The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis Applied to Big 5(4) Public Accounting Firms' Assessments of Client Internal Controls

It has been increasingly reasoned that language and organizational culture mediate between independent observers and the organizations they are trying to understand. We apply the linguistic relativity hypothesis and interpretive cultural anthropology to probe two discursive styles - metonymy and synecdoche - that may be used by the Big 5 (and following the collapse of Arthur Andersen, Big 4) public accounting firms to describe the internal control systems of their clients. Based upon a test instrument distributed to audit teams and interviews, we find that the more mechanistic audit firm cultures employ metonymy, while organic audit firm cultures employ synecdoche. Implications are explored.