Background: Auditing plays a fundamental role in promoting transparency and ensuring quality of financial reporting. The auditor’s professional role is shaped by a complex interplay of structural conditions, such as ownership structures, and institutional factors including legal frameworks, industry norms, and societal expectations. Together, these factors constitute the context in which auditors operate and influence how their responsibilities are performed across different organizational environments.  Purpose: Explore how ownership structures influence auditors´ perceived audit quality, independence and expectations, specifically focusing on how auditors perceive these dynamics in the Swedish audit context.  Method: This study adopts a qualitative research design using semi-structured interviews with auditors who worked with privately owned and publicly listed enterprises. The analysis is grounded in institutional theory, which provides a lens to understand how formal regulations, norms and external pressures shape the expectations placed on auditors.  Conclusion: The results show that ownership structure significantly affects the auditor´s role, especially regarding relational dynamics, professional independence and the expectations placed upon them. In private firms, auditors are often expected to take on advisory roles, whereas in public firms, stricter regulatory demands enforce a more formalized and independent approach.