Why Can’t Things Just Stay the Same

Three important changes to how public accounting in the USA is practiced have occurred in the last few years. Large firms have expanded their scope of services to such a degree that multidisciplinary practice seems the next logical step. At the same time, the success of consulting work has required some firms to bifurcate these activities into separate entities. Meanwhile, smaller practices are being consolidated into financial services corporations. These developments should cause researchers to reconsider fundamental questions that, for the most part, assume a set of practice conditions that are jeopardized by these changes. Importantly, the role of organizational structure needs to be explicitly considered, now that it is a variable and not a constant.