Public Accounting in China: The Role of Occupational Community within a Globalized Profession*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The globalization of the world economy has brought drastic changes to institutions of work and the structures that support them. This paper analyzes the evolving public accounting profession in China. We constructed a unique qualitative data set by conducting two rounds of on‐site interviews with public practice accountants in Chinese domestic and international firms in 2015 and 2016. Through narrative analysis of accountants' careers, we find that domestic accountants form a distinct group based on their role in supporting the Chinese accounting profession and the pressures, challenges, and opportunities they face in career choice and work conditions. Our study reveals how the well‐known distinctions of language, training, and international experience are further entwined with strong ties to state policy and the “transmission belt” of information flowing between regulatory bodies and workplace institutions. The accounting profession in China shares much in common with the “Western” form of the profession, evidence of the institutional isomorphism documented in the literature on Big 4 firms. Our study highlights additional nuances surrounding regulation and control of the accounting field, notable in domestic firms, which distinguish the Chinese profession within the global field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".