrated how accounting rationality has expanded in society
generally, we have little analysis of how new professional practices
and the expertise of adjacent professionals get absorbed within the
broader domain of accounting professionalism.
Traditional sociological theory suggests that professional
domain expansion (termed ‘‘jurisdictional expansion’’) occurs at
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 53
macro-organizational levels of analysis, typically through the work
of professional associations (Abbott, 1988). Abbott also argues that
jurisdictional expansion invariably encourages overt con?ict
between different professions and results in a power-hierarchy
or status order of professions. Domain expansion, in this traditional
view is overt, instrumental and highly contested.
Accounting research, however, offers an alternative view of how
professionals expand their domain of practice. Substantial
research, for example, argues that professional expertise is consti-
tuted, largely, at the ?rm or organizational level rather than at the
institute or ?eld level of analysis (Cooper & Robson, 2006;
Covaleski et al., 1998). Similarly, accounting theorists who adopt
an institutional perspective have suggested that processes of
accounting change are fundamentally different from those in other
professions in that, rather than occurring through overt con?ict
and change, they result from a much more nuanced and gradual
shift in cognition, a process sometimes termed ‘‘institutional think-
ing’’ (Potter, 2005; Young, 1996).
2.2. Domain expansion as institutional work
This view of the process of domain expansion can be seen as an
illustrative example of institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby,
2006). De?ned as the process by which institutions are created,
maintained and changed, the concept of institutional work has
gained traction because it offers a counterpoint to existing expla-
nations of institutional change which have been criticized for
adopting macro level points of view in which highly agentic or ‘‘hy-
permuscular’’ actors (known as ‘‘institutional entrepreneurs’’) gen-
erate profound social change by restructuring organizational ?elds
through highly contested and dramatic con?icts (see Delbridge &
Edwards, 2013; Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Suddaby, 2010 for
critiques).
The process of domain expansion shares many of the conceptual
attributes of institutional work. Foremost, accounting practices are
seen to expand to new domains through relatively quotidian and
mundane micro-level practices, rather than through the highly
contested and macro-level jurisdictional con?icts described in
sociological theories of the professions. In this sense, domain
extension is somewhat invisible because it is embedded in routine
practices of the profession. Similarly, one of the key mechanisms of
domain expansion is understood to occur through the discourse or
the extension of accounting language and terminology to new
spheres of social activity. Institutional work, similarly, occurs lar-
gely through the application of different vocabularies of motive
(Mills, 1940), rhetoric (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) or linguistic
claims (Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998) that reframe existing
social practices in ways that make them seem more rational and,
therefore, more legitimate.
Adopting an institutional work lens helps us to identify an
important means of enhancing our understanding of domain
extension in accounting. Most extant research on domain exten-
sion has focused on how various techniques of accounting have
been used to extend accounting expertise into a wide variety of
social domains. Few studies, however, have examined the institu-
tional work involved in domain extension of accounting expertise
by problematizing and discursively reconstructing the accounting
profession itself.
Similarly, most studies of domain extension in accounting have
focused on how the content of accounting expertise changes as it is
adapted from one empirical context (e.g., manufacturing) to
another (e.g., environmental auditing). But accounting expertise,
or any professional expertise for that matter, is not entirely consti-
tuted by the content of its knowledge. Professional expertise is also
constituted by how those claims to expertise can legitimately be
made. As the sites of professionalization increasingly shift to
ambiguous domains such as governments and large organizations
(Cooper & Robson, 2006), researchers observe that expert domain
change shifts from claims about the content of professional exper-
tise to claims about how claims of professional expertise can be
legitimately enacted (Noordegraaf, 2007). That is, as large organi-
zations increasingly become the generators of professionalism,
domain claim initiatives are less about asking ‘what constitutes
professional expertise?’ and more about asking ‘how can claims
to professional expertise be legitimately made or performed in this
context?’ (Hodgson, 2005).
We propose to correct this de?ciency by documenting the ways
in which the domain of accounting expertise is discursively recon-
structed through, and as a result of, the disruptive innovation of
New Media. We view the introduction of new media as a signi?-
cant disruption in the institutional fabric of accounting profession-
alism, but one that offers a rare opportunity to directly observe the
mechanisms by which accounting expertise is extended and recon-
structed, not through overt contestation over jurisdiction, but
rather through the institutional work of professional domain
construction.
We focus on the elite Big Four accounting ?rms and their inter-
action with New Media in an effort to understand the nuanced
ways in which domain extension occurs. We use content analysis
and interview data to demonstrate how ?rms engage in varied
practices designed to reconstitute accounting expertise in New
Media. Before presenting our study, however, we ?rst deconstruct
our core research question of how changes in professional exper-
tise occur into three subsidiary questions that integrate under-
standings of professional domain extension and institutional work.
3. Research questions
3.1. RQ1: Domain extension as boundary work
A key contribution of research on institutional work has been to
offer insight into the process by which actors construct, erode and
bridge boundaries, a process often referred to as ‘‘boundary work’’
(Gieryn, 1999). Within the context of the professions, boundary
work has typically referred to the process by which actors, typi-
cally professional associations, construct occupational closure or
socially legitimated claims to exclusive expertise. Occupational
boundary claims by professions are typically constructed through
associated claims to class (Friedson, 1986; Larson, 1977), exclusive
knowledge or technical expertise (Abbott, 1988) or power
(Johnson, 1972) that become formalized through regulatory bar-
gains with other powerful institutions such as the state (Cooper,
Lowe, Puxty, & Willmott, 1987).
Historically, research on boundary work has largely focused on
how occupational boundaries are constructed and maintained.
Considerably less research has been devoted to understanding
how occupational boundaries in the professions are eroded or
changed. One promising stream of research points to the impor-
tance of exogenous shocks or disruptive events such as the intru-
sion of a new institutional actor such as a new profession
(Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), a new regulatory space
(Lawrence, 1999) or a new set of technical practices as a key trigger
for boundary change. Few of these studies, however, offer explana-
tory accounts of how new boundaries are reconstructed after the
exogenous trigger event.
A second stream of research, though not acknowledged as a
form of institutional work, describes the process by which the
jurisdictional space of a profession becomes incrementally rede-
?ned (Barrett & Gendron, 2006; Gendron & Barrett, 2004;
O’Dwyer, 2011; O’Dwyer, Owen, & Unerman, 2011; Suddaby &
Greenwood, 2001). Young (1994, 1995), for example, analyzes
54 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
the way in which professional domain expansion has occurred in
accounting. In contrast to prior research, the boundary work of
domain expansion occurs largely endogenously through a shift in
cognition or taken-for-granted assumptions about how social
problems and issues might be re-conceptualized as ?nancial or
measurement issues. The institutional work of domain expansion,
in this perspective, involves abstracting existing templates and
techniques of accounting and diffusing them to new social
domains – i.e., translating them across cognitive and social bound-
aries and, in so doing, eroding the socially constructed concrete-
ness of those boundaries.
This latter view of boundary work is more theoretically consis-
tent with the construct of institutional work, in two ways. First, it
offers an endogenous explanation of how boundary erosion can
occur. Second, and perhaps more important, it offers a clear mech-
anism for boundary deconstruction through the association of
shifts in socially constructed forms of cognition with incremental
changes in practices. While some social theorists have long
acknowledged the important relationship between changes in
social boundaries and practices (Schatzki, 2001), Young (1994,
1995) offers a clear empirical illustration of how this process
occurs.
An emerging stream of research, however, suggests an alterna-
tive mechanism for the boundary work of domain extension. A
small and as yet unconnected group of studies suggests that a pre-
liminary step in the erosion and reconstruction of professional
jurisdictional boundaries occurs through the creation of a new dis-
cursive space. Power (1997) observed that accounting professionals
adopted linguistic claims of professional expertise in environmen-
tal auditing long before the profession had constructed any techni-
cal expertise in the domain. Similarly, Arndt and Bigelow (2005)
observe that a signi?cant preliminary stage in transforming hospi-
tal administration from a predominantly female to male profession
involved the use of male terminology to describe the ideal profes-
sional in prominent trade journals long before any male hospital
administrators existed.
A critical research issue, therefore, is to understand the process
by which the rhetorical construction of accounting expertise can be
extended to new domains. While prior research has established a
gradual but clear shift in the locus of professional expertise con-
struction, from the professional association to the professional ?rm
(Cooper & Robson, 2006), it is unclear how professional accounting
?rms might use the rhetorical space created by New Media to
engage in domain extension. More signi?cantly, perhaps, we have
little understanding of the evolutionary process – i.e., the practices
and the boundary work – by which Big Four ?rms have engaged
with New Media. Our ?rst research question thus is what forms
of boundary work have large professional accounting ?rms engaged
with as a result of the adoption of New Media?
3.2. RQ 2: Domain extension as rhetorical work
A related question is to understand how the creation of a new
rhetorical space created by such boundary work is then used
rhetorically to reconstruct the content of professional expertise.
The research outlined above not only describes a change in the
boundaries within which professional expertise is constructed, it
also describes a long-standing shift in content away from
moral-normative claims of legitimacy based on ethics to a dis-
course more ?rmly grounded in commerce. Considerable account-
ing research over the past decade has documented how the
discourse of professionalism has shifted away from more norma-
tive claims of legitimacy by reference to ethics and the protection
of public interest and toward legitimacy rationales based on
overtly commercial or economic rationales (e.g., Brint, 1996;
Covaleski, Dirsmith, & Rittenberg, 2003; Gendron & Suddaby,
2004).
Claims of legitimacy based on ethics in the professions are typ-
ically stated in counterpoint to commercial self-interest. The logic
of professionalism typically promotes discourse in which profes-
sional choices select ethics ahead of a professional’s economic
interests (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). Historically, the justi?ca-
tion for ethical rules that restrain competition for clients, predatory
pricing practices and rules against stealing clients are premised on
an implicit discursive assumption that professionalism is an exten-
sion of elitist norms of appropriate conduct in which overt com-
mercialism is seen to be unseemly because a professional is
foremost a gentleman and only a reluctant merchant (Gidney &
Miller, 1994).
A long history of ethical scandals in accounting, exempli?ed by
the role of Arthur Andersen in Enron, has challenged the
normative-ethical assumptions in the professions (Tof?er, 2003,
Wyatt, 2004). Several authors have documented a decline in the
ethical discourse of the profession and the emergence of a new dis-
course that favors a view of the accountant as a global businessper-
son, rather than a protector of the public interest (Brint, 1996;
Hanlon, 1994, 1996; Samuel, Covaleski, & Dirsmith, 2009;
Suddaby et al., 2009; Zeff, 2003).
Again, it is not clear how the content of professional discourse
will change in the context of New Media. A perhaps obvious pre-
diction is that the trend identi?ed above will persist or accelerate.
That is, the relative emphasis of managerial skills and entrepre-
neurial ability will outweigh the more traditional discourse of
accounting professionalism as protecting the public interest.
More signi?cantly, it is unclear what position or degree of engage-
ment large accounting ?rms will take with respect to trying to
in?uence the characterization of professionalism in New Media.
Our second research question, thus, is how has the content of
domain claims of professional expertise changed in New Media, and
what is the nature of engagement of Big Four accounting ?rms in this
process?
3.3. RQ 3: Domain extension as embedded agency
The concept of institutional work emerged in counterpoint to
existing explanations of social change that relied on assumptions
of highly powerful agents. That is, prior accounts of institutional
change typically invoked the notion of ‘‘institutional entrepre-
neurs’’ or extremely powerful actors that possessed both the
re?exivity to overcome cognitively embedded assumptions and
the resources necessary to create change.
So, for example, Greenwood and Suddaby (2006) point to the
(then) Big Five accounting ?rms as institutional agents responsible
for creating multidisciplinary professional ?rms as a new organiza-
tional form in the professions. Critics, however, have argued that
this ‘‘hypermuscular’’ view of agency is inconsistent with the phe-
nomenological underpinnings of institutional theory, which
assumes that actors are so completely embedded in the
taken-for-granted assumptions of their institutional world that
they lack the re?exive capacity to even conceive of alternative
social arrangements (Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Suddaby, 2010).
Prior theory has also tended to assume that institutional change
is necessarily accompanied by high degrees of con?ict between
institutional actors. Abbott (1988) for example premised his theory
of professions on the idea that professionals are engaged in ongo-
ing struggles and con?icts over jurisdiction. Similarly, most studies
of institutional entrepreneurship in the professions re?ect these
assumptions of ongoing struggle and competition between profes-
sional groups (Covaleski et al., 2003; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006;
Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004).
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 55
Institutional work, by contrast, sees profound social change as
occurring not from overt con?ict but rather incrementally, as the
product of relatively minor changes in somewhat routine interac-
tions between professions. Jurisdictional shifts in professions,
viewed through the lens of institutional work, occur not as strate-
gic shifts in claims to legitimate expertise nor as overt efforts to
claim new occupational legitimacy, but instead as the result of
the unanticipated consequences of somewhat disparate occupa-
tional groups, each of which are pursuing their own professional
projects, but who ?nd themselves occupying the same occupa-
tional space.
Again, by adopting a view of professional change as a process of
incremental and often unintended change, institutional work
shares many of the assumptions of domain change represented
in the accounting literature (Potter, 2005; Young, 1994). What
remains unclear in this process, however, is how the interaction
of different professional groups contributes to shifts in the expres-
sion and manifestation of new forms of professional expertise. That
is, we do not understand how embedded agency effectively gener-
ates domain extension. Our third research question, thus, is how do
different groups of technical experts act as embedded change agents in
processes of domain extension?
4. Methods
This study emerged froman interest in the process by which the
accounting profession engaged in the new discursive space created
by the introduction of New Media. Intuitively, the introduction of
new modes of communication constitutes a disruption to existing
institutions (Innis, 1950, 1951; McLuhan, 1962) and creates the
contextual conditions for the observation of new processes of
social construction designed to repair breaches to existing institu-
tional structures (Barley, 1986) or create new ones (Barley &
Tolbert, 1997). As such, we entered the ?eld with an open mind
as to what types of domain change might be manifest (Suddaby,
2006) and adopted a distinctly process-oriented methodological
perspective (Langley, 1999). We begin by discussing the empirical
context, then outline our research design and conclude the meth-
ods discussion with an overview of how we collected and inter-
preted our data.
4.1. Empirical context
The emergence and rapid growth of online communication
environments is a fairly recent phenomenon. Although the
Internet has origins dating back to the 1960s, early access to this
media was originally limited to university, military and other gov-
ernment agencies. Because the infrastructure was funded largely
by government sources, access to the Internet by commercial users
was prohibited until May of 1995 when the National Science
Foundation stopped its funding and all traf?c began to operate
on commercial networks. Microsoft’s full entry into the web brow-
ser, ISP and server markets in the mid to late 1990s serves to
demarcate the origin of commercial access to the World Wide
Web. By the late 1990s most commercial entities, including the
elite accounting ?rms, had established a signi?cant presence (i.e.,
websites) on the World Wide Web.
As the Internet has become more ubiquitous, new forms of
social interaction – termed ‘‘social media’’ – have emerged. These
newer social media are distinguished from traditional website
media in terms of the substantially heightened opportunities for
direct interactivity: two way exchange of information, network
creation, public or open dialogue and the creation and exchange
of ‘‘user generated content’’ (Jansen, Zhang, Sobel, & Chowdury,
2009; Jeacle & Carter, 2011; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Lovejoy &
Saxton, 2012; Scott & Orlikowski, 2012). Facebook is perhaps the
exemplar of a social media site. Launched in 2004, Facebook is a
social networking site that has grown to accommodate 1.4 billion
users with annual revenue of over $12 billion in 2014. LinkedIn,
created around the same time, is a social networking platform
for professional contacts with 360 million users. Another, more
recent example of social media is Twitter, which allows users to
broadcast short messages limited to 140 characters called
‘‘Tweets.’’ Established in 2007, Twitter has an estimated 284 mil-
lion users who send 500 million tweets per day. Table 1 summa-
rizes the key features of these four new media.
4.2. Research design
Our study focused on elite accounting ?rms (i.e., the ‘‘Big Four’’
– Deloitte Touche, KPMG, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Ernst &
Young, now known as EY). Prior studies have demonstrated that
these ?rms assume a leading role in processes of change in the
accounting profession (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002;
Suddaby et al., 2007) and that modi?cations in practice adopted
by the elite accounting ?rms diffuse rapidly amongst other ?rms
in the profession (Mezias, 1990; Xiao, Yang, & Chow, 2004).
We limited our analysis to the North American (US/Canada)
sites of each ?rm for two reasons. First, much of our knowledge
of professions and professionalism is uniquely North American.
There is a growing awareness that professionalism, as a
socio-historical construct, is manifest quite differently in
non-North American contexts (Krause, 1996; Sciulli & Halley,
2009). So, in order to avoid confusion between different models
of professionalism, we limit our analysis to North American sites.
Second, the Big Four ?rms themselves tend to treat North
America as an integrated commercial unit in which accounting
professionals move seamlessly between jurisdictions. Although
there may be localized differences between country-speci?c sites,
we assume that the discursive construction of expertise in the sites
Table 1
Comparison of key characteristics of main new media platforms.
Platform User
community
Connection type & quality Type of
network
Content dynamism Symbols Summary label
Traditional new media
Website ‘seekers’ B2C (no formal connections) N/A Static N/A ‘Digital library,’ ‘marketing
brochure’
Social media
Facebook ‘fans’ B2C (asymmetric) Social network Dynamic messages,
static ‘apps’
@, # ‘Social network’
Twitter ‘friends’ and
‘followers’
B2C, P2P (both symmetric &
asymmetric possible)
Message
network
Dynamic messages @, RT, MT, #,
#FF, ^, via
‘Global message network’
LinkedIn Professionals
and ‘fans’
B2C (asymmetric), P2P (symmetric) Professional
network
Dynamic messages @, # ‘Professional network,’ with
searchable directory
56 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
of the Canadian and US Big Four ?rms is generally representative of
the profession in North America.
