Audit Society

The concept of “audit society” refers primarily to a logic at work in regulatory and managerial processes and to tendencies, rather than to an epochal state or condition. In this context, an audit refers to a systematic assessment of institutional performance against agreed criteria and standards. The processes used to conduct such audits reflect the transformation of audit and evaluation practices into normative principles of organizational control with a wide reach. This transformation is in turn a function of what political scientists have called the “regulatory state,” meaning in part a state with an operating philosophy of acting “at a distance” on policy domains, via instruments such as accounting and audit. Below, the role of the “audit society” idea as a critical resource is developed, followed by a number of methodological issues and concerns related to its potential application.

The idea of “audit society” provided an organizing motif for criticisms of the public service reforms in the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere during the 1980s and 1990s, known collectively as the “new” public management. While the original formulation of the idea relied largely on a synthesis of secondary empirical evidence, it has provided the platform for substantive studies on health workers, teachers, the police, social workers, and psychoanalysts, to name but a few. The working practices of these groups have been targeted by reforms, and they have found their professional lifeworlds transformed to a greater or lesser extent by precise demands for accountability. The critical reaction that enlists the idea of “audit society” has focused on defending the importance of professional judgment, demonstrating the decline of trust and the rise of anxiety, and analyzing the unintended consequence of auditable targets, which damage the very service quality the reforms have been intended to improve.

The auditing process is used in a variety of ways in academia, ranging from performance assessment to evaluating the effectiveness of research grants. The wide-ranging appeal of the “audit society” motif does not necessarily mean that it has been applied consistently across fields. It has often been taken as a given, supplying only a pretext for empirical analysis. In the academy, there are also variations in disciplinary sensitivities. For example, the specific methodological commitments of anthropology make it particularly vulnerable to the shorter timescales of the audit process and to the reductive nature of performance measurement. Marilyn Strathern and others have been highly critical of audit and related forms of performance measurement as they have emerged in universities in the UK. By contrast, economics, which has to a large extent internalized evaluation mechanisms as part of its own “professionalization,” has been relatively silent on auditing as a specific mechanism of control and oversight.

If the concept of audit society is to be taken seriously as more than metaphor, it raises a number of serious issues for scholars. First, among these issues is the much debated boundary between audit and evaluation. Audit can be narrowly defined in the shadow of financial auditing largely as an exercise in compliance verification. From this point of view, it addresses the following question: Does this organization comply with some preestablished set of rules for the quality of its accounting? Even allowing for interpretation and discretion in the application of such rules, audit is fundamentally concerned with conformity with them. Interesting questions then concern the rules of performance themselves: How have they evolved and how are they implemented?

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