Routine dynamics and the relationality of auditor judgement: How auditors navigate situated novelty

This paper contributes to a long-standing debate in the audit literature about the place of professional judgement within the constraints of the formal audit process. Responding to recent calls for deeper exploration, we examine how auditors exercise judgement when facing a practical challenge they perceive as novel, for which they are unable to easily deploy prior understandings and judgement scripts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with practicing auditors and the Routine Dynamics (RD) perspective, emphasising patterns of routine action as having internal dynamics, we provide a nuanced account of how auditors progress from the position of relative epistemic obscurity to being comfortable enough to form a conclusion. Our findings show how auditors performed routines to establish social , temporal, and spatial relationalities within and beyond the present audit context, enabling them to nuance their interpretations and grow confident in their judgements. We reveal how auditor judgement is continuously present but fluctuates in intensity, depending on the auditors’ reflexive intent during individual routine performances, resulting in the augmentation or curtailment of opportunities for inference. We also show how auditors accrue comfort in their judgements in a progressive manner along a continuum, spanning from largely ritualistic performances to the more effortful, inferentially intensive ones that together shape how auditors grapple with novelty.