We chose to examine four forms of New Media – websites,
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. We selected these forms of media
for three reasons. First, while other forms of new media exist, these
particular sites are the most frequently used in North America
(Nielsen, 2011). Second, the sites were established at different
times – websites in the late 1990s, LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in
2004 and Twitter in 2007. As such, the sites provide a useful
sequence of snapshots of the evolution of New Media over time.
Third, while each of these forms qualify as new media, websites
are not considered to be a form of ‘‘social media’’ because of their
relative lack of interactivity. The various sites, thus, permit some
degree of comparison between new media, which adopts a tradi-
tional broadcast format and social media, which permits a more
decentralized, interactive and user-generated format.
4.3. Data gathering
Because institutional change is theorized to occur through pro-
cesses of structuration – i.e., recurring phases of structural change
followed by change in practices and meanings (Barley & Tolbert,
1997) – we adopt a two-stage longitudinal case study method.
Stage 1: The ?rst phase was designed to capture the process by
which the accounting profession ?rst adopted New Media – i.e., the
structural change phase that occurred in the early stages of New
Media adoption. Our interest here is in understanding how elite
accounting ?rms are engaging with New Media (our ?rst research
question) and how the content of domain claims of professional
expertise change when viewed through various types of New
Media (our second research question).
This data was collected in 2011, a period of time when the elite
accounting ?rms were in the early phases of social media adoption.
As our results demonstrate, most ?rms had not yet formalized
their social media plans. As such, this phase of data collection
offers a snapshot of the early stages of social media adoption and
re?ects the earliest attempts of accounting professionals to present
their discursive claims of professional domain with this new com-
municative technology.
To gather the textual data, we began with a comprehensive
search in February 2011 for all the website, Twitter, LinkedIn and
Facebook accounts of the national Big Four ?rms in the US and
Canada. Using custom code written in the Python programming
language (available upon request), we then downloaded all of the
individual pages from each of the ?rms’ websites in March and
April of 2011 and extracted the text from each page into a separate
?le. Similarly, all organizational messages (tweets) published up to
and including February 22, 2011 on the Twitter accounts main-
tained by the US and Canadian Big Four ?rms were downloaded
into an SQLite relational database via the Twitter application pro-
gramming interface (API) using Python code written speci?cally
for this research.
The ?nal database contained 7,050 tweets. A sample of 100
tweets from each account were double-checked against the actual
Twitter stream and found to be complete and accurate in all cases.
Original Python code was similarly used to download the 262
status updates from the organizations’ Facebook pages over the
period November 1, 2010 to July 11, 2011. To ensure the code
was downloading the updates accurately, we conducted a trial
download and randomly compared 100 downloaded status
updates with their counterpart updates on the Facebook website.
Status updates were downloaded correctly in all cases. We also
conducted qualitative analysis of the content and recent messages
on each ?rm’s LinkedIn account; however, given the more limited
variety of messages sent on these accounts, we did not download
en masse the messages sent on the ?rms’ LinkedIn accounts.
Stage 2: The second phase of data collection was designed to
analyze how different groups of technical experts, i.e., accountants
and New Media specialists, engage in practices of domain exten-
sion within the context of large professional organizations. This
phase of research was inspired by a reviewer of an early draft of
this research who pointed out the need to better understand the
formal processes by which professionals inside the organization
were actively engaged in monitoring and structuring the presenta-
tion of professionalism in New Media.
Accordingly, we supplemented our ?rst phase content analytic
data with semi-structured interviews with key informants from
each of the Big Four accounting ?rms in Canada who were respon-
sible for New Media marketing and strategy for their respective
organizations. The informants were identi?ed by different titles
(e.g., Director of Digital Marketing, Social Media Manager). A script
was used to guide the interview process, but whenever possible,
the researchers encouraged informants to expand their answers
when the line of questioning appeared fruitful. Probing questions
were asked when the answers provided were unclear, when con?r-
mation was required or when examples were needed. In total, ?ve
New Media executives were interviewed, representing at least one
at each Big Four ?rm. The interviews ranged in length from 45 to
90 min, were recorded and transcribed. This produced approxi-
mately 100 pages of single spaced interview text for analysis.
4.4. Data analysis
Phase 1 data was ?rst content-analyzed using quantitative tech-
niques designed to reveal recurrent broad themes contained in the
content of the various New Media platforms. Custom tools were
written in Python as well as Python’s Natural Language Toolkit
(NLTK) and were used to quantitatively map the relative and abso-
lute frequency of words, phrases and symbols used in various New
Media by Big Four ?rms. Table 2 summarizes the number of mes-
sages/web pages and words subject to this type of analysis. This
method uses quantitative analytic techniques to identify broad cat-
egories of themes present in large volumes of data (Krippendorf,
Table 2
Data Analyzed for Quantitative Analyses.
Organization/account Type of account Number of
messages
(FB, Twitter) or
web pages
(Website)
Total
number
of words
PwC_LLP Twitter – ?rm 903 16,045
DeloitteUS Twitter – ?rm 457 7507
KPMGAdvisory Twitter – ?rm 63 976
Ernst_and_Young Twitter – ?rm 324 6439
PwC_Canada_LLP Twitter – ?rm 612 10,670
KPMG_Canada Twitter – ?rm 747 11,173
KPMGCampusUS Twitter – recruiting 223 4412
DeloitteCanada Twitter – recruiting 2696 44,066
KPMGUSCareers Twitter – recruiting 344 3285
JoinDeloitteUS Twitter – recruiting 377 5923
KPMGCampusCDN Twitter – recruiting 304 5431
Deloitte USA Facebook – recruiting 95 1714
EY USA Facebook – recruiting 73 1311
PwC USA Facebook – recruiting 113 1921
Deloitte USA Facebook – ?rm 132 2109
Deloitte CA Facebook – ?rm 12 121
PwC USA Facebook – ?rm 97 1268
PwC CA Facebook – ?rm 68 974
PwC USA Website 3301 1,284,861
Deloitte USA Website 12,780 5,794,931
EY USA Website 671 679,552
KPMG USA Website 9169 1,200,322
Note: ‘recruiting’ denotes exclusively recruiting-focused account; ‘?rm’ denotes
general focus, non-recruiting account.
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 57
2004) and is similar to the open coding phase of traditional
grounded theory techniques (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Such analy-
ses reveal the key themes, ideas and subjects that are most preva-
lent in a given social media site.
These themes were then further interrogated by focusing anal-
ysis on speci?c themes related to professional domain extension.
Speci?cally, we searched for dominant targets (e.g., ‘‘youth’’), con-
cepts (e.g., ‘‘professionalism’’) and new phenomena (e.g., ‘‘celebrity
professional’’). Similarly, we analyzed the relative prevalence of
key terms of interest, such as ‘‘ethics,’’ across each of the New
Media platforms, a technique similar to Li, Lundholm, and Minnis
(2013) examination of perceived competition in 10-K ?lings.
Finally, we analyzed the proportion of words in each ?rm’s portfo-
lio of New Media content that re?ected key topical areas such as
‘‘ethics’’, ‘‘virtue’’, ‘‘legal’’ or ‘‘economics’’ using the pre-validated
Harvard IV psychosocial dictionary. Prior research has demon-
strated this technique to be an effective measure of sentiment in
media content (Tetlock, 2007; Tetlock, Saar-Tsechansky, &
MacSkassy, 2008).
Phase 1 and phase 2 data were also analyzed using more tradi-
tional qualitative techniques in which key topical areas, isolated by
the quantitative methods described above, were then recoded axi-
ally (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) in an effort to identify relationships
between open-coded categories and to discern broader theoretical
themes in the data. Finally, the material in both phases of data col-
lection were subject to more selective coding techniques in which
emergent themes identi?ed in prior rounds of analysis, such as the
notion of ‘‘celebrity professional’’ and ‘‘embedded agency,’’ were
clari?ed and elaborated.
5. Results
5.1. Domain extension as boundary work
Although social media was well established by 2011, the Big
Four accounting ?rms were just beginning to become strategically
engaged with this new form of communication. Our analysis of
New Media adoption by the Big Four reveals signi?cant variation
in the degree to which each of the ?rms transitioned the boundary
from traditional to New Media. The variation was manifest in three
key areas: the pace of adoption, the ostensible purpose of adoption
and the degree of strategic control exercised over New Media. We
elaborate each of these in turn.
5.1.1. Pace of adoption
We found a total of 8 websites, 11 Twitter accounts, 9 LinkedIn
accounts and 7 Facebook accounts for the national Big Four ?rms in
the US and Canada. By February of 2011 all ?rms in Canada and the
US had adopted websites. There was, however, substantial varia-
tion in the adoption of social media platforms. Table 3 summarizes
the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by the ?rms. Twitter was the
most popular social media application – seven of the eight ?rms
had Twitter accounts, whereas only ?ve had adopted Facebook.
One ?rm had adopted neither.
The variation in adoption of new media platforms is perhaps
unsurprising, given the novelty of the technology and the tradi-
tional media avoidance of professional ?rms. As one informant
observed ‘‘I came to [?rm] in November, 2011 and we didn’t have
a social media plan or anything related to social media until, I
would say, May of 2012. . .So when I came into my role there was
no social media marketing at this ?rm’’ (Informant 1:1). This infor-
mant’s experience was shared, generally, across the Big Four where
each informant indicated that their ?rm had only recently recog-
nized social media as a potential ?rm strategy.
The ?rms also demonstrated considerable confusion amongst
the managing partners as to how to strategically incorporate the
new media into daily practice. One informant, for example,
acknowledged that the ?rm was slow to adopt a clear social media
strategy because ‘‘. . .for many of us, me included, right, social
media is still a bit of a mystery on howyou use it, what you do with
it and particularly from a business perspective and I would say that
coming from. . .a traditional accounting ?rm. . .you’re trying to
think through how do we actually use this’’ (Informant 3:1). The
presence of new media, thus, provided a new liminal space, a
‘blank sheet’, within which the established accounting ?rms were
afforded the opportunity to rearticulate their claims to professional
expertise. As we demonstrate, the ?rms exhibit both considerable
variation in adoption patterns and some degree of confusion as to
the strategic potential of new media.
5.1.2. Purpose of adoption
This confusion as to the strategic potential was re?ected in how
?rms initially used new media applications. Table 4 summarizes
the various ways in which the Big Four ?rms set up their
Facebook and Twitter accounts. Table 4 effectively summarizes
each ?rm’s new media adoption pro?le. The results indicate that
the sites were typically set up with a clear and narrow focus on a
speci?c ?rm activity, such as ‘‘recruiting’’ or with a much more
general or diffuse purpose.
As Table 4 demonstrates, ?rms varied considerably both in the
number of new media accounts that were initially established as
well as the degree of strategic focus they adopted. Fig. 1 summa-
rizes the data in Table 4 in order to permit a more ?ne-grained
analysis of the data. Fig. 1 presents the output of a
multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analysis of the numerical
(no = 0, yes = 1) translation of Table 4. The analysis summarizes
in two-dimensional space how‘‘similar’’ each organization is based
on its new media adoption pro?le with Dimension 1 (shown on the
x-axis) representing a generic ‘‘?rm focus’’ and Dimension 2
(shown on the y-axis) representing a ‘‘recruitment only’’ focus.
Updated data in 2013 showed the same core pattern. Ultimately,
?rms have adopted distinct identities in terms of their overall
new media strategies. So, for example, among the Canadian ?rms,
EY had no Twitter presence in 2011, Deloitte and PwC both
adopted a generic ‘‘?rm’’ presence and KPMG had both ‘‘?rm’’
and ‘‘recruiting’’ pro?les in new media.
The ?rms also differ signi?cantly in the content of messages
placed in new social media. To examine this, we looked at the three
‘‘?rm’’ Twitter accounts maintained by the Canadian Big 4 ?rms. To
analyze the text we wrote a Python script that iterated over the
tweets and aggregated each ?rm’s messages into a single text ?le.
These three text ?les were then used to generate three ‘‘word
clouds’’ (using Wordle, www.wordle.net) shown in Fig. 2. The lar-
ger the word in the ?gure, the more frequently it appeared in the
organizations tweets. The word clouds thus re?ect what content
was emphasized in each ?rm’s Twitter messages.
Fig. 2 demonstrates considerable differentiation across ?rms by
content of new media. Deloitte is the only bilingual account.
Table 3
Distribution of the adoption of Facebook and Twitter of Big Four accounting ?rms in
2011.
Firm on FB?
No Yes
Firm on Twitter? No EY Canada
Yes KPMG USA
KPMG Canada
Deloitte USA
Deloitte Canada
EY USA
PwC USA
PwC Canada
58 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
Deloitte also stresses individuals (the ‘‘AJ’’, ‘‘KJP’’ and ‘‘FH’’ indicate
the initials of proli?c authors of tweets). Overall, Deloitte appears
to have adopted a more relational approach to their Twitter feeds
– i.e., focus on building personal relationships – than have the
other ?rms which, in turn appear to be more focused on broadcast-
ing research content, as re?ected in the prominence of such words
as ‘‘science’’, ‘‘report’’, ‘‘survey’’, ‘‘learn’’ and ‘‘study’’. Lastly, KPMG
appears to have adopted a self-promotional or marketing tone to
its content.
Finally, the ?rms used new media to present differentiated
images in their substantive practice areas. Both KPMG and PwC
present ‘‘tax’’ as a dominant content category on Twitter, whereas
Deloitte clearly de-emphasizes traditional functional areas of
accounting and prefers, instead, to focus on elements of new media
(as indicated by the prominence of ‘‘socialmedia’’, ‘‘video’’ and
‘‘live’’) as well as sustainable management (‘‘sustainability’’, point-
vert’’). PwC, while somewhat similar to KPMG in content, distin-
guishes itself with a semantic emphasis on data analysis
(‘‘forecast’’, ‘‘survey’’ and ‘‘sciences’’). KPMG, by contrast, presents
as a much more traditional accounting ?rm, emphasizing terms
like ‘‘risk’’, ‘‘?nancial’’ and ‘‘partner.’’ Indeed, KPMG is the only ?rm
where the word ‘‘accounting’’ appears.
In sum, our ?rst stage analysis reveals the preliminary phase of
domain extension within the Big Four accounting ?rms. In tradi-
tional media, such as websites, the ?rms present themselves
within the bounds of traditional professional discretion – i.e., as
relatively undifferentiated professional service ?rms. The introduc-
tion of new media, however, provides an open or liminal space that
created the opportunity to rede?ne professional domains. That is,
the new technology describes a new ideational context that gives
participants some freedom from established norms in how their
expert domain is de?ned and interpreted. We observe considerable
variation in practice in which some ?rms are slow to adopt, and
ultimately present a highly conservative professional image, focus-
ing on traditional functional areas of practice. Others, by contrast,
adopt new media early, do so with several platforms and demon-
strate a degree of sensitivity to the interactive and relational
potential of the new technology.
Table 4
New media adoption by ‘‘Big Four’’ accounting ?rms in Canada and USA in 2011.
Traditional new media Social media
Firm Website LinkedIn Facebook (?rm) Facebook (recruiting) Twitter (?rm) Twitter (recruiting) Twitter (other)
Deloitte US Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Deloitte CA Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No
EY US Yes Yes No Yes Yes No No
EY CA Yes No No No No No No
PwC US Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
PwC CA Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No
KPMG US Yes Yes No No Yes Yes (Â2) Yes
KPMG CA Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No
Note: ‘recruiting’ denotes exclusively recruiting-focused account; ‘?rm’ denotes general focus, non-recruiting account.
g y g g
-0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
Deloitte USA
Deloitte Canada
Ernst & Young USA
Ernst & Young Canada
PwC USA
PwC Canada
KPMG USA
KPMG Canada
-1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0
Fig. 1. Metric Multidimensional Scaling of New Media Adoption by Big Four Firms, 2011. Note: In this ?gure presents the output of a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS)
analysis of the numerical (no = 0, yes = 1) translation of Table 4. The analysis summarizes in two-dimensional space how ‘‘similar’’ each organization is based on its new
media adoption pro?le. Our analysis of the data suggests Dimension 1 (shown on the x-axis) represents a generic ‘‘?rm focus,’’ while Dimension 2 (shown on the y-axis)
represents a ‘‘recruitment only’’ focus. Higher values on the x-axis thus indicate greater emphasis on the corporate or ‘‘?rm’’ focus in a ?rm’s new media adoption pro?le,
while higher values on the y-axis indicate greater emphasis on a ‘‘recruiting’’ focus in the ?rm’s new media adoption pro?le. Also note that the adoption pro?le shown is from
2011; Ernst & Young is now known as ‘‘EY.’’
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 59
More important for our purposes is the observation that new
media creates the liminal space for institutional work. New media
offers the accounting profession a newly bounded conceptual
space within which the domain of professional expertise can be
re-conceptualized. The variation in practices of adoption and rep-
resentation that we observe suggest a broad range of institutional
practices. That is, there is considerable variation across ?rms in the
degree of institutional re?exivity or understanding of the ways in
which new media can be used to assist in domain extension. As
we demonstrate in the next section, this variation in institutional
re?exivity is best re?ected in the degree of agency or strategic con-
trol assumed by individual ?rms. Signi?cantly, we observe that tra-
ditional accounting professionals possessed neither awareness nor
agency in this arena and ceded much of the institutional work to an
emerging professional category – social media professionals.
5.1.3. Strategic control
A key ?nding of our research is the low level of direct oversight
of the digital media function by professionally trained accountants
in a function that directly affects client contact. Although the
accounting profession has a long history of delegating work to a
variety of organizational professionals such as human resources
or marketing, research (Anderson-Gough et al., 1998) and practi-
tioner accounts (Maister, 1998) indicate that professionals are
loath to delegate any functions that interfere with their direct con-
tact with clients. Indeed, having non-professionals contact clients
KPMG
PwC
Fig. 2. Word Clouds for Deloitte-Canada, KPMG-Canada and PwC-Canada ‘Firm’ Twitter Accounts.
60 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
was cited as a key objection to multidisciplinary partnerships in
North America (Suddaby, 2001). However, in the case of social
media, the Big Four ?rms were unre?ectively willing to cede con-
trol over their claims to professional expertise vis-à-vis their cli-
ents to social media experts.
