Accounting for shifting expectations The strategic evolution of public accounting firms in times of regulatory change

Within increasingly demanding institutional environments, public accounting firms (PAFs) face pressures to adjust the scope of their services, the manner in which these services are delivered, and the governance mechanisms that underpin them. In the Netherlands, two decades of audit-related scandals have eroded trust in the accounting profession, while European sustainability reporting reforms have simultaneously expanded the firms’ service offerings. This thesis examines how professionals within the large Dutch PAFs have responded to these converging pressures. Adopting an interpretive, qualitative case-based approach, it draws on 60 semi-structured interviews and an extensive documentary archive.
The first paper investigates the introduction of independent Supervisory Boards into the Big 4 firms' governance, revealing that their influence was contingent on their ability to accumulate symbolic authority beyond their formal regulatory mandate, drawing on the concepts of identity regulation and ontological security to frame the analysis. The second paper examines how sustained regulatory scrutiny reconfigured the pathways to partnership, using Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, habitus, and hysteresis to link macro-level regulation, firm-level evaluation practices, and individual partners' responses. The third paper analyses the PAFs' role in the implementation of the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, drawing on the concepts of legal endogeneity and regulatory intermediation to illuminate how PAFs shaped the meaning of compliance in the context of the Directive.
Together, the papers reveal the ability of PAFs to adapt to expanding societal demands and increased regulatory scrutiny, showing how governance, professional success, and the meaning of compliance are continuously renegotiated.