Management Research Seminar: Carla Edgley

Theme group: Working life

Speaker: Carla Edgley, Cardiff Business School

Abstract

Audit firms in the UK are currently striving to embrace a ‘Diversity’ agenda in their management control and recruitment processes. In spite of a clear commitment to diversity, as diversity policies roll out, the pace of change is slow, particularly at senior levels. This is the so called enigma of diversity. As organisations make sense of diversity, priorities can shift and practices lose their emancipatory potential. Our study is about the work of making sense of and enacting the modern discourse of ‘diversity’ as presented in the ‘hard law’ of legislation, and the ‘soft law’ of consultants, academics and social activists, into the organizational and profession processes of audit firms. As part of a UK-wide, ongoing study investigating the discourse and practices of diversity in the audit field, the aim of the current paper is to examine how firms’ existing processes give meaning to the perceived imperatives for them to ‘embrace diversity’, and how organizational actors within audit firms are responding to it (Weick et al., 2005). We conclude that the professional identity of auditors has shaped fluid meanings of diversity that offer plausible understandings of the organizational context of audit professionals. There remain, however, unresolved tensions between professionals’ commitments to the idea of diversity and the way in which soft law interpretations, diversity programmes and policies are only partially undoing homogenous hierarchies within firms.

Speaker bio

Carla Edgley MAFCA FHEA is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting at Cardiff Business School and Director of the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Research Group.  She trained as a chartered accountant with PwC and worked in senior management accounting roles in industry and the public sector before moving to a career in academia. Her teaching is in professional accounting subjects and her research interests include critical perspectives on understandings of materiality as a reporting principle in accounting, corporate social responsibility assurance and taxation.  Her publications to date have drawn on Foucauldian insights into the workings of materiality, power and knowledge in the accounting field. Her recent work has explored beliefs about diversity and the materiality of the body in social constructs of professional identity in accounting.