As noted above, managing partners viewed social media as a
‘‘mystery’’ and were very willing to cede jurisdiction within the
?rm to non-accountant social media experts. None of the social
media executives we interviewed at the Big Four ?rms were
trained as accountants. While this is, perhaps, unsurprising, they
also each indicated a relatively high degree of autonomy in insti-
tuting strategic policies on new media within the organization.
One informant indicated that, although she formally reported to
a member of the executive committee and liaised with her coun-
terpart in the global organization, she and her digital media team
were allowed to ‘‘work fairly independently around our mission’’
(Informant 4:1). This informant went on to point out that when
he ?rst arrived at the ?rm, professional accountants did engage
directly with social media strategy and managed it through a pro-
fessional committee. One of his ?rst tasks, however, was to take
control of the function and distance it from existing controls:
when I came here a year ago . . . I would say that social media
was fragmented and not one single group sort of used it and
it was a social media governance by committee, and over a
short period of time we changed that and took responsibility
for it; and not to be controlling but because some things are
best accomplished not through committee but through getting
stuff done. . .[the professional committee’s] approach to social
media was very risk based, right, and their training and whatnot
would cause people, other than the talent team
, to basi-
cally want to do nothing, to be fearful of it. (Informant 4:1)
In fact, each of the digital media executives interviewed indi-
cated that, although they formally report to an executive commit-
tee comprised of accounting professionals, they enjoyed
considerable autonomy. Another informant observed ‘‘I would
say that I report to my director, but the nature of a matrix organi-
zation means that you have a lot of people that you kind of . . . I
guess you report to because you’re working on a project with
them’’ (Informant 2:1).
Although the digital media executives enjoy relatively low
levels of professional monitoring, they do exert a high degree of
control over the content in their ?rm’s digital media. For example,
an informant at one Big Four ?rm indicated that, up until recently,
only one person (i.e., the informant) was authorized to tweet on
the ?rm account. Even though the authority to issue tweets was
recently opened up to include two members of the public
relations team, the informant indicated that ‘‘because it’s my
responsibility, I am not comfortable allowing access to too many
people so, a lot of times, the tweets are sent to me for approval
?rst’’ (Informant 1:1). Another informant con?rmed that the only
people in the ?rm with authority to access Twitter and Facebook
accounts ‘‘would only be myself and the social media manager’’
(Informant 3:2).
The content of social media sites at Big Four ?rms, thus, is very
tightly controlled by the social media professionals but quite inde-
pendent from the scrutiny of the accounting professionals. This
observation was somewhat surprising, given that much of the con-
tent of the sites and tweets related to substantive accounting
issues. When pressed to explain the inconsistency, each of the
informants pointed to regulatory and ethical concerns within the
profession that required such tight monitoring. However, the infor-
mants appeared vague about the speci?cs of these rules:
There’s rules around, you know, not talking about a client
engagement speci?cally, right, so not getting into details there,
but you just . . . yeah, I think that’s probably the biggest one.
(Informant 5:1)
The digital professionals, thus, appeared to be strategically
drawing on the professional ethics of auditors to justify their tight
jurisdictional control over content without really being able to
articulate the speci?c professional justi?cation.
One of the clear consequences of such tight gate-keeping con-
trols by the social media executives was that the interactive poten-
tial of the New Media is not realized in Big Four accounting ?rms.
That is, rather than using social media as a mechanism for giving
external and internal stakeholders voice, the media was used rela-
tively narrowly to simply ‘‘broadcast’’ information. The digital
executives were aware of this limitation:
it’s social media in terms of us using the channel, but we are not
using social media to be social. Social media is two-way com-
munication. Due to independence and legal reasons our
two-way communication is limited, if non-existent. So we’re
using the channel, but we’re not using it for what it’s meant
to be used for (Informant 1:1).
In fact, they often tried to work around the limitation by creat-
ing content that gave the appearance if not the substance of
two-way communication. The same informant observed ‘‘so, dur-
ing our [?rm event] we had live tweeting and it was intended to
instigate conversation between other users and re-tweets, not nec-
essarily a conversation with us. Again, not really having a conver-
sation but trying to look like we’re having a conversation, if that
makes sense’’ (Informant 1:1).
5.1.4. Domain extension as boundary work
Our results contradict much of the extant knowledge of bound-
ary work in the professions, which assumes that the boundary
work of domain extension is universally characterized by
inter-professional con?ict over jurisdiction. Gieryn (1983: 791)
thus observes that when the goal of boundary work is to extend
a professional domain into adjacent areas of occupational exper-
tise, a key strategy is to absorb the adjacent occupation while char-
acterizing it as subordinate and inferior. Abbott (1988), similarly,
observed that when different professions occupy the same
work-space, occupational roles between professions are often not
clearly de?ned and therefore jurisdiction must be claimed and con-
stantly maintained. The ongoing assumption in this research, thus,
is that domain extension is necessarily competitive and con?icted
with the intended objective of coercively constructing a clear
status-order between the professions.
Our results do not support this observation. Instead of a con-
?icted relationship with social media-experts, we see a high degree
of willingness by accountants to cede jurisdiction to social media
experts. Indeed, as noted above, the accountants give the
social-media managers jurisdiction to negotiate individual profes-
sional identities and reconstruct traditionally sensitive communi-
cation relations with clients.
Perhaps more importantly, they do not try to force social media
managers into a subordinate relationship. Indeed they take pains
to separate them from other clearly subordinate managers such
as marketing and HR. Two of the four ?rms experimented with
the notion of melding new media professionals with the occupa-
tional category of Human Resources. However, each ?rm quickly
identi?ed the social media group as having greater strategic signif-
icance than HR and allowed them to create their own distinct func-
tional area in the ?rms.
Signi?cantly, each of the ?rms granted considerable autonomy,
discretion and strategic status to this new occupational category.
Social media experts are clearly characterized as craftsmen rather
than support staff. Their work is described as ‘‘mysterious’’ and
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 61
distinct from traditional functional support areas like marketing
and HR.
The boundary between social media and accountancy, thus,
seems highly permeable to this new occupational category.
Moreover, the boundary work appears to be mutual, with both
accountants and social media experts striving to understand and
assimilate practices from each other. In this regard, rather than
demonstrating a high degree of con?ict and contest, the boundary
work we observe is perhaps best characterized as an actively nego-
tiated order (Strauss, 1978) with considerable accommodation
given to the new occupational group.
5.1.5. Domain extension as rhetorical work
A second key element of the institutional work of domain
extension is the rhetorical construction of boundaries of expert
identity. As noted above, when the goal is assimilation of an adja-
cent professional category, rhetoric is typically used to characterize
the occupational category that is intended to be colonized as sub-
ordinate or inferior to the incumbent professional group (Freidson,
1970; Gieryn, 1983). That is, the boundary work of domain exten-
sion is typically characterized by the rhetoric of demonization
(Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). In our analysis of new media profes-
sionals in Big Four accounting ?rms, however, this did not occur.
Accounting professionals in Big Four ?rms seem content to main-
tain the characterization of new media experts as mysterious
craftsmen. Instead, we observe a somewhat contradictory rhetoric
in which the social media experts use new media to
re-characterize the substantive content and identity of accounting
professionalism.
To address the question of how the substantive content of pro-
fessionalism discourse has changed in New Media we conducted a
proportion-of-words analysis on the ?rm tweets, FaceBook sta-
tuses, and websites, with a focus on measuring the proportion of
words in the categories of ‘‘Virtue’’ and ‘‘Econ’’ of the Harvard IV
psychosocial dictionary (General Inquirer, 2011). The Virtue cate-
gory includes 719 words ‘‘indicating an assessment of moral
approval or good fortune, especially from the perspective of
middle-class society,’’ while ECON includes 502 words ‘‘of an eco-
nomic, commercial, industrial, or business orientation, including
roles, collectivities, acts, abstract ideas, and symbols, including ref-
erences to money [and] names of common commodities in busi-
ness’’ (General Inquirer, 2011). Together, the results will facilitate
a reliable, quantitative comparison of the prevalence of words con-
noting norms of ‘‘virtue’’ and those connoting norms of ‘‘com-
merce.’’ Our results are presented in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 demonstrates that, on traditional forms of new media,
such as websites, ethical terms and economic/commercial terms
appear roughly equally, albeit relatively infrequently. In contrast,
economic/commercial terms markedly outweigh normative/ethi-
cal terms on all the newer forms of social media. The difference
P
r
o
p
o
r
?
o
n
o
f
a
l
l
w
o
r
d
s
Fig. 3. Proportion of Words in General Inquirer ‘ECON and ‘Virtue’ Categories, by Account Type. Note: The y-axis shows the proportion of all words in the Big Four ?rms’
Facebook, Twitter, and website accounts that fall in the ‘‘Virtue’’ and ‘‘ECON’’ categories, respectively, of the Harvard IV psychosocial dictionary (General Inquirer, 2011). For
example, roughly 1% of all words in the ?rms’ Facebook recruiting accounts are in the ‘Virtue’ category.
62 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
is most acute on the Facebook accounts (both corporate and
recruiting) where the proportion of commercial terms is roughly
double that of normative/ethical terms. Overall, our results support
the proposition that, while ethics received roughly equal treatment
to business in traditional forms of new media, in social media, pro-
fessionalism is much more sharply focused on issues of
commercialism.
In our interviews with social media executives in Big Four ?rms
we sought to determine if there was a deliberate strategy to pro-
mote an image of the ?rm, or of individual accountants, as busi-
nesspeople rather than dispassionate and objective professionals.
Our informants con?rmed that a key component of their social
media strategy for the ?rm is premised on making the accounting
professionals more visible as commercially oriented ‘‘personal
brands’’:
. . .the big thing was, I think, that while lawyers were applauded
for having big personal brands, accountants weren’t, and so the
hardest thing when I ?rst started in professional services was
trying to get [accountants] to even speak to the media, right?
It just wasn’t a culture where people wanted that visibility,
and the ones that did were not always. . .didn’t always sit so
well with the culture of the ?rm, right. (Informant 4:2)
A second informant at another Big Four ?rm also used the term
‘‘personal brand’’ in describing their strategy of using social media
to promote individual accounting professionals as businesspeople
in order to overcome the inherent reluctance of accounting ?rms
to directly solicit business:
you know, as a professional services ?rm, we’re a bit risk averse.
We have to keep arms-length distance. We have to use our peo-
ple to help market our stuff. . .there’s a bit more regulation in
my role, and we’re trying to. . .we’ve been trying to work around
that by elevating our people. . .. (Informant 2:1)
The media executives were consistent in pointing out that the
image of the professional that they were trying to cultivate had less
to do with general expertise in accounting and more to do with
projecting a personal brand of being an involved and connected
business leader.
A third informant indicated that a key part of their LinkedIn
strategy is around cultivating this image: ‘‘We have developed a
three-part training series . . . to help partners build their brand.
Part one is focused on customizing their pro?le, making sure it
has a professional photo, as well as a full description of experience
and skills, etc. The next part is focused on showing them how to
follow core people, groups, and companies that are relevant to
their business . . . and then the third advanced part is focused on
showing them how to proactively activate their pro?le, including
sharing information and participating in discussions’’ (Informant
5:1).
Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, the enhanced focus on commer-
cialism in social media is part of a clear impression management
(Neu, 1991) strategy to reformulate the professional image of
accountants away from their studious and introverted stereotype
and convert them into a gregarious, engaged and active online
businessperson. The traditional image of professionalism is delib-
erately subverted to the social media project of developing individ-
ual ‘‘personal brands.’’
Instead of observing the subordination of an adjacent occupa-
tional category, we see a concerted effort by the social media
experts to rhetorically reconstitute the professional image of
accountants. There are two distinct themes to this rhetoric. First,
the prototypical accounting professional is recon?gured away from
the traditional focus on the professional quality of work and ethical
independence to an image of commercial engagement and eco-
nomic expertise. This theme is not particularly new, but rather
re?ects a crystallized articulation of a trend of domain extension
that has been observed in the accounting profession for some time.
Second, and perhaps more novel is the distinct shift in level of anal-
ysis of professional rhetoric from a traditional focus on the profes-
sion or the ?rm, to a new focus on the individual accountant. As we
outline in the following section, the emergence of the individual
accountants as business celebrities, is a form of domain extension
that shifts agency to individual accountants and to social media
experts.
5.2. Domain extension as embedded agency
The boundary work of domain extension of accountants in new
media occurs around two themes. First, we observe a distinct trend
toward localizing professional expertise, not in the profession or
even the professional ?rm, but rather in the individual profes-
sional. That is, there is a clear and deliberate strategy toward build-
ing an individual professional’s ‘‘personal brand’’ around
distinctive expert knowledge. Secondly, the content of expert
knowledge is not the traditional expertise around distinct ele-
ments of accounting practice, such as audit, tax or accounting
but rather is constructed around distinct industry context. That
is, expert knowledge is largely focused in industry-speci?c exper-
tise such as mining, technology, manufacturing and related
contexts.
To address the question of how the discourse of accounting
expertise is being reconstructed in new media, we conducted a
thematic content analysis of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook mes-
sages. Focusing explicitly on those messages that contain both
strong ‘‘personalization’’ content as well as content focused on pro-
fessionalism, we identi?ed four distinct categories of messages
used to promote individual professionals within New Media. We
term these four themes, respectively, ‘‘press,’’ ‘‘new hire,’’ ‘‘exper-
tise,’’ and ‘‘kudos.’’ The essential elements of each category, along
with representative quotes, are summarized in Table 5. We elabo-
rate these categories below.
The ‘‘press’’ message is used to publicize the activities of a
speci?c employee on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. The messages
almost always include links to other Web content such as videos,
pictures, reports or interviews. The author of the message is nearly
always the ?rm that employs the individual professional, and the
content of the message is typically devoted to promoting
?rm-level expertise in a substantive area of practice. The messages
are clearly used to construct an image of both the individual pro-
fessional and the ?rm as having considerable facility in
multi-media in addition to promoting the individual professional’s
expert knowledge.
The ‘‘new hire’’ message is most common on LinkedIn, but can
occur across all types of newmedia. Similar to the ‘‘press’’ message,
the ‘‘new hire’’ message emanates from the ?rm and is used to pro-
mote the ?rm’s acquisition of new professional talent.
The ‘‘expertise’’ message also focuses attention on an individ-
ual employee’s professional knowledge but contrasts with the
above types in that it focuses more closely on knowledge
content authored by the individual professional. Thus the mes-
sage is designed to draw the reader to a website, blog or other
external content that is speci?cally authored by the individual
professional. The ?rst three messages under the category of
‘‘expertise’’ messages in Table 5 highlight these type of
messages. It is important to note, however, that there are also
a number of ‘‘expertise messages’’ designed to draw the reader
to content that is authored by the ?rm. The remaining three
quotes in the ‘‘expertise’’ section of Table 5 illustrate these
types of messages.
‘‘Kudos’’ messages single out speci?c employees for congratula-
tions and occur across all types of New Media platforms. These
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 63
messages typically appear to be authored by the ?rm and are used
to offer recognition for achievement to both internal and external
audiences.
Collectively, these four types of messages describe the emer-
gence of what we term the ‘‘celebrity accountant’’ in new media.
That is, new media offers the opportunity for overt celebration of
the expertise and personal characteristics of individual accoun-
tants. Such messages appear to be shifting from the private space
to the public space (Neu, 2006); forms of communication between
professionals and between professionals and ?rms that were tradi-
tionally very private – such as job inquiries, congratulatory mes-
sages, promotions and commendations – now occur in highly
visible contexts. Moreover, both the ?rm and the individuals are
able to contribute content. This is in sharp contrast to how Big
Four ?rms appear in traditional media where, typically, the indi-
vidual accountant is largely invisible. Firm advertising in tradi-
tional media, including websites, rarely put face or name to
individual accountants.
Our interview data con?rmed that the creation of the ‘‘celebrity
accountant’’ is a deliberate social media strategy within the Big
Four. Each of the informants indicated that a key initiative for their
respective ?rms is to ‘‘personalize’’ the ?rm brand by giving each of
their partners a vivid and human online presence. As one infor-
mant stated ‘‘What we’re looking to do now is really make our
partners more real through using things like video to help them
come to life’’ (Informant 5:1). This informant con?rmed that their
strategy was to build the ?rm image around partner personalities:
‘‘So it’s making, you know, our partnership more real people. It’s
playing on the front line, putting a face to them so they’re not just
a photo and it’s . . . helping us really build out our partners as
thought leaders and viewers in their space’’ (Informant 5:1).
Two of the ?rms have extended the strategy of positioning the
?rm around ‘‘personal brands’’ to explicit strategies based on con-
structing individual partners as ‘‘gurus.’’ Informant 5:1, described
the strategy in this way:
We are in the midst of also launching a ‘guru program’ where
we’re helping our top partners build their pro?le through
events and traditional media, but also, just as importantly, in
the digital space. We are helping them learn how to use
LinkedIn and Twitter to really connect with niche audiences
and share key insights so people think of them as gurus on a
particular topic. (Informant 5:1)
The strategy of creating celebrity professionals is paired with a
supporting campaign to construct each guru’s expertise around
business-speci?c sectors. The social media executives accomplish
this by ensuring that the designated guru’s ‘‘digital presence’’ is
‘‘augmented’’ by packaging information about the accountant and
circulating it in industry-speci?c sectors. As one social media exec-
utive explained ‘‘what we’re really looking into is the more sophis-
ticated advance features of LinkedIn, which is networking, using
LinkedIn groups. . .so let’s say we have an event happening and
it’s geared toward mining professionals in Vancouver. We know
that’s where they congregate; that’s where they talk. Well we need
to be present in that group, and the idea is to encourage our part-
ners to be thought leaders – post relevant ?rm content and answer
questions’’ (Informant 1:1).
Our content analysis of the various social media accounts of the
Big Four demonstrates a clear shift to industry speci?c claims of
expertise. We restricted our analysis to the non-recruiting ‘‘?rm’’
accounts on different forms of new media. We thus examined
the aggregate content of the websites, along with the Facebook
and Twitter ‘‘?rm’’ accounts. Note that we aggregate the content
of all the Big Four ?rms in our analysis in an effort to capture holis-
tically how these elite ?rms’ new media sites re?ect the relative
importance of industry versus substantive accounting knowledge.
