The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Amanda Sonnerfeldt. Photo

Amanda Sonnerfeldt

Senior lecturer, Assistant head Accounting and Corporate Finance, Department of Business Administration

Amanda Sonnerfeldt. Photo

Being an audit professional in the digital age

Author

  • Amanda Sonnerfeldt
  • Karin Jonnergård

Editor

  • Jan Marton
  • Fredrik Nilsson
  • Peter Öhman

Summary, in English

In this chapter, we explore how audit professionals in transnational accounting firms feel about their professional identity in the digital age. Based on 15 interviews with audit professionals, our findings reveal that despite the dispositional and relational affordances of emerging digital technology, some auditors are experiencing professional insecurities. Our interviewees expressed concerns on the development of the audit profession as a collective as well as audit professionals individually. The former manifested in the lack of trust in their systems of expertise, and the latter in the lack of information technology skills, uncertainty in their career trajectories and ethical concerns due to the decoupling between claims by the firms and actual practices. Discussions on emerging technology tend to focus on its capacity to enhance the quality of audits. Audit professionals are often presumed to have adapted to the epistemic changes, acquired new competence to work with these technologies to maintain their legitimate standing as a professional. This study importantly draw attention to the presence of professional insecurities in this transition process thus, offering important insights and reflection for both the audit and auditors to move forward. The findings provide a basis to understand how and why auditors are renegotiating their expertise and reconstituting their professional role in this digital age. It gently reminds accounting educators to proactively respond to the shifts in the way that expertise is and will be embodied and institutionalised. It also cautions accounting firms against complacency: to construct greater alignment between their recruitment and marketing discourses, and to create a culture fitting to this digital era.

Department/s

  • Accounting and Corporate Finance

Publishing year

2023-08-25

Language

English

Pages

157-179

Publication/Series

Auditing Transformation : Regulation, Digitalisation and Sustainability

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

Routledge

Topic

  • Business Administration

Keywords

  • Auditors
  • Profession
  • Digital age
  • Digitalisation
  • Professional insecurities
  • Identity

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 9781003411390