Michael power audit society pdf

Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. More Since the early s there has been an explosion of auditing activity in the United Kingdom and North America. Authors Affiliations are at time of print publication. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Show Summary Details.

Subscriber Login Email Address. Password Please enter your Password. Home The Audit Society. The Human Contribution Author : J. Reason Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Genre : Transportation Get Book. Audit Education Author : Karen A. Van Peursem,Elizabeth A. I suspect lawyers and engineers would too. Power goes deeper still into the process of audit, and asks deep questions about what it is, what it measures, and what it actually achieves.

Does it actually provide valid reassurance about a company's performance or is it an empty reassurance, or a ritual of verification, that does not actually show very much at all. Have we removed our faith from individuals and corporations and misplaced it in a rather abstract process that cannot actually give us the trust and reassurance we seek?

Is our faith in audit in vain? Do we end up generating performance measures that can be audited? Or performance measures that actually measure something about the task at hand? Do professionals generate spurious performance metrics to distract auditors with something measurable but meaningless? If so you can see how easily we get from proper scrutiny and audit into probophilia. In my darker reflections I sometimes wonder if the power of EXCEL spreadsheets allows measurement and data to be generated without thought and so represent an intellectual step backward for us.

The inability of most people to make accurate inferences from data further increases my doubts on this e. For example he gives the example of the Research Assessment Exercise in Universities- and how academics altered their research and teaching activities to meets its demand. It started to drive activity, not measure it. I well remember Prof Chris Dowrick writing his excellent book Beyond Depression: A new approach to understanding and management and commenting ruefully that he was glad I liked it But he had written an excellent synthetic work of the kind only academics who know a field really well can do.

Power's section on audit in medicine is very useful P His comment is that performance is an ill defined term, and the hierarchy between efficacy, efficiency and economy is not fully worked out. Hence performance metrics are always contested, and behind each measurements are often hidden presuppositions about value, and about who has authority or power to assign value.

There is great summary of the problem of the Audit Society on p, "The audit society is a society that endangers itself because it invests too heavily in shallow rituals of verification at the expense of other forms of organisational intelligence.

Power is throughout this book suggesting that audit puts us less in control than we like to think, and we may have to be able to live with this uncertainty. The attempt to become assured, and too certain, and too comfortable in this, may actually render us blind to true risks. An example of this is that some social services child protection teams may be rated "excellent" on official inspections, and then have a case of failed procedures and systems land in their area.

Power's final chapter on Audit, trust and Risk is excellent. He acknowledges the positive intention of audit- we cannot function without some checking and accounting mechanisms. But he is well aware of their limitations, and their potential for damaging side effects. He's acutely aware that organisations may adapt their activities to meet auditing requirements, rather than whatever and whoever their service needs to be delivered to.

As Power says on p "At the extreme performance and quality are in danger of being defined largely in terms of conformity to such process. Power concludes this book with a memorable paragraph which I quote, "Auditing operationalizes a balance of liberty and discipline which is not shaped simply by objective economic necessity or common sense. Rather, even in its most mundane techniques, it reflects a complex and not always consistent constellation of social attitudes to risk, trust and accountability.

The motif of the audit society reflects a tendency for audit to become a leading bearer of legitimacy and this must be so because other sources of legitimacy such as community and state are declining in influence. So the audit society is a symptom of the times, coincidentally a fin de siecle, in which a gulf has opened up between poorly rewarded doing and highly rewarded observing.

In this book I have tried to create some understanding and a little discomfort about this growing industry of comfort production. For those of us who are in regulated professions it will show you where these ideas have come from, and where they are going. This book raises significant questions about what we are really asking for when we seek assurance, and about whether we should really be seeking it at all.

It is not the easiest reading as it packs a lot of content into a small number of pages. The effort of reading it is worthwhile, and readers will come away with a far better understanding of the problem, its development, and how we can in future mitigate its excesses.