Our results are summarized in Fig. 4, which shows the word clouds
generated from these accounts.
Fig. 4 demonstrates a progression from traditional ‘‘broadcast’’
forms of new media (i.e., the websites), where core terms referenc-
ing the substantive bases of accounting knowledge appear quite
prominently, to the newer social media (Twitter and Facebook),
where references to substantive knowledge areas all but disappear.
For example, the word cloud in the upper frame of Fig. 4, which
represents the accumulated content of Big Four websites, contains
Table 5
Thematic content analysis of new media messages.
Message
type
Message
author
Sample quotes
Press Firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CEO Jim Quigley discusses our global growth strategy on CNBC–250,000 hires in ?ve years.http://bit.ly/bEbVsW
[Twitter]
Webinar w/Cathy Benko co-author of Mass Career Customization and Vice Chairman & Chief Talent Of?cer, Deloitte LLPhttp://bit.ly/19HlyN
(6.25) [Twitter]
Deloitte Partner, John Sizer, is interviewed by The Economic Minute: Mark-to-Market Accountinghttp://bitly.com/900dG [Twitter]
New Hire Firm Mitchell L. Glassman, former Director of the Division of Resolutions & Receiverships with the FDIC, has joined Deloitte.http://ow.ly/3HTLp
[Twitter]
Deloitte Canada has a new Business Technology Analyst. [USERNAME] is now Business Technology Analyst, was Associate Business Analyst at
Scotia Capital. [LinkedIn]
Expertise Firm/
individual
New blog post from Deloitte Center for Collective Leadership’s Stephen Langton explores why some organizations seem to be ‘‘hot houses’’ for
ideas and innovation and some...well, aren’t. [Facebook]
PwC’s Shannon Schuyler on how social innovation can drive ideas and help your organization grow.http://huff.to/kOZC7D [Facebook]
Deloitte Canada (BLOG) In today’s world of 7 billion people on the planet, do we have an abundance of talent available? Read a perspective
from Paul Held, Managing partner for Deloitte’s Consulting practice in Canada. [LinkedIn]
The second report in Deloitte’s new longitudinal survey series, Talent Edge 2020, reveals a looming risk for employers to lose their critical tal-
ent as nearly 2 out 3 employees surveyed desire to leave their current companies. [Facebook]
A wealth of information related to IFRS:http://www.kpmgifrsinstitute.com [Twitter]
Deloitte Canada Find out how we think NFC (near ?eld communication) chips will impact our lives in #2012. Check our our #TMTPredictions
exclusive video now! [LinkedIn]
Kudos Firm/
individual
Congratulations Pratham USA and INJAZ al-Arab, Deloitte21 Challenge 2011 Grant for Innovation recipients! Read DTTL Chief Corporate
Development Of?ce Ainar Aijala’s blog post to visualize how the Deloitte21 Challenge helps change lives. [Facebook]
We’re proud of our very own Leisha John, Americas Dir of Environmental Sustainability, for being named as a Top Woman in Sustainability by
LittlePinkBook.com, an online magazine for professional women interested in excelling in their careers and growing their businesses - http://
bit.ly/f378fz [Facebook]
Deloitte’s Cunningham, Fucci named to Consulting magazine’s Top 25 Consultantshttp://is.gd/wPN [Twitter]
64 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
clear references to each of the substantive knowledge bases of the
accounting profession – i.e., ‘‘accounting,’’ ‘‘tax,’’ ‘‘risk,’’ ‘‘compli-
ance’’ and ‘‘audit.’’ These terms are highlighted in ovals in Fig. 4.
The word cloud for websites also contains relatively equal refer-
ences to important industry contexts for these elite ?rms, includ-
ing ‘‘health,’’ ‘‘insurance,’’ ‘‘?nancial’’ and ‘‘technology.’’ These
terms are highlighted in rectangles in Fig. 4.
By contrast, the word cloud for Big Four Twitter accounts con-
tains only the terms ‘‘tax,’’ ‘‘risk,’’ and ‘‘accounting.’’ The term ‘‘au-
dit’’ does not appear at all. Also by contrast, the frequency and
centrality of industry terms becomes more prominent and includes
reference to the general terms ‘‘business,’’ ‘‘industry’’ and ‘‘compa-
nies’’ along with more speci?c reference to the ‘‘?nancial,’’ ‘‘health-
care,’’ ‘‘services’’ and ‘‘technology’’ sectors.
The contrast becomes sharper in the third word cloud, which
represents the collective Facebook accounts for the Big Four.
Here the terms ‘‘audit,’’ ‘‘accounting’’ and ‘‘compliance’’ disappear
completely. The terms ‘‘risk’’ and ‘‘tax’’ are the only surviving ref-
erences to a substantive knowledge base in accounting. In their
place, we see prominent reference to a number of substantive
industry sectors including ‘‘health,’’ ‘‘energy,’’ ‘‘technology,’’ ‘‘sus-
tainability’’ and ‘‘communications.’’ The more generic terms ‘‘busi-
ness’’ and ‘‘industry’’ also remain and are larger, indicating
increased frequency and centrality of use.
Collectively, the three word clouds demonstrate a gradual but
distinct shift between traditional new media, where substantive
knowledge topics get relatively equal play with claims of industry
expertise, to social media, where industry expertise clearly trumps
traditional accounting knowledge. The erosion of traditional topics
of substantive accounting knowledge occurs most acutely on
Facebook rather than Twitter. The shift toward industry knowledge
and industry-speci?c services is also apparent in the specialized
Websites
Twitter
Facebook
Fig. 4. Word Clouds Generated from Combined Big 4 Website, Twitter, and Facebook ‘Firm’ Accounts.
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 65
new media accounts created by the Big Four at the global level.
Deloitte Global, for example, has four blogs, one each on ‘‘Global
Business Issues,’’ ‘‘Human Capital Issues’’ and ‘‘Trends, Tax and
Sustainability.’’ The Deloitte Global Twitter accounts are even more
heavily skewed toward industry speci?c topic areas. They include
‘‘Business Analytics,’’ ‘‘Financial Services,’’ ‘‘Government,’’
‘‘Growth,’’ ‘‘Health Care,’’ ‘‘IFRS,’’ ‘‘Organizational Performance,’’
‘‘Reform and Regulation,’’ ‘‘Risk Management’’ and ‘‘Technology.’’
Thus, of the ten Deloitte Twitter blogs, only one is directed at a tra-
ditional substantive knowledge area (Risk Management) and the
bulk of the rest are devoted to industry sector knowledge.
Both themes re?ect the process of reconstructing the individual
accountant as an agentic actor. This is not to suggest that accoun-
tants have not been agentic actors. Clearly they have. However,
their agency has been largely constructed around both the profes-
sion (Suddaby & Muzio, 2015) and, more recently, the ?rm (Cooper
& Robson, 2006). Such macro-level agency, however, does not seem
to translate well to new media, and what we observe in this section
of results is a concerted, and increasingly strategic or deliberate
effort to socially construct the celebrity accountant as an
industry-speci?c expert. This effort re?ects a third stage of domain
extension that, ironically, not only transfers agency from the pro-
fession and ?rm to individual accountants, it also grants increased
agency to the social media experts who engineer the reconstruc-
tion. We elaborate this observation in the discussion section below.
6. Discussion
Our analysis describes a staged process by which the account-
ing profession has become engaged in domain change as a result
of adopting a new practice (social media) and a new form of exper-
tise (social media experts). We identify three distinct phases, each
of which incorporates a distinct type of institutional work.
The ?rst phase, which we term boundary work, involved the
inculcation of social media within the boundaries of the Big Five
accounting ?rms. While each ?rm varied in its mode and intent
of adoption of the new practice, they were each remarkably consis-
tent in granting the adopted professionals considerable latitude
and discretion in their activities. That is, in addition to including
new social media within the boundaries of the professional service
?rm, accountants also maintained a distinct boundary between
social media professionals and accounting practice. The result of
this boundary work is the creation of a new conceptual ‘‘space’’
within the accounting ?rm within which two categories of profes-
sionalism interact and experiment with the domain of accounting
expertise.
The second phase, which we label rhetorical work, describes the
process by which the domain of accounting expertise is recon?g-
ured as a result of the adoption of new language in the context
of social media. Here we observe not just an acceleration of exist-
ing trends toward increased commercialism, but rather a near com-
plete absence of ethics and norms in the language of professional
expertise. We also observe the beginnings of a distinct shift in level
of analysis of professional domain construction, away from the
profession or the ?rm and toward the individual professional.
This phase of domain extension is notable also for what we did
not observe. Established theories of the professions would predict
that this phase would involve the rhetorical subordination of social
media experts as an inferior form of expertise and a focus on the
work of establishing formal controls by the incumbent profession-
als over the newcomers. However, we see no effort, either formal
or informal, to restrict the autonomy and discretion of social media
experts. Rather, we see a high degree of tolerance and discretion, if
not overt cooperation, between the two professions.
The third phase, which we call embedded agency work, is charac-
terized by an effort to construct the individual accountant as an
agentic actor in the profession. We describe this reconstructed
accounting professional as the celebrity accountant and note that
this is a marked shift in the recent history of the accounting profes-
sion which has, largely, located authority and identity of the pro-
fession within the context of the large professional ?rm.
Markedly, the celebrity accountant, although not fully established
as an icon of professional expertise, represents the early stages of
reconstituting embedded agency in the profession at the individual
level of analysis. This is in sharp contradistinction to traditional
understandings of professional expertise as being constituted pri-
marily at the level of the professional association or, more recently,
the ?rm.
It is important to note that much of this institutional work is not
overtly deliberate. That is, our interview subjects do not display an
obvious degree of awareness that they are engaged in processes of
domain change. However, when pressed, they do express some
degree of re?exivity about the role that they, and the new media,
are playing in changing the nature of accounting professionalism.
Part of their objective in achieving a successful social media pres-
ence, they acknowledge, is to change the way that accountants
view themselves. This, we interpret, as a key shift in
self-cognition, or a change in institutional thinking, which we view
as an essential element of domain change.
7. Conclusion
Our analysis of the domain extension that has occurred in
accounting as a result of the adoption of new social media differs
substantially from more traditional accounts of jurisdictional
change in the professions. Foremost, it is not characterized by
the high degree of strategic intentionality and con?ict described
in the sociology of professions (e.g., Abbott, 1988). Rather, we
observe a somewhat endogenous and organic adoption of new
practices and expertise that are considered somewhat tangential
and incremental in the context of the large professional ?rm, but
which clearly hold the potential for larger changes in professional
identity, ethics and norms of behavior for accountants.
Processes of endogenous change, driven by alterations in
micro-practices at the sub-?rm level and which are largely unin-
tended, describe key elements of institutional work. They offer
an important alternative to the highly strategic, top-down charac-
terization of jurisdictional change that tends to dominate discus-
sions of change in the professions. Our analysis, thus, contributes
directly to existing understandings of domain change in the
accounting profession (Potter, 2005; Young, 1996). Rather than
focusing attention on the extension of accounting domain by
examining how accountants adopt new areas of professional prac-
tice, however, we focus instead on how the adoption of new media
to promote existing practices has initiated a range of changing
quotidian practices that form the micro-foundations of broader
domain change in the profession.
Our study also differs from traditional views of professional
change by illustrating the process by which professional projects,
in order to be successful, must become embedded in larger projects
of institutional change. Prior theory has argued that the profes-
sional project of accountancy, which failed to gain social closure
at the level of the nation state, succeeded globally because of its
af?liation with the broader institutional project of the
trans-national corporation (Suddaby & Viale, 2011). In this case,
the professional project of social media analysts has become inti-
mately intertwined with the institutional project of accountancy.
In contrast to prior professional projects in accountancy, however,
which have concentrated on the prominence of the diversi?ed
66 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
professional ?rm over that of the professional association, this pro-
ject appears to focus on individual professionals.
This research, however, offers only a preliminary glimpse into
the process of domain change within the context of social media.
Our research focuses on the early stages of new media adoption,
so more longitudinal studies will help to elaborate the processes
of institutional work that are involved in later phases. Similarly,
our study offers a gross overview of the adoption practices of
new media across US and Canadian ?rms. More detailed ethno-
graphic studies involving a single ?rm over time might offer a
more focused analysis of the subjective and interpretive processes
of individual professionals, both accounting and social media
experts, over time. It would be instructive, for example, to examine
the evolution of celebrity accountants over time through compar-
ative case studies.
Most of our knowledge of domain change in professions, and
indeed much of our knowledge of professionalism itself, is based
upon studies of classic or ‘pure’ professions that emerged in asso-
ciation with the protective guidance of the nation-state.
Increasingly, however, large diversi?ed organizations have become
the site of professional emergence. We have little understanding of
how effectively our knowledge of professions holds true when the
site of analysis moves from inter to intra professional competition.
Our preliminary investigation in this study suggests that domain
change, as a conceptual construct, operates under fundamentally
different assumptions when it occurs intra-organizationally. Our
study sketches out this relationship and our hope is that future
research will elaborate and extend this preliminary model.
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68 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
doc_599218599.pdf
This paper develops an endogenous model of institutional and professional domain change. Traditional
accounts of domain change focus attention on how professional expertise is extended to new areas of
practice. This form of domain extension is typically both deliberate and contested. However, domain
change can also occur in a somewhat quotidian and uncontested fashion when professional expertise
is extended intra-organizationally.
Twittering change: The institutional work of domain change
in accounting expertise
Roy Suddaby
a,b,?
, Gregory D. Saxton
c
, Sally Gunz
d
a
Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
b
Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK
c
University at Buffalo, SUNY, 331 Baldy, North Campus, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
d
School of Accounting and Finance, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 28 September 2012
Revised 12 May 2015
Accepted 14 July 2015
Available online 25 July 2015
a b s t r a c t
This paper develops an endogenous model of institutional and professional domain change. Traditional
accounts of domain change focus attention on how professional expertise is extended to new areas of
practice. This form of domain extension is typically both deliberate and contested. However, domain
change can also occur in a somewhat quotidian and uncontested fashion when professional expertise
is extended intra-organizationally. We analyze the ways in which the domain of accounting expertise
is reconstituted in new social media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – in Big 4 accounting ?rms.
Using content analysis and interview data we show how social media professionals, in pursuing their
own professional project, generate change in the professional domain of accountancy. Our analysis
demonstrates that the institutional work of domain change occurs through three related activities:
boundary work, rhetorical work and the construction of the embedded actor.
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
How do changes in professional expertise occur? In the ?eld of
accounting, considerable research has demonstrated how ‘‘profes-
sionalism’’ as a construct has shifted over time (e.g.,
Anderson-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 1998, 2000, 2001; Coffey,
1994; Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Samuel, 1998; Empson, 2004;
Grey, 1994, 1998; Pentland, 1993). Much of this research demon-
strates a movement away from professionalism as a
normative-ethical construct and toward professionalism as an
expression of jurisdictional or technical expertise (e.g., Brint,
1996). Similar research shows that these changes occur as account-
ing work shifts to new domains of practice, such as large organiza-
tions (Suddaby, Gendron, & Lam, 2009) or trans-national
organizational ?elds (Suddaby, Cooper, & Greenwood, 2007).
A related stream of research has demonstrated how the domain
of accounting, as jurisdictional claim to expertise (Miller, 1994),
has become reconstituted over time. Much of this research has
focused on the discursive strategies through which accounting
expertise and technology is applied to new areas of practice
(Miller, 1991; Hopwood, 1987; Power, 1997; Young, 1994). A key
insight of this research is that changes in the domain of accounting
expertise do not typically occur as a radical and strategic change
but, rather, occur incrementally as pre-existing accounting prac-
tices and terms are gradually applied to new regulatory spaces
(Young, 1994, 1995).
This line of research offers useful insight into the endogenous
and largely routine ways in which the domain of accounting exper-
tise and techniques of rationalization have become expanded and
elaborated in contemporary society (Meyer, 1986). Indeed, the pro-
cess by which the domain of accounting has become diffused in
modern society illustrates many of the key dynamics of institu-
tional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006), or the process by which
the habitual practices of individual and collective actors engaged
in somewhat routine interactions contribute to macro-level social
change.
But these accounts have been criticized for neglecting the
micro-level dynamics through which domain extension occurs
(Robson, 1991). More speci?cally, as Potter (2005) and West
(2003) observe, what remains unexamined is how small groups
of technical experts can generate changes in how accounting
expertise is represented and legitimated, not through processes
of overt contests over professional jurisdiction (i.e. Abbott, 1988),
but rather through relatively routine commitments from the
day-to-day actions of individual professionals pursuing their own
relatively isolated professional projects at work.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2015.07.002
0361-3682/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
?
Corresponding author at: Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of
Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Suddaby), [email protected]
(G.D. Saxton), [email protected] (S. Gunz).
Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ aos
We seek to answer this call by studying the process by which
accounting expertise becomes reconstructed and promoted within
the elite Big Four accounting ?rms as a result of the adoption of
new social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (‘‘New
Media’’). The introduction of the Internet in the latter years of
the twentieth century has generated a proliferation of new forms
of media that have radically altered the ways in which human
interaction occurs (Agre, 2003; Castells, 2001, 2009). The adoption
of new communicative technologies, like the adoption of new audit
technologies (Fischer, 1996), creates the opportunity for members
of an institution, such as a profession, to engage in forms of insti-
tutional work, de?ned as the relatively mundane actions of indi-
viduals and collectives to create, maintain or alter an institution
(Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The rapid emergence of New Media
provides a useful natural experiment within which the fabric of a
social institution – i.e. the domain of accounting expertise – is
‘‘torn’’ and reconstructed.
We apply the conceptual lens of ‘institutional work’ to present a
theoretical model of practice-driven domain change in accounting.
