Culture in the audit file: an empirical reflection on the cross-national cultural ‘native categories’ used by auditors in a ‘Big 4’ professional services firm

A typical characteristic of the auditing profession is the sensitive balance between a professionally intimate client relationship on one hand and the need for accountability to a wide variety of third parties, underpinned by professional requirements of objectivity, confidentiality, due care and independence on the other hand. Given state of cross-cultural research in auditing and fact that cultural taxonomies are rather more cultural artefacts for us in practice than they are scientific tools for explaining cultural differences, an alternative approach has been taken to explore further possible explanations of impact of cross-national cultural differences on auditors’ professional behaviour. A grounded theory approach is employed to provide an empirical insight into how cross-national cultural differences actually play out in the day-to-day global practice of an international audit firm. The cultural taxonomies of acclaimed constructs and dimensions that take societal culture as their unit of analysis may well provide for a practical synthesising framework for understanding, structuring and expressing the ‘native categories’.