Audit Culture

Audit culture, in general, refers to the implementation across a wide range of businesses and institutions of systems of regulation, in which questions of quality are subsumed by logics of management. The term began to be employed in the 1990s by British accountants, anthropologists, and sociologists to refer to the increasing use of regulatory mechanisms, designed to monitor and measure performance, in fields other than accounting, insurance, and finance, where the mechanisms originated. More recently, the term has been used to refer to and theorize the emergence within the human services of these regulatory practices and the language and values accompanying them. For example, terms such as performance outcomes, quality assurance, accountability, transparency, efficiency, best practices, stakeholder, benchmarking, and value added circulate within and anchor ...