Our interest is in understanding how new social media creates an
opportunity to recon?gure accounting expertise in new ways. That
is, our interest is in understanding howNew Media creates the lim-
inal space for certain professionals, even non-accounting profes-
sionals, to engage in practices and actions that have the
unintended consequence of extending domain by rede?ning pro-
fessional expertise.
Our theoretical argument differs from existing theories of
domain change in three important ways. First, most prior research
on domain change in accounting has focused on examining how
accounting expertise is extended to new jurisdictions or areas of
practice – e.g., ?nancial instruments (Young, 1996) and environ-
mentalism (Power, 1997). This research adopts the traditional
post-Enlightenment notion of professional expertise as being con-
stituted, largely, by the content and spread of knowledge. We build
on these studies by focusing instead on how our understanding of
professionalism changes when the domain of accounting is
extended, not to a new practice area, but instead to the somewhat
ambiguous public domain of social media. In this case, we observe
that domain extension is less concerned with the substantive con-
tent of expert knowledge and, instead, more concerned with how
claims to professional expertise can be made and who has authority
to make them. That is, we observe that domain change not only
occurs by colonizing new areas of practice, but also occurs by
changing the ways in which claims to professional expertise can
legitimately be enacted.
Second, while most accounts of domain change adopt, either
explicitly or implicitly, the notion of different occupational groups
engaging in overtly strategic jurisdictional con?ict over claims to
professional expertise (e.g., Abbott, 1988), our analysis focuses on
domain change that occurs intra-organizationally in a largely
uncontested and unanticipated manner through the quotidian
interactions of traditional professionals (e.g., accountants) and
non-traditional professionals (e.g., social media experts), each pur-
suing their own professional project in the context of a large orga-
nization. In this case we do not observe overt con?ict over
jurisdiction, but rather a willing secession by accountants of their
autonomy over de?ning professional domain to social media
experts and a concomitant change in how claims of professional
expertise are enacted in new media.
Finally, our analysis demonstrates the critically important role
of large and complex professional organizations in enacting – i.e.,
mediating, enabling, and facilitating – domain change in the
accounting profession. As large professional ?rms have increas-
ingly become the sites of professionalization, so too have large pro-
fessional ?rms become the sites within which domain change occurs.
That is, rather than extending accounting professionalism to assert
new knowledge claims, our analysis demonstrates that accounting
professionalism is extended within the organization by generating
new ways in which claims to accounting expertise can legitimately
be made. This form of domain change is not so much about extend-
ing professionalism to new jurisdictions as it is about extending
the range of performative activities through which claims to pro-
fessional expertise can occur.
We present our paper in four sections. The next section outlines
the theoretical basis for our contention that New Media provides a
disruptive change in the domain of accounting expertise. We
brie?y review the literature on domain change and jurisdictional
competition in the professions, and then review the history of
emerging modes of new media and summarize their various char-
acteristics. In the second section we describe our research design
and methods. Our results are presented in the third section and
we conclude with a discussion of our theoretical insights and the
broader implications of our study.
2. Theoretical context
2.1. Existing approaches to domain change in accounting
A growing stream of research has come to understand account-
ing as a social and highly institutionalized practice (Hopwood,
1992; Miller, 1994). From this perspective, the expansion of
accounting in society does not represent a functional need for tech-
nical accounting skills but rather a form of cultural rationalization
in which the existence of accountants and accounting practices
re?ects cultural claims to legitimacy and rationality (Meyer,
1986). The global expansion of the accounting profession, thus, is
explained by the growing cultural legitimacy that accountancy
represents in an increasingly rationalized society.
An important extension of this research has focused on under-
standing how and why the domain of accounting has been
extended and reconstituted in contemporary society (Miller,
1994; Miller & Rose, 1990). A recurring theme of the research is
that the accounting domain is continually in ?ux, constantly
extending both in ‘‘power and scope’’ (Hoskin & Macve, 1994:
92). Thus, much early research focused on documenting the expan-
sion of accounting rationality to new organizational and societal
settings (Gowler & Legge, 1983; Loft, 1986) including restructuring
individuals as ‘‘calculable selves’’ (Miller, 1992).
More recently, research has turned to understanding the pro-
cesses by which domain expansion occurs. A key ?nding is the
importance of how spaces and issues become framed or problema-
tized in accounting language (Young, 1994). Once issues have been
reframed as accounting problems, they gain legitimacy and entry
into the regulatory space of an organization – i.e., a corporation,
a collective or a nation-state. Such expansion typically occurs
through the adoption of specialized language – vocabularies and
terms that comprise ‘‘rationales’’ that ‘‘mobilize the calculative
technologies of accounting’’ (Miller, 1994: 3). Collectively, these
studies have generated signi?cant insights into why, where and
how the domain of accounting expertise has permeated broad
areas of contemporary society. More importantly, this research
points to the often deleterious and unintended consequences of
domain expansion. What is missing from these accounts, however,
is an understanding of how domain expansion occurs within the
accounting profession itself. That is, while prior research has ably
demonstrated how accounting rationality has expanded in society
generally, we have little analysis of how new professional practices
and the expertise of adjacent professionals get absorbed within the
broader domain of accounting professionalism.
Traditional sociological theory suggests that professional
domain expansion (termed ‘‘jurisdictional expansion’’) occurs at
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 53
macro-organizational levels of analysis, typically through the work
of professional associations (Abbott, 1988). Abbott also argues that
jurisdictional expansion invariably encourages overt con?ict
between different professions and results in a power-hierarchy
or status order of professions. Domain expansion, in this traditional
view is overt, instrumental and highly contested.
Accounting research, however, offers an alternative view of how
professionals expand their domain of practice. Substantial
research, for example, argues that professional expertise is consti-
tuted, largely, at the ?rm or organizational level rather than at the
institute or ?eld level of analysis (Cooper & Robson, 2006;
Covaleski et al., 1998). Similarly, accounting theorists who adopt
an institutional perspective have suggested that processes of
accounting change are fundamentally different from those in other
professions in that, rather than occurring through overt con?ict
and change, they result from a much more nuanced and gradual
shift in cognition, a process sometimes termed ‘‘institutional think-
ing’’ (Potter, 2005; Young, 1996).
2.2. Domain expansion as institutional work
This view of the process of domain expansion can be seen as an
illustrative example of institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby,
2006). De?ned as the process by which institutions are created,
maintained and changed, the concept of institutional work has
gained traction because it offers a counterpoint to existing expla-
nations of institutional change which have been criticized for
adopting macro level points of view in which highly agentic or ‘‘hy-
permuscular’’ actors (known as ‘‘institutional entrepreneurs’’) gen-
erate profound social change by restructuring organizational ?elds
through highly contested and dramatic con?icts (see Delbridge &
Edwards, 2013; Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Suddaby, 2010 for
critiques).
The process of domain expansion shares many of the conceptual
attributes of institutional work. Foremost, accounting practices are
seen to expand to new domains through relatively quotidian and
mundane micro-level practices, rather than through the highly
contested and macro-level jurisdictional con?icts described in
sociological theories of the professions. In this sense, domain
extension is somewhat invisible because it is embedded in routine
practices of the profession. Similarly, one of the key mechanisms of
domain expansion is understood to occur through the discourse or
the extension of accounting language and terminology to new
spheres of social activity. Institutional work, similarly, occurs lar-
gely through the application of different vocabularies of motive
(Mills, 1940), rhetoric (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) or linguistic
claims (Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998) that reframe existing
social practices in ways that make them seem more rational and,
therefore, more legitimate.
Adopting an institutional work lens helps us to identify an
important means of enhancing our understanding of domain
extension in accounting. Most extant research on domain exten-
sion has focused on how various techniques of accounting have
been used to extend accounting expertise into a wide variety of
social domains. Few studies, however, have examined the institu-
tional work involved in domain extension of accounting expertise
by problematizing and discursively reconstructing the accounting
profession itself.
Similarly, most studies of domain extension in accounting have
focused on how the content of accounting expertise changes as it is
adapted from one empirical context (e.g., manufacturing) to
another (e.g., environmental auditing). But accounting expertise,
or any professional expertise for that matter, is not entirely consti-
tuted by the content of its knowledge. Professional expertise is also
constituted by how those claims to expertise can legitimately be
made. As the sites of professionalization increasingly shift to
ambiguous domains such as governments and large organizations
(Cooper & Robson, 2006), researchers observe that expert domain
change shifts from claims about the content of professional exper-
tise to claims about how claims of professional expertise can be
legitimately enacted (Noordegraaf, 2007). That is, as large organi-
zations increasingly become the generators of professionalism,
domain claim initiatives are less about asking ‘what constitutes
professional expertise?’ and more about asking ‘how can claims
to professional expertise be legitimately made or performed in this
context?’ (Hodgson, 2005).
We propose to correct this de?ciency by documenting the ways
in which the domain of accounting expertise is discursively recon-
structed through, and as a result of, the disruptive innovation of
New Media. We view the introduction of new media as a signi?-
cant disruption in the institutional fabric of accounting profession-
alism, but one that offers a rare opportunity to directly observe the
mechanisms by which accounting expertise is extended and recon-
structed, not through overt contestation over jurisdiction, but
rather through the institutional work of professional domain
construction.
We focus on the elite Big Four accounting ?rms and their inter-
action with New Media in an effort to understand the nuanced
ways in which domain extension occurs. We use content analysis
and interview data to demonstrate how ?rms engage in varied
practices designed to reconstitute accounting expertise in New
Media. Before presenting our study, however, we ?rst deconstruct
our core research question of how changes in professional exper-
tise occur into three subsidiary questions that integrate under-
standings of professional domain extension and institutional work.
3. Research questions
3.1. RQ1: Domain extension as boundary work
A key contribution of research on institutional work has been to
offer insight into the process by which actors construct, erode and
bridge boundaries, a process often referred to as ‘‘boundary work’’
(Gieryn, 1999). Within the context of the professions, boundary
work has typically referred to the process by which actors, typi-
cally professional associations, construct occupational closure or
socially legitimated claims to exclusive expertise. Occupational
boundary claims by professions are typically constructed through
associated claims to class (Friedson, 1986; Larson, 1977), exclusive
knowledge or technical expertise (Abbott, 1988) or power
(Johnson, 1972) that become formalized through regulatory bar-
gains with other powerful institutions such as the state (Cooper,
Lowe, Puxty, & Willmott, 1987).
Historically, research on boundary work has largely focused on
how occupational boundaries are constructed and maintained.
Considerably less research has been devoted to understanding
how occupational boundaries in the professions are eroded or
changed. One promising stream of research points to the impor-
tance of exogenous shocks or disruptive events such as the intru-
sion of a new institutional actor such as a new profession
(Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), a new regulatory space
(Lawrence, 1999) or a new set of technical practices as a key trigger
for boundary change. Few of these studies, however, offer explana-
tory accounts of how new boundaries are reconstructed after the
exogenous trigger event.
A second stream of research, though not acknowledged as a
form of institutional work, describes the process by which the
jurisdictional space of a profession becomes incrementally rede-
?ned (Barrett & Gendron, 2006; Gendron & Barrett, 2004;
O’Dwyer, 2011; O’Dwyer, Owen, & Unerman, 2011; Suddaby &
Greenwood, 2001). Young (1994, 1995), for example, analyzes
54 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
the way in which professional domain expansion has occurred in
accounting. In contrast to prior research, the boundary work of
domain expansion occurs largely endogenously through a shift in
cognition or taken-for-granted assumptions about how social
problems and issues might be re-conceptualized as ?nancial or
measurement issues. The institutional work of domain expansion,
in this perspective, involves abstracting existing templates and
techniques of accounting and diffusing them to new social
domains – i.e., translating them across cognitive and social bound-
aries and, in so doing, eroding the socially constructed concrete-
ness of those boundaries.
This latter view of boundary work is more theoretically consis-
tent with the construct of institutional work, in two ways. First, it
offers an endogenous explanation of how boundary erosion can
occur. Second, and perhaps more important, it offers a clear mech-
anism for boundary deconstruction through the association of
shifts in socially constructed forms of cognition with incremental
changes in practices. While some social theorists have long
acknowledged the important relationship between changes in
social boundaries and practices (Schatzki, 2001), Young (1994,
1995) offers a clear empirical illustration of how this process
occurs.
An emerging stream of research, however, suggests an alterna-
tive mechanism for the boundary work of domain extension. A
small and as yet unconnected group of studies suggests that a pre-
liminary step in the erosion and reconstruction of professional
jurisdictional boundaries occurs through the creation of a new dis-
cursive space. Power (1997) observed that accounting professionals
adopted linguistic claims of professional expertise in environmen-
tal auditing long before the profession had constructed any techni-
cal expertise in the domain. Similarly, Arndt and Bigelow (2005)
observe that a signi?cant preliminary stage in transforming hospi-
tal administration from a predominantly female to male profession
involved the use of male terminology to describe the ideal profes-
sional in prominent trade journals long before any male hospital
administrators existed.
A critical research issue, therefore, is to understand the process
by which the rhetorical construction of accounting expertise can be
extended to new domains. While prior research has established a
gradual but clear shift in the locus of professional expertise con-
struction, from the professional association to the professional ?rm
(Cooper & Robson, 2006), it is unclear how professional accounting
?rms might use the rhetorical space created by New Media to
engage in domain extension. More signi?cantly, perhaps, we have
little understanding of the evolutionary process – i.e., the practices
and the boundary work – by which Big Four ?rms have engaged
with New Media. Our ?rst research question thus is what forms
of boundary work have large professional accounting ?rms engaged
with as a result of the adoption of New Media?
3.2. RQ 2: Domain extension as rhetorical work
A related question is to understand how the creation of a new
rhetorical space created by such boundary work is then used
rhetorically to reconstruct the content of professional expertise.
The research outlined above not only describes a change in the
boundaries within which professional expertise is constructed, it
also describes a long-standing shift in content away from
moral-normative claims of legitimacy based on ethics to a dis-
course more ?rmly grounded in commerce. Considerable account-
ing research over the past decade has documented how the
discourse of professionalism has shifted away from more norma-
tive claims of legitimacy by reference to ethics and the protection
of public interest and toward legitimacy rationales based on
overtly commercial or economic rationales (e.g., Brint, 1996;
Covaleski, Dirsmith, & Rittenberg, 2003; Gendron & Suddaby,
2004).
Claims of legitimacy based on ethics in the professions are typ-
ically stated in counterpoint to commercial self-interest. The logic
of professionalism typically promotes discourse in which profes-
sional choices select ethics ahead of a professional’s economic
interests (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). Historically, the justi?ca-
tion for ethical rules that restrain competition for clients, predatory
pricing practices and rules against stealing clients are premised on
an implicit discursive assumption that professionalism is an exten-
sion of elitist norms of appropriate conduct in which overt com-
mercialism is seen to be unseemly because a professional is
foremost a gentleman and only a reluctant merchant (Gidney &
Miller, 1994).
A long history of ethical scandals in accounting, exempli?ed by
the role of Arthur Andersen in Enron, has challenged the
normative-ethical assumptions in the professions (Tof?er, 2003,
Wyatt, 2004). Several authors have documented a decline in the
ethical discourse of the profession and the emergence of a new dis-
course that favors a view of the accountant as a global businessper-
son, rather than a protector of the public interest (Brint, 1996;
Hanlon, 1994, 1996; Samuel, Covaleski, & Dirsmith, 2009;
Suddaby et al., 2009; Zeff, 2003).
Again, it is not clear how the content of professional discourse
will change in the context of New Media. A perhaps obvious pre-
diction is that the trend identi?ed above will persist or accelerate.
That is, the relative emphasis of managerial skills and entrepre-
neurial ability will outweigh the more traditional discourse of
accounting professionalism as protecting the public interest.
More signi?cantly, it is unclear what position or degree of engage-
ment large accounting ?rms will take with respect to trying to
in?uence the characterization of professionalism in New Media.
Our second research question, thus, is how has the content of
domain claims of professional expertise changed in New Media, and
what is the nature of engagement of Big Four accounting ?rms in this
process?
3.3. RQ 3: Domain extension as embedded agency
The concept of institutional work emerged in counterpoint to
existing explanations of social change that relied on assumptions
of highly powerful agents. That is, prior accounts of institutional
change typically invoked the notion of ‘‘institutional entrepre-
neurs’’ or extremely powerful actors that possessed both the
re?exivity to overcome cognitively embedded assumptions and
the resources necessary to create change.
So, for example, Greenwood and Suddaby (2006) point to the
(then) Big Five accounting ?rms as institutional agents responsible
for creating multidisciplinary professional ?rms as a new organiza-
tional form in the professions. Critics, however, have argued that
this ‘‘hypermuscular’’ view of agency is inconsistent with the phe-
nomenological underpinnings of institutional theory, which
assumes that actors are so completely embedded in the
taken-for-granted assumptions of their institutional world that
they lack the re?exive capacity to even conceive of alternative
social arrangements (Powell & Colyvas, 2008; Suddaby, 2010).
Prior theory has also tended to assume that institutional change
is necessarily accompanied by high degrees of con?ict between
institutional actors. Abbott (1988) for example premised his theory
of professions on the idea that professionals are engaged in ongo-
ing struggles and con?icts over jurisdiction. Similarly, most studies
of institutional entrepreneurship in the professions re?ect these
assumptions of ongoing struggle and competition between profes-
sional groups (Covaleski et al., 2003; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006;
Maguire, Hardy, & Lawrence, 2004).
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 55
Institutional work, by contrast, sees profound social change as
occurring not from overt con?ict but rather incrementally, as the
product of relatively minor changes in somewhat routine interac-
tions between professions. Jurisdictional shifts in professions,
viewed through the lens of institutional work, occur not as strate-
gic shifts in claims to legitimate expertise nor as overt efforts to
claim new occupational legitimacy, but instead as the result of
the unanticipated consequences of somewhat disparate occupa-
tional groups, each of which are pursuing their own professional
projects, but who ?nd themselves occupying the same occupa-
tional space.
Again, by adopting a view of professional change as a process of
incremental and often unintended change, institutional work
shares many of the assumptions of domain change represented
in the accounting literature (Potter, 2005; Young, 1994). What
remains unclear in this process, however, is how the interaction
of different professional groups contributes to shifts in the expres-
sion and manifestation of new forms of professional expertise. That
is, we do not understand how embedded agency effectively gener-
ates domain extension. Our third research question, thus, is how do
different groups of technical experts act as embedded change agents in
processes of domain extension?
