Jurisdictional disputes over professional work: the institutionalization of the global knowledge expert☆

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to use the sociology of professions, institutional theory, and outsourcing literatures to examine the dramaturgy of exchange relations among the Big Five public accounting firms, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), as it concerns the outsourcing of internal audit services to international external audit firms. Toward this end, a latent content analysis of a variety of public and private documents is performed where we find that the transformation of the jurisdiction of internal auditing to be rife with conflict, characterized by a heated dramaturgy of exchange relations among the Big Five, the AICPA, the IIA, the SEC, and also the US Congress. Rhetorical ploys supporting this dramaturgy incorporated such key terms as: “world class services”, “global economy”, “market forces”, “commodification”, “monetization of professional services”, “knowledge experts”, “the knowledge millennium”, “leveraging knowledge”, “higher order platform of services”, “value chains”—all in addition to making more money. At issue is how the competing factions seek to re-institutionalize societal expectations of proper professional behavior to legitimate a transformation of jurisdictions, for example, to create the “knowledge expert” providing robust services in a global economy.