Vanessa Egan

Exploration of professional and firm socialisation through remote onboarding

The nature of the accounting profession and the process of accounting firm and professional socialisation is widely studied in the critical accounting literature, in part because of the public interest mandate of accountants. The Covid-19 pandemic brought an unexpected pivot to virtual onboarding of accounting trainees in 2020 and (in part) in 2021. This process involved both formal engagement with the firm, and informal engagement with their peers. Unlike in a face-to-face situation, the use of technology to communicate separated these strands, offering an interesting quasi-experimental setting in which to examine aspects of firm and professional socialisation.