4. Methods
This study emerged froman interest in the process by which the
accounting profession engaged in the new discursive space created
by the introduction of New Media. Intuitively, the introduction of
new modes of communication constitutes a disruption to existing
institutions (Innis, 1950, 1951; McLuhan, 1962) and creates the
contextual conditions for the observation of new processes of
social construction designed to repair breaches to existing institu-
tional structures (Barley, 1986) or create new ones (Barley &
Tolbert, 1997). As such, we entered the ?eld with an open mind
as to what types of domain change might be manifest (Suddaby,
2006) and adopted a distinctly process-oriented methodological
perspective (Langley, 1999). We begin by discussing the empirical
context, then outline our research design and conclude the meth-
ods discussion with an overview of how we collected and inter-
preted our data.
4.1. Empirical context
The emergence and rapid growth of online communication
environments is a fairly recent phenomenon. Although the
Internet has origins dating back to the 1960s, early access to this
media was originally limited to university, military and other gov-
ernment agencies. Because the infrastructure was funded largely
by government sources, access to the Internet by commercial users
was prohibited until May of 1995 when the National Science
Foundation stopped its funding and all traf?c began to operate
on commercial networks. Microsoft’s full entry into the web brow-
ser, ISP and server markets in the mid to late 1990s serves to
demarcate the origin of commercial access to the World Wide
Web. By the late 1990s most commercial entities, including the
elite accounting ?rms, had established a signi?cant presence (i.e.,
websites) on the World Wide Web.
As the Internet has become more ubiquitous, new forms of
social interaction – termed ‘‘social media’’ – have emerged. These
newer social media are distinguished from traditional website
media in terms of the substantially heightened opportunities for
direct interactivity: two way exchange of information, network
creation, public or open dialogue and the creation and exchange
of ‘‘user generated content’’ (Jansen, Zhang, Sobel, & Chowdury,
2009; Jeacle & Carter, 2011; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Lovejoy &
Saxton, 2012; Scott & Orlikowski, 2012). Facebook is perhaps the
exemplar of a social media site. Launched in 2004, Facebook is a
social networking site that has grown to accommodate 1.4 billion
users with annual revenue of over $12 billion in 2014. LinkedIn,
created around the same time, is a social networking platform
for professional contacts with 360 million users. Another, more
recent example of social media is Twitter, which allows users to
broadcast short messages limited to 140 characters called
‘‘Tweets.’’ Established in 2007, Twitter has an estimated 284 mil-
lion users who send 500 million tweets per day. Table 1 summa-
rizes the key features of these four new media.
4.2. Research design
Our study focused on elite accounting ?rms (i.e., the ‘‘Big Four’’
– Deloitte Touche, KPMG, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Ernst &
Young, now known as EY). Prior studies have demonstrated that
these ?rms assume a leading role in processes of change in the
accounting profession (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002;
Suddaby et al., 2007) and that modi?cations in practice adopted
by the elite accounting ?rms diffuse rapidly amongst other ?rms
in the profession (Mezias, 1990; Xiao, Yang, & Chow, 2004).
We limited our analysis to the North American (US/Canada)
sites of each ?rm for two reasons. First, much of our knowledge
of professions and professionalism is uniquely North American.
There is a growing awareness that professionalism, as a
socio-historical construct, is manifest quite differently in
non-North American contexts (Krause, 1996; Sciulli & Halley,
2009). So, in order to avoid confusion between different models
of professionalism, we limit our analysis to North American sites.
Second, the Big Four ?rms themselves tend to treat North
America as an integrated commercial unit in which accounting
professionals move seamlessly between jurisdictions. Although
there may be localized differences between country-speci?c sites,
we assume that the discursive construction of expertise in the sites
Table 1
Comparison of key characteristics of main new media platforms.
Platform User
community
Connection type & quality Type of
network
Content dynamism Symbols Summary label
Traditional new media
Website ‘seekers’ B2C (no formal connections) N/A Static N/A ‘Digital library,’ ‘marketing
brochure’
Social media
Facebook ‘fans’ B2C (asymmetric) Social network Dynamic messages,
static ‘apps’
@, # ‘Social network’
Twitter ‘friends’ and
‘followers’
B2C, P2P (both symmetric &
asymmetric possible)
Message
network
Dynamic messages @, RT, MT, #,
#FF, ^, via
‘Global message network’
LinkedIn Professionals
and ‘fans’
B2C (asymmetric), P2P (symmetric) Professional
network
Dynamic messages @, # ‘Professional network,’ with
searchable directory
56 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
of the Canadian and US Big Four ?rms is generally representative of
the profession in North America.
We chose to examine four forms of New Media – websites,
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. We selected these forms of media
for three reasons. First, while other forms of new media exist, these
particular sites are the most frequently used in North America
(Nielsen, 2011). Second, the sites were established at different
times – websites in the late 1990s, LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in
2004 and Twitter in 2007. As such, the sites provide a useful
sequence of snapshots of the evolution of New Media over time.
Third, while each of these forms qualify as new media, websites
are not considered to be a form of ‘‘social media’’ because of their
relative lack of interactivity. The various sites, thus, permit some
degree of comparison between new media, which adopts a tradi-
tional broadcast format and social media, which permits a more
decentralized, interactive and user-generated format.
4.3. Data gathering
Because institutional change is theorized to occur through pro-
cesses of structuration – i.e., recurring phases of structural change
followed by change in practices and meanings (Barley & Tolbert,
1997) – we adopt a two-stage longitudinal case study method.
Stage 1: The ?rst phase was designed to capture the process by
which the accounting profession ?rst adopted New Media – i.e., the
structural change phase that occurred in the early stages of New
Media adoption. Our interest here is in understanding how elite
accounting ?rms are engaging with New Media (our ?rst research
question) and how the content of domain claims of professional
expertise change when viewed through various types of New
Media (our second research question).
This data was collected in 2011, a period of time when the elite
accounting ?rms were in the early phases of social media adoption.
As our results demonstrate, most ?rms had not yet formalized
their social media plans. As such, this phase of data collection
offers a snapshot of the early stages of social media adoption and
re?ects the earliest attempts of accounting professionals to present
their discursive claims of professional domain with this new com-
municative technology.
To gather the textual data, we began with a comprehensive
search in February 2011 for all the website, Twitter, LinkedIn and
Facebook accounts of the national Big Four ?rms in the US and
Canada. Using custom code written in the Python programming
language (available upon request), we then downloaded all of the
individual pages from each of the ?rms’ websites in March and
April of 2011 and extracted the text from each page into a separate
?le. Similarly, all organizational messages (tweets) published up to
and including February 22, 2011 on the Twitter accounts main-
tained by the US and Canadian Big Four ?rms were downloaded
into an SQLite relational database via the Twitter application pro-
gramming interface (API) using Python code written speci?cally
for this research.
The ?nal database contained 7,050 tweets. A sample of 100
tweets from each account were double-checked against the actual
Twitter stream and found to be complete and accurate in all cases.
Original Python code was similarly used to download the 262
status updates from the organizations’ Facebook pages over the
period November 1, 2010 to July 11, 2011. To ensure the code
was downloading the updates accurately, we conducted a trial
download and randomly compared 100 downloaded status
updates with their counterpart updates on the Facebook website.
Status updates were downloaded correctly in all cases. We also
conducted qualitative analysis of the content and recent messages
on each ?rm’s LinkedIn account; however, given the more limited
variety of messages sent on these accounts, we did not download
en masse the messages sent on the ?rms’ LinkedIn accounts.
Stage 2: The second phase of data collection was designed to
analyze how different groups of technical experts, i.e., accountants
and New Media specialists, engage in practices of domain exten-
sion within the context of large professional organizations. This
phase of research was inspired by a reviewer of an early draft of
this research who pointed out the need to better understand the
formal processes by which professionals inside the organization
were actively engaged in monitoring and structuring the presenta-
tion of professionalism in New Media.
Accordingly, we supplemented our ?rst phase content analytic
data with semi-structured interviews with key informants from
each of the Big Four accounting ?rms in Canada who were respon-
sible for New Media marketing and strategy for their respective
organizations. The informants were identi?ed by different titles
(e.g., Director of Digital Marketing, Social Media Manager). A script
was used to guide the interview process, but whenever possible,
the researchers encouraged informants to expand their answers
when the line of questioning appeared fruitful. Probing questions
were asked when the answers provided were unclear, when con?r-
mation was required or when examples were needed. In total, ?ve
New Media executives were interviewed, representing at least one
at each Big Four ?rm. The interviews ranged in length from 45 to
90 min, were recorded and transcribed. This produced approxi-
mately 100 pages of single spaced interview text for analysis.
4.4. Data analysis
Phase 1 data was ?rst content-analyzed using quantitative tech-
niques designed to reveal recurrent broad themes contained in the
content of the various New Media platforms. Custom tools were
written in Python as well as Python’s Natural Language Toolkit
(NLTK) and were used to quantitatively map the relative and abso-
lute frequency of words, phrases and symbols used in various New
Media by Big Four ?rms. Table 2 summarizes the number of mes-
sages/web pages and words subject to this type of analysis. This
method uses quantitative analytic techniques to identify broad cat-
egories of themes present in large volumes of data (Krippendorf,
Table 2
Data Analyzed for Quantitative Analyses.
Organization/account Type of account Number of
messages
(FB, Twitter) or
web pages
(Website)
Total
number
of words
PwC_LLP Twitter – ?rm 903 16,045
DeloitteUS Twitter – ?rm 457 7507
KPMGAdvisory Twitter – ?rm 63 976
Ernst_and_Young Twitter – ?rm 324 6439
PwC_Canada_LLP Twitter – ?rm 612 10,670
KPMG_Canada Twitter – ?rm 747 11,173
KPMGCampusUS Twitter – recruiting 223 4412
DeloitteCanada Twitter – recruiting 2696 44,066
KPMGUSCareers Twitter – recruiting 344 3285
JoinDeloitteUS Twitter – recruiting 377 5923
KPMGCampusCDN Twitter – recruiting 304 5431
Deloitte USA Facebook – recruiting 95 1714
EY USA Facebook – recruiting 73 1311
PwC USA Facebook – recruiting 113 1921
Deloitte USA Facebook – ?rm 132 2109
Deloitte CA Facebook – ?rm 12 121
PwC USA Facebook – ?rm 97 1268
PwC CA Facebook – ?rm 68 974
PwC USA Website 3301 1,284,861
Deloitte USA Website 12,780 5,794,931
EY USA Website 671 679,552
KPMG USA Website 9169 1,200,322
Note: ‘recruiting’ denotes exclusively recruiting-focused account; ‘?rm’ denotes
general focus, non-recruiting account.
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 57
2004) and is similar to the open coding phase of traditional
grounded theory techniques (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Such analy-
ses reveal the key themes, ideas and subjects that are most preva-
lent in a given social media site.
These themes were then further interrogated by focusing anal-
ysis on speci?c themes related to professional domain extension.
Speci?cally, we searched for dominant targets (e.g., ‘‘youth’’), con-
cepts (e.g., ‘‘professionalism’’) and new phenomena (e.g., ‘‘celebrity
professional’’). Similarly, we analyzed the relative prevalence of
key terms of interest, such as ‘‘ethics,’’ across each of the New
Media platforms, a technique similar to Li, Lundholm, and Minnis
(2013) examination of perceived competition in 10-K ?lings.
Finally, we analyzed the proportion of words in each ?rm’s portfo-
lio of New Media content that re?ected key topical areas such as
‘‘ethics’’, ‘‘virtue’’, ‘‘legal’’ or ‘‘economics’’ using the pre-validated
Harvard IV psychosocial dictionary. Prior research has demon-
strated this technique to be an effective measure of sentiment in
media content (Tetlock, 2007; Tetlock, Saar-Tsechansky, &
MacSkassy, 2008).
Phase 1 and phase 2 data were also analyzed using more tradi-
tional qualitative techniques in which key topical areas, isolated by
the quantitative methods described above, were then recoded axi-
ally (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) in an effort to identify relationships
between open-coded categories and to discern broader theoretical
themes in the data. Finally, the material in both phases of data col-
lection were subject to more selective coding techniques in which
emergent themes identi?ed in prior rounds of analysis, such as the
notion of ‘‘celebrity professional’’ and ‘‘embedded agency,’’ were
clari?ed and elaborated.
5. Results
5.1. Domain extension as boundary work
Although social media was well established by 2011, the Big
Four accounting ?rms were just beginning to become strategically
engaged with this new form of communication. Our analysis of
New Media adoption by the Big Four reveals signi?cant variation
in the degree to which each of the ?rms transitioned the boundary
from traditional to New Media. The variation was manifest in three
key areas: the pace of adoption, the ostensible purpose of adoption
and the degree of strategic control exercised over New Media. We
elaborate each of these in turn.
5.1.1. Pace of adoption
We found a total of 8 websites, 11 Twitter accounts, 9 LinkedIn
accounts and 7 Facebook accounts for the national Big Four ?rms in
the US and Canada. By February of 2011 all ?rms in Canada and the
US had adopted websites. There was, however, substantial varia-
tion in the adoption of social media platforms. Table 3 summarizes
the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by the ?rms. Twitter was the
most popular social media application – seven of the eight ?rms
had Twitter accounts, whereas only ?ve had adopted Facebook.
One ?rm had adopted neither.
The variation in adoption of new media platforms is perhaps
unsurprising, given the novelty of the technology and the tradi-
tional media avoidance of professional ?rms. As one informant
observed ‘‘I came to [?rm] in November, 2011 and we didn’t have
a social media plan or anything related to social media until, I
would say, May of 2012. . .So when I came into my role there was
no social media marketing at this ?rm’’ (Informant 1:1). This infor-
mant’s experience was shared, generally, across the Big Four where
each informant indicated that their ?rm had only recently recog-
nized social media as a potential ?rm strategy.
The ?rms also demonstrated considerable confusion amongst
the managing partners as to how to strategically incorporate the
new media into daily practice. One informant, for example,
acknowledged that the ?rm was slow to adopt a clear social media
strategy because ‘‘. . .for many of us, me included, right, social
media is still a bit of a mystery on howyou use it, what you do with
it and particularly from a business perspective and I would say that
coming from. . .a traditional accounting ?rm. . .you’re trying to
think through how do we actually use this’’ (Informant 3:1). The
presence of new media, thus, provided a new liminal space, a
‘blank sheet’, within which the established accounting ?rms were
afforded the opportunity to rearticulate their claims to professional
expertise. As we demonstrate, the ?rms exhibit both considerable
variation in adoption patterns and some degree of confusion as to
the strategic potential of new media.
5.1.2. Purpose of adoption
This confusion as to the strategic potential was re?ected in how
?rms initially used new media applications. Table 4 summarizes
the various ways in which the Big Four ?rms set up their
Facebook and Twitter accounts. Table 4 effectively summarizes
each ?rm’s new media adoption pro?le. The results indicate that
the sites were typically set up with a clear and narrow focus on a
speci?c ?rm activity, such as ‘‘recruiting’’ or with a much more
general or diffuse purpose.
As Table 4 demonstrates, ?rms varied considerably both in the
number of new media accounts that were initially established as
well as the degree of strategic focus they adopted. Fig. 1 summa-
rizes the data in Table 4 in order to permit a more ?ne-grained
analysis of the data. Fig. 1 presents the output of a
multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analysis of the numerical
(no = 0, yes = 1) translation of Table 4. The analysis summarizes
in two-dimensional space how‘‘similar’’ each organization is based
on its new media adoption pro?le with Dimension 1 (shown on the
x-axis) representing a generic ‘‘?rm focus’’ and Dimension 2
(shown on the y-axis) representing a ‘‘recruitment only’’ focus.
Updated data in 2013 showed the same core pattern. Ultimately,
?rms have adopted distinct identities in terms of their overall
new media strategies. So, for example, among the Canadian ?rms,
EY had no Twitter presence in 2011, Deloitte and PwC both
adopted a generic ‘‘?rm’’ presence and KPMG had both ‘‘?rm’’
and ‘‘recruiting’’ pro?les in new media.
The ?rms also differ signi?cantly in the content of messages
placed in new social media. To examine this, we looked at the three
‘‘?rm’’ Twitter accounts maintained by the Canadian Big 4 ?rms. To
analyze the text we wrote a Python script that iterated over the
tweets and aggregated each ?rm’s messages into a single text ?le.
These three text ?les were then used to generate three ‘‘word
clouds’’ (using Wordle, www.wordle.net) shown in Fig. 2. The lar-
ger the word in the ?gure, the more frequently it appeared in the
organizations tweets. The word clouds thus re?ect what content
was emphasized in each ?rm’s Twitter messages.
Fig. 2 demonstrates considerable differentiation across ?rms by
content of new media. Deloitte is the only bilingual account.
Table 3
Distribution of the adoption of Facebook and Twitter of Big Four accounting ?rms in
2011.
Firm on FB?
No Yes
Firm on Twitter? No EY Canada
Yes KPMG USA
KPMG Canada
Deloitte USA
Deloitte Canada
EY USA
PwC USA
PwC Canada
58 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
Deloitte also stresses individuals (the ‘‘AJ’’, ‘‘KJP’’ and ‘‘FH’’ indicate
the initials of proli?c authors of tweets). Overall, Deloitte appears
to have adopted a more relational approach to their Twitter feeds
– i.e., focus on building personal relationships – than have the
other ?rms which, in turn appear to be more focused on broadcast-
ing research content, as re?ected in the prominence of such words
as ‘‘science’’, ‘‘report’’, ‘‘survey’’, ‘‘learn’’ and ‘‘study’’. Lastly, KPMG
appears to have adopted a self-promotional or marketing tone to
its content.
