This paper develops an endogenous model of institutional and professional domain change. Traditional accounts of domain change focus attention on how professional expertise is extended to new areas of practice. This form of domain extension is typically both deliberate and contested. However, domain change can also occur in a somewhat quotidian and uncontested fashion when professional expertise is extended intra-organizationally. We analyze the ways in which the domain of accounting expertise is reconstituted in new social media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – in Big 4 accounting firms. Using content analysis and interview data we show how social media professionals, in pursuing their own professional project, generate change in the professional domain of accountancy. Our analysis demonstrates that the institutional work of domain change occurs through three related activities: boundary work, rhetorical work and the construction of the embedded actor.

This paper examines how the interaction of perceived subjectivity and pay transparency in profit allocation is associated with an important aspect of law partners' professional judgment, namely their tendency to accede to the wishes of their client and fellow partner (labeled hereafter as partner accedence). Based on interviews with 56 corporate law partners working in large Canadian law firms, we find higher partner accedence in a less subjective system than in a more subjective system, but only under no pay transparency. We find that pay transparency (versus no transparency) is associated with increased accedence in a more subjective system, but it is marginally associated with decreased accedence in a less subjective system. In an experiment where we randomly assign MTurk participants to conditions, we replicate the finding that pay transparency (versus no transparency) has a more positive effect on partner accedence as subjectivity level increases. Data Availability: Lawyers participated in the study upon which this paper is based only after signing agreements that strict confidentiality of all data would be maintained by the researchers. As such, we are bound by these confidentiality agreements with individual lawyers interviewed for the study. Experiment data from Amazon Mechanical Turk are available from the authors.