The 'Big Four' in the spotlight: Accountability and professional legitimacy in the UK audit market

This paper seeks to understand how professions are scrutinized, and attempt to justify themselves, in the light of apparent failure. We analyse the interaction between the heads of the Big Four-the four largest accounting firms-and the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee during a recent British parliamentary investigation into the audit market. The paper provides an ethnomethodologically informed discourse analysis of the forms of mundane and professional reason through which 'reality disjunctures', that is, conflicting accounts of events, were posed and handled during these interactions. The reality disjunctures exposed by the Committee, we propose, serve to perform 'holding to account' and questioning the legitimacy of the Big Four. The candidate resolutions proffered by the Big Four, in turn, sought to perform 'accountability', restore legitimacy and trust in the profession, and maintain the status quo. These discursive contests, we argue, were pivotal to the social construction of reality of the UK audit profession and also served to shape the future of the profession, including implications for governance and state regulation.