Finally, the ?rms used new media to present differentiated
images in their substantive practice areas. Both KPMG and PwC
present ‘‘tax’’ as a dominant content category on Twitter, whereas
Deloitte clearly de-emphasizes traditional functional areas of
accounting and prefers, instead, to focus on elements of new media
(as indicated by the prominence of ‘‘socialmedia’’, ‘‘video’’ and
‘‘live’’) as well as sustainable management (‘‘sustainability’’, point-
vert’’). PwC, while somewhat similar to KPMG in content, distin-
guishes itself with a semantic emphasis on data analysis
(‘‘forecast’’, ‘‘survey’’ and ‘‘sciences’’). KPMG, by contrast, presents
as a much more traditional accounting ?rm, emphasizing terms
like ‘‘risk’’, ‘‘?nancial’’ and ‘‘partner.’’ Indeed, KPMG is the only ?rm
where the word ‘‘accounting’’ appears.
In sum, our ?rst stage analysis reveals the preliminary phase of
domain extension within the Big Four accounting ?rms. In tradi-
tional media, such as websites, the ?rms present themselves
within the bounds of traditional professional discretion – i.e., as
relatively undifferentiated professional service ?rms. The introduc-
tion of new media, however, provides an open or liminal space that
created the opportunity to rede?ne professional domains. That is,
the new technology describes a new ideational context that gives
participants some freedom from established norms in how their
expert domain is de?ned and interpreted. We observe considerable
variation in practice in which some ?rms are slow to adopt, and
ultimately present a highly conservative professional image, focus-
ing on traditional functional areas of practice. Others, by contrast,
adopt new media early, do so with several platforms and demon-
strate a degree of sensitivity to the interactive and relational
potential of the new technology.
Table 4
New media adoption by ‘‘Big Four’’ accounting ?rms in Canada and USA in 2011.
Traditional new media Social media
Firm Website LinkedIn Facebook (?rm) Facebook (recruiting) Twitter (?rm) Twitter (recruiting) Twitter (other)
Deloitte US Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Deloitte CA Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No
EY US Yes Yes No Yes Yes No No
EY CA Yes No No No No No No
PwC US Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
PwC CA Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No
KPMG US Yes Yes No No Yes Yes (Â2) Yes
KPMG CA Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No
Note: ‘recruiting’ denotes exclusively recruiting-focused account; ‘?rm’ denotes general focus, non-recruiting account.
g y g g
-0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
Deloitte USA
Deloitte Canada
Ernst & Young USA
Ernst & Young Canada
PwC USA
PwC Canada
KPMG USA
KPMG Canada
-1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0
Fig. 1. Metric Multidimensional Scaling of New Media Adoption by Big Four Firms, 2011. Note: In this ?gure presents the output of a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS)
analysis of the numerical (no = 0, yes = 1) translation of Table 4. The analysis summarizes in two-dimensional space how ‘‘similar’’ each organization is based on its new
media adoption pro?le. Our analysis of the data suggests Dimension 1 (shown on the x-axis) represents a generic ‘‘?rm focus,’’ while Dimension 2 (shown on the y-axis)
represents a ‘‘recruitment only’’ focus. Higher values on the x-axis thus indicate greater emphasis on the corporate or ‘‘?rm’’ focus in a ?rm’s new media adoption pro?le,
while higher values on the y-axis indicate greater emphasis on a ‘‘recruiting’’ focus in the ?rm’s new media adoption pro?le. Also note that the adoption pro?le shown is from
2011; Ernst & Young is now known as ‘‘EY.’’
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 59
More important for our purposes is the observation that new
media creates the liminal space for institutional work. New media
offers the accounting profession a newly bounded conceptual
space within which the domain of professional expertise can be
re-conceptualized. The variation in practices of adoption and rep-
resentation that we observe suggest a broad range of institutional
practices. That is, there is considerable variation across ?rms in the
degree of institutional re?exivity or understanding of the ways in
which new media can be used to assist in domain extension. As
we demonstrate in the next section, this variation in institutional
re?exivity is best re?ected in the degree of agency or strategic con-
trol assumed by individual ?rms. Signi?cantly, we observe that tra-
ditional accounting professionals possessed neither awareness nor
agency in this arena and ceded much of the institutional work to an
emerging professional category – social media professionals.
5.1.3. Strategic control
A key ?nding of our research is the low level of direct oversight
of the digital media function by professionally trained accountants
in a function that directly affects client contact. Although the
accounting profession has a long history of delegating work to a
variety of organizational professionals such as human resources
or marketing, research (Anderson-Gough et al., 1998) and practi-
tioner accounts (Maister, 1998) indicate that professionals are
loath to delegate any functions that interfere with their direct con-
tact with clients. Indeed, having non-professionals contact clients
KPMG
PwC
Fig. 2. Word Clouds for Deloitte-Canada, KPMG-Canada and PwC-Canada ‘Firm’ Twitter Accounts.
60 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
was cited as a key objection to multidisciplinary partnerships in
North America (Suddaby, 2001). However, in the case of social
media, the Big Four ?rms were unre?ectively willing to cede con-
trol over their claims to professional expertise vis-à-vis their cli-
ents to social media experts.
As noted above, managing partners viewed social media as a
‘‘mystery’’ and were very willing to cede jurisdiction within the
?rm to non-accountant social media experts. None of the social
media executives we interviewed at the Big Four ?rms were
trained as accountants. While this is, perhaps, unsurprising, they
also each indicated a relatively high degree of autonomy in insti-
tuting strategic policies on new media within the organization.
One informant indicated that, although she formally reported to
a member of the executive committee and liaised with her coun-
terpart in the global organization, she and her digital media team
were allowed to ‘‘work fairly independently around our mission’’
(Informant 4:1). This informant went on to point out that when
he ?rst arrived at the ?rm, professional accountants did engage
directly with social media strategy and managed it through a pro-
fessional committee. One of his ?rst tasks, however, was to take
control of the function and distance it from existing controls:
when I came here a year ago . . . I would say that social media
was fragmented and not one single group sort of used it and
it was a social media governance by committee, and over a
short period of time we changed that and took responsibility
for it; and not to be controlling but because some things are
best accomplished not through committee but through getting
stuff done. . .[the professional committee’s] approach to social
media was very risk based, right, and their training and whatnot
would cause people, other than the talent team
, to basi-
cally want to do nothing, to be fearful of it. (Informant 4:1)
In fact, each of the digital media executives interviewed indi-
cated that, although they formally report to an executive commit-
tee comprised of accounting professionals, they enjoyed
considerable autonomy. Another informant observed ‘‘I would
say that I report to my director, but the nature of a matrix organi-
zation means that you have a lot of people that you kind of . . . I
guess you report to because you’re working on a project with
them’’ (Informant 2:1).
Although the digital media executives enjoy relatively low
levels of professional monitoring, they do exert a high degree of
control over the content in their ?rm’s digital media. For example,
an informant at one Big Four ?rm indicated that, up until recently,
only one person (i.e., the informant) was authorized to tweet on
the ?rm account. Even though the authority to issue tweets was
recently opened up to include two members of the public
relations team, the informant indicated that ‘‘because it’s my
responsibility, I am not comfortable allowing access to too many
people so, a lot of times, the tweets are sent to me for approval
?rst’’ (Informant 1:1). Another informant con?rmed that the only
people in the ?rm with authority to access Twitter and Facebook
accounts ‘‘would only be myself and the social media manager’’
(Informant 3:2).
The content of social media sites at Big Four ?rms, thus, is very
tightly controlled by the social media professionals but quite inde-
pendent from the scrutiny of the accounting professionals. This
observation was somewhat surprising, given that much of the con-
tent of the sites and tweets related to substantive accounting
issues. When pressed to explain the inconsistency, each of the
informants pointed to regulatory and ethical concerns within the
profession that required such tight monitoring. However, the infor-
mants appeared vague about the speci?cs of these rules:
There’s rules around, you know, not talking about a client
engagement speci?cally, right, so not getting into details there,
but you just . . . yeah, I think that’s probably the biggest one.
(Informant 5:1)
The digital professionals, thus, appeared to be strategically
drawing on the professional ethics of auditors to justify their tight
jurisdictional control over content without really being able to
articulate the speci?c professional justi?cation.
One of the clear consequences of such tight gate-keeping con-
trols by the social media executives was that the interactive poten-
tial of the New Media is not realized in Big Four accounting ?rms.
That is, rather than using social media as a mechanism for giving
external and internal stakeholders voice, the media was used rela-
tively narrowly to simply ‘‘broadcast’’ information. The digital
executives were aware of this limitation:
it’s social media in terms of us using the channel, but we are not
using social media to be social. Social media is two-way com-
munication. Due to independence and legal reasons our
two-way communication is limited, if non-existent. So we’re
using the channel, but we’re not using it for what it’s meant
to be used for (Informant 1:1).
In fact, they often tried to work around the limitation by creat-
ing content that gave the appearance if not the substance of
two-way communication. The same informant observed ‘‘so, dur-
ing our [?rm event] we had live tweeting and it was intended to
instigate conversation between other users and re-tweets, not nec-
essarily a conversation with us. Again, not really having a conver-
sation but trying to look like we’re having a conversation, if that
makes sense’’ (Informant 1:1).
5.1.4. Domain extension as boundary work
Our results contradict much of the extant knowledge of bound-
ary work in the professions, which assumes that the boundary
work of domain extension is universally characterized by
inter-professional con?ict over jurisdiction. Gieryn (1983: 791)
thus observes that when the goal of boundary work is to extend
a professional domain into adjacent areas of occupational exper-
tise, a key strategy is to absorb the adjacent occupation while char-
acterizing it as subordinate and inferior. Abbott (1988), similarly,
observed that when different professions occupy the same
work-space, occupational roles between professions are often not
clearly de?ned and therefore jurisdiction must be claimed and con-
stantly maintained. The ongoing assumption in this research, thus,
is that domain extension is necessarily competitive and con?icted
with the intended objective of coercively constructing a clear
status-order between the professions.
Our results do not support this observation. Instead of a con-
?icted relationship with social media-experts, we see a high degree
of willingness by accountants to cede jurisdiction to social media
experts. Indeed, as noted above, the accountants give the
social-media managers jurisdiction to negotiate individual profes-
sional identities and reconstruct traditionally sensitive communi-
cation relations with clients.
Perhaps more importantly, they do not try to force social media
managers into a subordinate relationship. Indeed they take pains
to separate them from other clearly subordinate managers such
as marketing and HR. Two of the four ?rms experimented with
the notion of melding new media professionals with the occupa-
tional category of Human Resources. However, each ?rm quickly
identi?ed the social media group as having greater strategic signif-
icance than HR and allowed them to create their own distinct func-
tional area in the ?rms.
Signi?cantly, each of the ?rms granted considerable autonomy,
discretion and strategic status to this new occupational category.
Social media experts are clearly characterized as craftsmen rather
than support staff. Their work is described as ‘‘mysterious’’ and
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 61
distinct from traditional functional support areas like marketing
and HR.
The boundary between social media and accountancy, thus,
seems highly permeable to this new occupational category.
Moreover, the boundary work appears to be mutual, with both
accountants and social media experts striving to understand and
assimilate practices from each other. In this regard, rather than
demonstrating a high degree of con?ict and contest, the boundary
work we observe is perhaps best characterized as an actively nego-
tiated order (Strauss, 1978) with considerable accommodation
given to the new occupational group.
5.1.5. Domain extension as rhetorical work
A second key element of the institutional work of domain
extension is the rhetorical construction of boundaries of expert
identity. As noted above, when the goal is assimilation of an adja-
cent professional category, rhetoric is typically used to characterize
the occupational category that is intended to be colonized as sub-
ordinate or inferior to the incumbent professional group (Freidson,
1970; Gieryn, 1983). That is, the boundary work of domain exten-
sion is typically characterized by the rhetoric of demonization
(Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). In our analysis of new media profes-
sionals in Big Four accounting ?rms, however, this did not occur.
Accounting professionals in Big Four ?rms seem content to main-
tain the characterization of new media experts as mysterious
craftsmen. Instead, we observe a somewhat contradictory rhetoric
in which the social media experts use new media to
re-characterize the substantive content and identity of accounting
professionalism.
To address the question of how the substantive content of pro-
fessionalism discourse has changed in New Media we conducted a
proportion-of-words analysis on the ?rm tweets, FaceBook sta-
tuses, and websites, with a focus on measuring the proportion of
words in the categories of ‘‘Virtue’’ and ‘‘Econ’’ of the Harvard IV
psychosocial dictionary (General Inquirer, 2011). The Virtue cate-
gory includes 719 words ‘‘indicating an assessment of moral
approval or good fortune, especially from the perspective of
middle-class society,’’ while ECON includes 502 words ‘‘of an eco-
nomic, commercial, industrial, or business orientation, including
roles, collectivities, acts, abstract ideas, and symbols, including ref-
erences to money [and] names of common commodities in busi-
ness’’ (General Inquirer, 2011). Together, the results will facilitate
a reliable, quantitative comparison of the prevalence of words con-
noting norms of ‘‘virtue’’ and those connoting norms of ‘‘com-
merce.’’ Our results are presented in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 demonstrates that, on traditional forms of new media,
such as websites, ethical terms and economic/commercial terms
appear roughly equally, albeit relatively infrequently. In contrast,
economic/commercial terms markedly outweigh normative/ethi-
cal terms on all the newer forms of social media. The difference
P
r
o
p
o
r
?
o
n
o
f
a
l
l
w
o
r
d
s
Fig. 3. Proportion of Words in General Inquirer ‘ECON and ‘Virtue’ Categories, by Account Type. Note: The y-axis shows the proportion of all words in the Big Four ?rms’
Facebook, Twitter, and website accounts that fall in the ‘‘Virtue’’ and ‘‘ECON’’ categories, respectively, of the Harvard IV psychosocial dictionary (General Inquirer, 2011). For
example, roughly 1% of all words in the ?rms’ Facebook recruiting accounts are in the ‘Virtue’ category.
62 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
is most acute on the Facebook accounts (both corporate and
recruiting) where the proportion of commercial terms is roughly
double that of normative/ethical terms. Overall, our results support
the proposition that, while ethics received roughly equal treatment
to business in traditional forms of new media, in social media, pro-
fessionalism is much more sharply focused on issues of
commercialism.
In our interviews with social media executives in Big Four ?rms
we sought to determine if there was a deliberate strategy to pro-
mote an image of the ?rm, or of individual accountants, as busi-
nesspeople rather than dispassionate and objective professionals.
Our informants con?rmed that a key component of their social
media strategy for the ?rm is premised on making the accounting
professionals more visible as commercially oriented ‘‘personal
brands’’:
. . .the big thing was, I think, that while lawyers were applauded
for having big personal brands, accountants weren’t, and so the
hardest thing when I ?rst started in professional services was
trying to get [accountants] to even speak to the media, right?
It just wasn’t a culture where people wanted that visibility,
and the ones that did were not always. . .didn’t always sit so
well with the culture of the ?rm, right. (Informant 4:2)
A second informant at another Big Four ?rm also used the term
‘‘personal brand’’ in describing their strategy of using social media
to promote individual accounting professionals as businesspeople
in order to overcome the inherent reluctance of accounting ?rms
to directly solicit business:
you know, as a professional services ?rm, we’re a bit risk averse.
We have to keep arms-length distance. We have to use our peo-
ple to help market our stuff. . .there’s a bit more regulation in
my role, and we’re trying to. . .we’ve been trying to work around
that by elevating our people. . .. (Informant 2:1)
The media executives were consistent in pointing out that the
image of the professional that they were trying to cultivate had less
to do with general expertise in accounting and more to do with
projecting a personal brand of being an involved and connected
business leader.
A third informant indicated that a key part of their LinkedIn
strategy is around cultivating this image: ‘‘We have developed a
three-part training series . . . to help partners build their brand.
Part one is focused on customizing their pro?le, making sure it
has a professional photo, as well as a full description of experience
and skills, etc. The next part is focused on showing them how to
follow core people, groups, and companies that are relevant to
their business . . . and then the third advanced part is focused on
showing them how to proactively activate their pro?le, including
sharing information and participating in discussions’’ (Informant
5:1).
Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, the enhanced focus on commer-
cialism in social media is part of a clear impression management
(Neu, 1991) strategy to reformulate the professional image of
accountants away from their studious and introverted stereotype
and convert them into a gregarious, engaged and active online
businessperson. The traditional image of professionalism is delib-
erately subverted to the social media project of developing individ-
ual ‘‘personal brands.’’
Instead of observing the subordination of an adjacent occupa-
tional category, we see a concerted effort by the social media
experts to rhetorically reconstitute the professional image of
accountants. There are two distinct themes to this rhetoric. First,
the prototypical accounting professional is recon?gured away from
the traditional focus on the professional quality of work and ethical
independence to an image of commercial engagement and eco-
nomic expertise. This theme is not particularly new, but rather
re?ects a crystallized articulation of a trend of domain extension
that has been observed in the accounting profession for some time.
Second, and perhaps more novel is the distinct shift in level of anal-
ysis of professional rhetoric from a traditional focus on the profes-
sion or the ?rm, to a new focus on the individual accountant. As we
outline in the following section, the emergence of the individual
accountants as business celebrities, is a form of domain extension
that shifts agency to individual accountants and to social media
experts.
5.2. Domain extension as embedded agency
The boundary work of domain extension of accountants in new
media occurs around two themes. First, we observe a distinct trend
toward localizing professional expertise, not in the profession or
even the professional ?rm, but rather in the individual profes-
sional. That is, there is a clear and deliberate strategy toward build-
ing an individual professional’s ‘‘personal brand’’ around
distinctive expert knowledge. Secondly, the content of expert
knowledge is not the traditional expertise around distinct ele-
ments of accounting practice, such as audit, tax or accounting
but rather is constructed around distinct industry context. That
is, expert knowledge is largely focused in industry-speci?c exper-
tise such as mining, technology, manufacturing and related
contexts.
To address the question of how the discourse of accounting
expertise is being reconstructed in new media, we conducted a
thematic content analysis of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook mes-
sages. Focusing explicitly on those messages that contain both
strong ‘‘personalization’’ content as well as content focused on pro-
fessionalism, we identi?ed four distinct categories of messages
used to promote individual professionals within New Media. We
term these four themes, respectively, ‘‘press,’’ ‘‘new hire,’’ ‘‘exper-
tise,’’ and ‘‘kudos.’’ The essential elements of each category, along
with representative quotes, are summarized in Table 5. We elabo-
rate these categories below.
