The Audit Society

Manifold Conceptions of the Internal Auditing of Risk Culture in the Financial Sector

“…In a similar vein, studies exploring outsourcing of IA to third parties suggest that outsourcing improves the independence and objectivity of IA, but discourages auditee managers from sharing information, resulting in lower audit quality (Abdolmohammadi 2013;Caplan et al 2000;Prawitt et al 2012;Speklé et al 2007). Overall, these studies reveal that due to lack of content knowledge on the heterogeneity of processes (including risk management, corporate governance, and internal control), IA has developed its techniques to merely verify the process of decision-making (Pentland 2000;Power 1999). While these studies teach us to look at rationales and approaches of IA, they ignore the interactions and expectations of different stakeholders on IA rationales and approaches.…”

“…The boundary identification was mostly linked to understanding what to include and what to exclude (Abbott 1995;Bowker and Star 1996;Mikes 2009). Here, more specifically, we found the idea of "demarcating the object of audit" (Power 1997(Power , 1999. The second step that emerged was calculation linked to the aspiration of rendering "organizational spaces knowable and governable" (Miller and O'Leary 1987;Miller and Power 2013;Vaivio 1999Vaivio , 2006.…”

“…There is a danger that a direct transfer of knowledge, without critical considerations on the intangibility of risk culture, could lead to mere ritualistic thinking among implementers promoting a tick-box-based verification approach rendering IA of risk culture inefficient or ineffective (Erasmus and Coetzee 2018;McCabe 2014;Power 1999). Second, the control and governance approach, if extended to employees' behavior, raises ethical concerns where excessive controls might rob employees of their individuality and dissociate them from critical and moral decision-making (leading to the colonization of employees' emotional self) (Ezzy 2001;McCabe 2014).…”

Opening the Black Box of Scholarly Communication Funding: A Public Data Infrastructure for Financial Flows in Academic Publishing

“…This question cannot be reflexively posed without at least minimally considering broader shifts towards transparency, reporting, quantification and ' audit rituals' within public institutionsas well as shifts in management and governance within higher education (cf. Power, 1999;McGettigan, 2013;Davies, 2014). A higher degree of transparency around financial flows in scholarly communication might have consequences for institutions of higher learning whose members often complain of the crippling explosion of administrative rituals in addition to excessive teaching loads and diminishing research time.…”

Some Provocations for a Future of Institutional Research: Evidence-Based Decision Making as Séance

“…The efficiency of higher education is monitored and evaluated by auditing and control processes harvesting and analysing data and evidence as 'rituals of verification' (Power 1999(Power 2004. Higher education increasingly resembles "Auditland" (Murphie 2014:10).…”