An institutional change perspective for understanding the development of internal auditing

Abstract

This study aims to examine the extent to which institutional norms prevailing in corporate governance settings shape attributes of internal audit departments and to theorize the developments of internal audit practices from an institutional change perspective. It employs a qualitative research approach based on document review and interviews with internal audit directors of selected Ethiopian public and private sector organizations. Findings indicate that regulation-based institutional norms explain the adoption of internal audit and the function's characteristics in Ethiopian organizations. Similarly, innovative introduction of internal audit practices that originate within some organizations diffuse as a result of inter-organizational interactions and get institutionalized overtime. Such innovations are associated with organisational size, top management characteristics, and internal audit's advancement in technology or emanate from exogenous input from the international business environment. Innovations serve as a basis for supplanting old institutional norms of internal audit by new ones. This suggests that institutional norms of internal audit are not static as they are not always taken-for-granted at the level of individual organizations. This study is the first to theorize the development of internal audit practices from an institutional change perspective. This contributes to our understanding of key drivers of institutional change that initiate new institutional norms that foster the development of internal audit through deinstitutionalization of old practices and introduction and diffusion of new ones.