Professional Identity and “the Enigma of Diversity” : Sensemaking and enacting hard and soft law in Audit Firms

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