Audit Society

Financial audits, safety inspections, quality certifications, teaching evaluations, compliance reports: over the past forty years "auditing" has spread from the accounting profession into nearly every field. If your job involves compliance paperwork that never ends and an unending stream of annual reviews and assessment forms, what follows is what you live through daily. Michael Power, professor of accounting at the London School of Economics, named this spread the audit explosion and wrote it up in 1997 as The Audit Society, now cited over 13,000 times. His diagnosis is counterintuitive: what auditing produces is usually not assurance that things are actually fine, but the comfort of "it looks like it was checked"; and more importantly, to become auditable, organisations quietly remake themselves into something else. The book's subtitle sums it up: Rituals of Verification.

Where did the explosion come from? Power's answer is political rather than efficiency-based: public sector reform since the 1980s demanded that everything be accountable, accountability needs evidence, evidence needs verification, and so auditing became the default move. One insight will be developed later (R12, mechanical objectivity): when a society stops trusting the discretion of professionals, it turns to trusting procedures and numbers instead, because procedures look checkable by anyone. Auditing is an institutional response to an absence of trust, not a source of trust.

The core concept is a verb phrase: making things auditable. Auditing does not arrive with a ruler to measure an organisation as it stands; the organisation grows compliance departments, documentation systems and indicator frameworks in advance, arranging itself into a shape the audit can read. Power points to the crack in this: between the assurance auditing promises and the assurance it can actually deliver lies a gap that cannot be filled, and the two "coexist uneasily." The ritual gets performed fully while the substance may be absent, and auditability gradually displaces substance.

Power later hit the brakes on his own theory, which makes it more credible, not weaker. In 2000 he wrote a "second thoughts" piece, and a 2003 retrospective conceded that the early account was too pessimistic and painted auditing as monolithic, calling for study of how it actually varies across settings. In 2004 he pushed the diagnosis one layer further: organisations begin doing "second-order risk management," managing not the risk in the business itself but the risk of being held accountable, piling on defensive documentation and process. In 2022 he and collaborators simply studied how accounting practices dissolve and come to an end, adding a counterweight to the story that auditing can only expand forever.

A second line comes from anthropology. Marilyn Strathern analysed the ratings culture of British universities in 1997 and edited the collection Audit Cultures in 2000, promoting auditing from an accounting term to a cultural form: how the language of accountability colonises the university and even scholars' understanding of themselves. Her article title from the same year is blunt enough, "The Tyranny of Transparency." Shore and Wright formally proposed the concept of audit culture in 1999; in 2015 they folded rankings and ratings into audit culture too, and that paper is the hinge between the "audit society" and "ranking reactivity" literatures (the machine in R01); in 2024 it was consolidated into a monograph. The original setting is Britain's research assessment regime, the RAE (later the REF): universities rearranged their internal structures to meet the assessment and mass-produced compliance documents, and substantive research got crowded out by auditable proxies. You should find that scene familiar, since it is the administrative version of ranking discipline.

Put the audit society back on the map and its place is the soil. R03 covers how commensuration presses quality into quantity, R04 covers how a public measure like a ranking penetrates an organisation and makes people discipline themselves; audit culture answers an earlier question, where all these measures come from. The answer is that the audit explosion mass-produced them, and behind every indicator, score and certification stands a demand for accountability that requires verifiability. Reactivity (R01) describes organisations struggling with measures; the audit society explains why organisations are surrounded by so many measures. The former is the play, the latter is the stage. That is also why the two literatures were formally merged by Shore and Wright in 2015: rankings and ratings were always a branch of audit culture.

Evidence has to be graded; that is the honest boundary. Most criticism of audit culture is case studies and ethnography. Accountability backfiring does have hard evidence: studies of England's NHS targets regime documented a whole toolkit of gaming. But comparative work in the same field also shows waiting times really did fall. Gaming and genuine improvement coexist, and the whole case is in K02 (the case band, on governance indicators). On the public administration side, de Bruijn and Radin have organised this class of "performance accountability paradoxes" into systematic textbooks. The newest fieldwork is from 2026: frontline agencies build their own "secret spreadsheets." The reported numbers feed the audit, while the spreadsheet holds the real work. The organisation lives in two realities at once. There is also an unconnected thread: Power's "making things auditable" and the "reverse engineering" mechanism Espeland later added (the evaluated taking the ranking formula apart and rearranging themselves accordingly) are very likely the same thing under two disciplinary names, yet the two literatures have never seriously talked to each other.

One open question: most of the evidence for audit culture backfiring is case-based. Is there robust evidence that auditing genuinely improved outcomes? The D1 report lists this as the counter-evidence still missing on this line: not all accountability degrades, and what is lacking is the boundary conditions.

The one-line takeaway: the more diligently you audit, the better an organisation gets at being audited, and between that and the organisation actually getting better lies a gap you have to design your way across.