The ‘‘press’’ message is used to publicize the activities of a
speci?c employee on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. The messages
almost always include links to other Web content such as videos,
pictures, reports or interviews. The author of the message is nearly
always the ?rm that employs the individual professional, and the
content of the message is typically devoted to promoting
?rm-level expertise in a substantive area of practice. The messages
are clearly used to construct an image of both the individual pro-
fessional and the ?rm as having considerable facility in
multi-media in addition to promoting the individual professional’s
expert knowledge.
The ‘‘new hire’’ message is most common on LinkedIn, but can
occur across all types of newmedia. Similar to the ‘‘press’’ message,
the ‘‘new hire’’ message emanates from the ?rm and is used to pro-
mote the ?rm’s acquisition of new professional talent.
The ‘‘expertise’’ message also focuses attention on an individ-
ual employee’s professional knowledge but contrasts with the
above types in that it focuses more closely on knowledge
content authored by the individual professional. Thus the mes-
sage is designed to draw the reader to a website, blog or other
external content that is speci?cally authored by the individual
professional. The ?rst three messages under the category of
‘‘expertise’’ messages in Table 5 highlight these type of
messages. It is important to note, however, that there are also
a number of ‘‘expertise messages’’ designed to draw the reader
to content that is authored by the ?rm. The remaining three
quotes in the ‘‘expertise’’ section of Table 5 illustrate these
types of messages.
‘‘Kudos’’ messages single out speci?c employees for congratula-
tions and occur across all types of New Media platforms. These
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 63
messages typically appear to be authored by the ?rm and are used
to offer recognition for achievement to both internal and external
audiences.
Collectively, these four types of messages describe the emer-
gence of what we term the ‘‘celebrity accountant’’ in new media.
That is, new media offers the opportunity for overt celebration of
the expertise and personal characteristics of individual accoun-
tants. Such messages appear to be shifting from the private space
to the public space (Neu, 2006); forms of communication between
professionals and between professionals and ?rms that were tradi-
tionally very private – such as job inquiries, congratulatory mes-
sages, promotions and commendations – now occur in highly
visible contexts. Moreover, both the ?rm and the individuals are
able to contribute content. This is in sharp contrast to how Big
Four ?rms appear in traditional media where, typically, the indi-
vidual accountant is largely invisible. Firm advertising in tradi-
tional media, including websites, rarely put face or name to
individual accountants.
Our interview data con?rmed that the creation of the ‘‘celebrity
accountant’’ is a deliberate social media strategy within the Big
Four. Each of the informants indicated that a key initiative for their
respective ?rms is to ‘‘personalize’’ the ?rm brand by giving each of
their partners a vivid and human online presence. As one infor-
mant stated ‘‘What we’re looking to do now is really make our
partners more real through using things like video to help them
come to life’’ (Informant 5:1). This informant con?rmed that their
strategy was to build the ?rm image around partner personalities:
‘‘So it’s making, you know, our partnership more real people. It’s
playing on the front line, putting a face to them so they’re not just
a photo and it’s . . . helping us really build out our partners as
thought leaders and viewers in their space’’ (Informant 5:1).
Two of the ?rms have extended the strategy of positioning the
?rm around ‘‘personal brands’’ to explicit strategies based on con-
structing individual partners as ‘‘gurus.’’ Informant 5:1, described
the strategy in this way:
We are in the midst of also launching a ‘guru program’ where
we’re helping our top partners build their pro?le through
events and traditional media, but also, just as importantly, in
the digital space. We are helping them learn how to use
LinkedIn and Twitter to really connect with niche audiences
and share key insights so people think of them as gurus on a
particular topic. (Informant 5:1)
The strategy of creating celebrity professionals is paired with a
supporting campaign to construct each guru’s expertise around
business-speci?c sectors. The social media executives accomplish
this by ensuring that the designated guru’s ‘‘digital presence’’ is
‘‘augmented’’ by packaging information about the accountant and
circulating it in industry-speci?c sectors. As one social media exec-
utive explained ‘‘what we’re really looking into is the more sophis-
ticated advance features of LinkedIn, which is networking, using
LinkedIn groups. . .so let’s say we have an event happening and
it’s geared toward mining professionals in Vancouver. We know
that’s where they congregate; that’s where they talk. Well we need
to be present in that group, and the idea is to encourage our part-
ners to be thought leaders – post relevant ?rm content and answer
questions’’ (Informant 1:1).
Our content analysis of the various social media accounts of the
Big Four demonstrates a clear shift to industry speci?c claims of
expertise. We restricted our analysis to the non-recruiting ‘‘?rm’’
accounts on different forms of new media. We thus examined
the aggregate content of the websites, along with the Facebook
and Twitter ‘‘?rm’’ accounts. Note that we aggregate the content
of all the Big Four ?rms in our analysis in an effort to capture holis-
tically how these elite ?rms’ new media sites re?ect the relative
importance of industry versus substantive accounting knowledge.
Our results are summarized in Fig. 4, which shows the word clouds
generated from these accounts.
Fig. 4 demonstrates a progression from traditional ‘‘broadcast’’
forms of new media (i.e., the websites), where core terms referenc-
ing the substantive bases of accounting knowledge appear quite
prominently, to the newer social media (Twitter and Facebook),
where references to substantive knowledge areas all but disappear.
For example, the word cloud in the upper frame of Fig. 4, which
represents the accumulated content of Big Four websites, contains
Table 5
Thematic content analysis of new media messages.
Message
type
Message
author
Sample quotes
Press Firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CEO Jim Quigley discusses our global growth strategy on CNBC–250,000 hires in ?ve years.http://bit.ly/bEbVsW
[Twitter]
Webinar w/Cathy Benko co-author of Mass Career Customization and Vice Chairman & Chief Talent Of?cer, Deloitte LLPhttp://bit.ly/19HlyN
(6.25) [Twitter]
Deloitte Partner, John Sizer, is interviewed by The Economic Minute: Mark-to-Market Accountinghttp://bitly.com/900dG [Twitter]
New Hire Firm Mitchell L. Glassman, former Director of the Division of Resolutions & Receiverships with the FDIC, has joined Deloitte.http://ow.ly/3HTLp
[Twitter]
Deloitte Canada has a new Business Technology Analyst. [USERNAME] is now Business Technology Analyst, was Associate Business Analyst at
Scotia Capital. [LinkedIn]
Expertise Firm/
individual
New blog post from Deloitte Center for Collective Leadership’s Stephen Langton explores why some organizations seem to be ‘‘hot houses’’ for
ideas and innovation and some...well, aren’t. [Facebook]
PwC’s Shannon Schuyler on how social innovation can drive ideas and help your organization grow.http://huff.to/kOZC7D [Facebook]
Deloitte Canada (BLOG) In today’s world of 7 billion people on the planet, do we have an abundance of talent available? Read a perspective
from Paul Held, Managing partner for Deloitte’s Consulting practice in Canada. [LinkedIn]
The second report in Deloitte’s new longitudinal survey series, Talent Edge 2020, reveals a looming risk for employers to lose their critical tal-
ent as nearly 2 out 3 employees surveyed desire to leave their current companies. [Facebook]
A wealth of information related to IFRS:http://www.kpmgifrsinstitute.com [Twitter]
Deloitte Canada Find out how we think NFC (near ?eld communication) chips will impact our lives in #2012. Check our our #TMTPredictions
exclusive video now! [LinkedIn]
Kudos Firm/
individual
Congratulations Pratham USA and INJAZ al-Arab, Deloitte21 Challenge 2011 Grant for Innovation recipients! Read DTTL Chief Corporate
Development Of?ce Ainar Aijala’s blog post to visualize how the Deloitte21 Challenge helps change lives. [Facebook]
We’re proud of our very own Leisha John, Americas Dir of Environmental Sustainability, for being named as a Top Woman in Sustainability by
LittlePinkBook.com, an online magazine for professional women interested in excelling in their careers and growing their businesses - http://
bit.ly/f378fz [Facebook]
Deloitte’s Cunningham, Fucci named to Consulting magazine’s Top 25 Consultantshttp://is.gd/wPN [Twitter]
64 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
clear references to each of the substantive knowledge bases of the
accounting profession – i.e., ‘‘accounting,’’ ‘‘tax,’’ ‘‘risk,’’ ‘‘compli-
ance’’ and ‘‘audit.’’ These terms are highlighted in ovals in Fig. 4.
The word cloud for websites also contains relatively equal refer-
ences to important industry contexts for these elite ?rms, includ-
ing ‘‘health,’’ ‘‘insurance,’’ ‘‘?nancial’’ and ‘‘technology.’’ These
terms are highlighted in rectangles in Fig. 4.
By contrast, the word cloud for Big Four Twitter accounts con-
tains only the terms ‘‘tax,’’ ‘‘risk,’’ and ‘‘accounting.’’ The term ‘‘au-
dit’’ does not appear at all. Also by contrast, the frequency and
centrality of industry terms becomes more prominent and includes
reference to the general terms ‘‘business,’’ ‘‘industry’’ and ‘‘compa-
nies’’ along with more speci?c reference to the ‘‘?nancial,’’ ‘‘health-
care,’’ ‘‘services’’ and ‘‘technology’’ sectors.
The contrast becomes sharper in the third word cloud, which
represents the collective Facebook accounts for the Big Four.
Here the terms ‘‘audit,’’ ‘‘accounting’’ and ‘‘compliance’’ disappear
completely. The terms ‘‘risk’’ and ‘‘tax’’ are the only surviving ref-
erences to a substantive knowledge base in accounting. In their
place, we see prominent reference to a number of substantive
industry sectors including ‘‘health,’’ ‘‘energy,’’ ‘‘technology,’’ ‘‘sus-
tainability’’ and ‘‘communications.’’ The more generic terms ‘‘busi-
ness’’ and ‘‘industry’’ also remain and are larger, indicating
increased frequency and centrality of use.
Collectively, the three word clouds demonstrate a gradual but
distinct shift between traditional new media, where substantive
knowledge topics get relatively equal play with claims of industry
expertise, to social media, where industry expertise clearly trumps
traditional accounting knowledge. The erosion of traditional topics
of substantive accounting knowledge occurs most acutely on
Facebook rather than Twitter. The shift toward industry knowledge
and industry-speci?c services is also apparent in the specialized
Websites
Fig. 4. Word Clouds Generated from Combined Big 4 Website, Twitter, and Facebook ‘Firm’ Accounts.
R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68 65
new media accounts created by the Big Four at the global level.
Deloitte Global, for example, has four blogs, one each on ‘‘Global
Business Issues,’’ ‘‘Human Capital Issues’’ and ‘‘Trends, Tax and
Sustainability.’’ The Deloitte Global Twitter accounts are even more
heavily skewed toward industry speci?c topic areas. They include
‘‘Business Analytics,’’ ‘‘Financial Services,’’ ‘‘Government,’’
‘‘Growth,’’ ‘‘Health Care,’’ ‘‘IFRS,’’ ‘‘Organizational Performance,’’
‘‘Reform and Regulation,’’ ‘‘Risk Management’’ and ‘‘Technology.’’
Thus, of the ten Deloitte Twitter blogs, only one is directed at a tra-
ditional substantive knowledge area (Risk Management) and the
bulk of the rest are devoted to industry sector knowledge.
Both themes re?ect the process of reconstructing the individual
accountant as an agentic actor. This is not to suggest that accoun-
tants have not been agentic actors. Clearly they have. However,
their agency has been largely constructed around both the profes-
sion (Suddaby & Muzio, 2015) and, more recently, the ?rm (Cooper
& Robson, 2006). Such macro-level agency, however, does not seem
to translate well to new media, and what we observe in this section
of results is a concerted, and increasingly strategic or deliberate
effort to socially construct the celebrity accountant as an
industry-speci?c expert. This effort re?ects a third stage of domain
extension that, ironically, not only transfers agency from the pro-
fession and ?rm to individual accountants, it also grants increased
agency to the social media experts who engineer the reconstruc-
tion. We elaborate this observation in the discussion section below.
6. Discussion
Our analysis describes a staged process by which the account-
ing profession has become engaged in domain change as a result
of adopting a new practice (social media) and a new form of exper-
tise (social media experts). We identify three distinct phases, each
of which incorporates a distinct type of institutional work.
The ?rst phase, which we term boundary work, involved the
inculcation of social media within the boundaries of the Big Five
accounting ?rms. While each ?rm varied in its mode and intent
of adoption of the new practice, they were each remarkably consis-
tent in granting the adopted professionals considerable latitude
and discretion in their activities. That is, in addition to including
new social media within the boundaries of the professional service
?rm, accountants also maintained a distinct boundary between
social media professionals and accounting practice. The result of
this boundary work is the creation of a new conceptual ‘‘space’’
within the accounting ?rm within which two categories of profes-
sionalism interact and experiment with the domain of accounting
expertise.
The second phase, which we label rhetorical work, describes the
process by which the domain of accounting expertise is recon?g-
ured as a result of the adoption of new language in the context
of social media. Here we observe not just an acceleration of exist-
ing trends toward increased commercialism, but rather a near com-
plete absence of ethics and norms in the language of professional
expertise. We also observe the beginnings of a distinct shift in level
of analysis of professional domain construction, away from the
profession or the ?rm and toward the individual professional.
This phase of domain extension is notable also for what we did
not observe. Established theories of the professions would predict
that this phase would involve the rhetorical subordination of social
media experts as an inferior form of expertise and a focus on the
work of establishing formal controls by the incumbent profession-
als over the newcomers. However, we see no effort, either formal
or informal, to restrict the autonomy and discretion of social media
experts. Rather, we see a high degree of tolerance and discretion, if
not overt cooperation, between the two professions.
The third phase, which we call embedded agency work, is charac-
terized by an effort to construct the individual accountant as an
agentic actor in the profession. We describe this reconstructed
accounting professional as the celebrity accountant and note that
this is a marked shift in the recent history of the accounting profes-
sion which has, largely, located authority and identity of the pro-
fession within the context of the large professional ?rm.
Markedly, the celebrity accountant, although not fully established
as an icon of professional expertise, represents the early stages of
reconstituting embedded agency in the profession at the individual
level of analysis. This is in sharp contradistinction to traditional
understandings of professional expertise as being constituted pri-
marily at the level of the professional association or, more recently,
the ?rm.
It is important to note that much of this institutional work is not
overtly deliberate. That is, our interview subjects do not display an
obvious degree of awareness that they are engaged in processes of
domain change. However, when pressed, they do express some
degree of re?exivity about the role that they, and the new media,
are playing in changing the nature of accounting professionalism.
Part of their objective in achieving a successful social media pres-
ence, they acknowledge, is to change the way that accountants
view themselves. This, we interpret, as a key shift in
self-cognition, or a change in institutional thinking, which we view
as an essential element of domain change.
7. Conclusion
Our analysis of the domain extension that has occurred in
accounting as a result of the adoption of new social media differs
substantially from more traditional accounts of jurisdictional
change in the professions. Foremost, it is not characterized by
the high degree of strategic intentionality and con?ict described
in the sociology of professions (e.g., Abbott, 1988). Rather, we
observe a somewhat endogenous and organic adoption of new
practices and expertise that are considered somewhat tangential
and incremental in the context of the large professional ?rm, but
which clearly hold the potential for larger changes in professional
identity, ethics and norms of behavior for accountants.
Processes of endogenous change, driven by alterations in
micro-practices at the sub-?rm level and which are largely unin-
tended, describe key elements of institutional work. They offer
an important alternative to the highly strategic, top-down charac-
terization of jurisdictional change that tends to dominate discus-
sions of change in the professions. Our analysis, thus, contributes
directly to existing understandings of domain change in the
accounting profession (Potter, 2005; Young, 1996). Rather than
focusing attention on the extension of accounting domain by
examining how accountants adopt new areas of professional prac-
tice, however, we focus instead on how the adoption of new media
to promote existing practices has initiated a range of changing
quotidian practices that form the micro-foundations of broader
domain change in the profession.
Our study also differs from traditional views of professional
change by illustrating the process by which professional projects,
in order to be successful, must become embedded in larger projects
of institutional change. Prior theory has argued that the profes-
sional project of accountancy, which failed to gain social closure
at the level of the nation state, succeeded globally because of its
af?liation with the broader institutional project of the
trans-national corporation (Suddaby & Viale, 2011). In this case,
the professional project of social media analysts has become inti-
mately intertwined with the institutional project of accountancy.
In contrast to prior professional projects in accountancy, however,
which have concentrated on the prominence of the diversi?ed
66 R. Suddaby et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 45 (2015) 52–68
professional ?rm over that of the professional association, this pro-
ject appears to focus on individual professionals.
This research, however, offers only a preliminary glimpse into
the process of domain change within the context of social media.
Our research focuses on the early stages of new media adoption,
so more longitudinal studies will help to elaborate the processes
of institutional work that are involved in later phases. Similarly,
our study offers a gross overview of the adoption practices of
new media across US and Canadian ?rms. More detailed ethno-
graphic studies involving a single ?rm over time might offer a
more focused analysis of the subjective and interpretive processes
of individual professionals, both accounting and social media
experts, over time. It would be instructive, for example, to examine
the evolution of celebrity accountants over time through compar-
ative case studies.
Most of our knowledge of domain change in professions, and
indeed much of our knowledge of professionalism itself, is based
upon studies of classic or ‘pure’ professions that emerged in asso-
ciation with the protective guidance of the nation-state.
Increasingly, however, large diversi?ed organizations have become
the site of professional emergence. We have little understanding of
how effectively our knowledge of professions holds true when the
site of analysis moves from inter to intra professional competition.
Our preliminary investigation in this study suggests that domain
change, as a conceptual construct, operates under fundamentally
different assumptions when it occurs intra-organizationally. Our
study sketches out this relationship and our hope is that future
research will elaborate and extend this preliminary model.
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