Mission maintenance in professional service firms must balance the commercial and professional logics and prevent mission drift. Based on a case study of ‘auditing in action’ in a German professional service firm we argue that mission maintenance results from interactions between the practice and field level. We find that anchors on the field level target individuals’ discretionary choices by balancing competing demands from the commercial and professional logics on the practice level. Therefore, we identify anchoring as a central cross-level mechanism for maintaining the balance between routinizing for professional quality and ‘flexibilizing’ for efficiency on the practice level. With these findings we make two contributions to the literature: an analysis of how the field level can contribute to maintaining organisations’ missions in fields that have competing logics, and the identification of anchoring as a central mechanism to balance competing demands with the expectations of referent audiences on the field level.

专业服务公司的任务维护必须平衡商业逻辑和专业逻辑，防止任务漂移。基于德国专业服务公司的“审计在行动”案例研究，我们认为任务维护是实践和现场层面之间相互作用的结果。我们发现，通过在实践层面平衡商业逻辑和专业逻辑的竞争需求，现场层面的锚点针对个人的自由选择。因此，我们将锚定视为一种核心的跨层级机制，用于在实践层面保持专业质量的常规化和提高效率的“灵活化”之间的平衡。有了这些发现，我们对文献做出了两个贡献：