Exploring Compliance and Convergence of Auditor Commitments to Professional Values : A Contextual Analysis

By emphasising the work context of auditing in terms of clients served, and by disentangling conformity into compliance and convergence this article extends the institutional analysis of conformity and variation in value commitments in the auditing profession. We find that type of client is a factor that results in differences in compliance and convergence to professional value commitments in the complete sample of 1,646 Swedish Big 4 and non-Big 4 auditors. By analysing not only compliance to value commitments, but also how closely sub-groups within the profession resemble each other (i.e., convergence), we contribute by showing that the type of client served is both a source of conformity and destabilizing factor within the auditing profession, and that Big 4 firms are less homogenous than typically portrayed in previous research.