Audit Loops
Audit Loops
The situations we have described in previous sections are indicative of a gradual change perceived by auditors themselves. This is a change towards what we might call proactive auditing; that is, auditing that will not only control organizations but also enable their enhancement. One consequence of the requirement that audit should ideally “add value” is that the National Audit Office becomes increasingly implicated The situations we have described in previous sections are indicative of a gradual change perceived by auditors themselves. This is a change towards what we might call proactive auditing; that is, auditing that will not only control organizations but also enable their enhancement. One consequence of the requirement that audit should ideally “add value” is that the National Audit Office becomes increasingly implicated
In a down-to-earth estimation, we were told: “it is a balancing act”. Holding the balance is crucial, however, since politicians or the media may jump at an
opportunity to argue that the office is less than objective. 11 “As soon as you touch these things,” one interviewee noted, “you are in the political sphere.” Since auditors,
simply by doing their job, runs the risk of being drawn into the political sphere, it is crucial for them to avoid to be seen as taking sides. The auditors we spoke with thus insisted on objectivity, neutrality and formal transparency even as they aimed to provide learning opportunities.
This is also why it is crucial to the audit office that performance audit is seen by the public, including by members of Parliament as a straightforward evaluative process. Data flows from the organizations and agencies that are being investigated to the audit office. Suggestions and criticisms flow from the office and back. Responses and clarifications are written. Recommendations are received and put to use. In contrast to this linear, procedural self-description, we suggest that the framing of auditing, the production of audit knowledge, the recommendations and demands such knowledge gives rise to, and the subsequent responses are recursively implicated. Through loops of ongoing interactions, these phases become “folded together,” and the question of what constitutes the inside and the outside of auditing is rendered ambiguous.
The situation can be explicated with reference to the previously mentioned
notion of mechanical, rule-following objectivity. As Porter notes, this form of objectivity is “especially prominent where inside and outside are not sharply differentiated” (1995, 229). This lack of sharp differentiation precisely characterizes the loop-like interactions through which performance audit knowledge is made and validated. This is the kind of situation, Porter argues, that “encourages the greatest extremes of standardization and objectivity, a preoccupation with explicit, public forms of knowledge” (229). Such a pre-occupation is also a prevalent feature of performance auditing. It is manifest, not least, in the way the indisputability of final reports are seen as depending exclusively on ‘objective’ data, even though the quality of such reports is acknowledged to rely to a significant extent on qualitative knowledge and observations ‘in the field’. Because of these co-evolving but also competing and, to an extent, contradictory tendencies, auditors encounter challenges when engaging in loops to support organizational learning.
As noted, these are loops through which information continuously flow back and forth between auditors and auditees, transforming the knowledge of both parties in the process. Such audit loops, we argue, are constitutive of performance audit because they are absolutely necessary for the production of relevant audit knowledge. At the same time, these loops have contradictory implications. They are both generative and troublesome. They form the basis for both control and learning while also threatening both aspirations. And they involve interaction and mutuality in a way that cannot be accounted for according to the epistemology of mechanical objectivity that both informs public and internal understandings of auditing and sustains the organizational legitimacy of the National Audit Office.
Although we have illustrated audit loops with material from performance audit at the National Audit Office, they are by no means confined to this setting. Indeed, Although we have illustrated audit loops with material from performance audit at the National Audit Office, they are by no means confined to this setting. Indeed,
It was in the context of addressing this question that we were told how auditors have “no leeway for making mistakes”, since any mistake risks tarnishing the reputation of the organization as a whole. One could certainly argue that having in principle no leeway for making mistakes does not protect an organization against actually making them. Yet it is to minimize this possibility that the office enters into further audit loops in order to ensure its accountability.
Thus, since 2000 the office has requested external reviewers to evaluate the quality of all its reports. In 2006, the office collaborated with the Supreme Audit Institutions of several other countries, in a process where colleagues from these institutions conducted a peer-review of the office and offered criticisms and recommendations. The detailed report and the organizational plans for addressing the identified shortcomings followed much the same format as the one usually used by the office for its performance audits. These documents are also publically available
online. 12 Accordingly, we might say that even if no one forces the office to ‘take its
own medicine’ it willingly does so anyway. It engages in exercises that help it perform as the kind of learning organization that it hopes to induce other own medicine’ it willingly does so anyway. It engages in exercises that help it perform as the kind of learning organization that it hopes to induce other
Auditing and Postplurality
’Forster foresaw connectedness in the form of an intermediary (a participant- observer) making repeated excursions between separate realms, domains or entities, and drawing comparisons by coming to terms with the regularities of life practiced by each as he interprets them’. This is the merographic amalgam of pluralism. A postplural world has “lost” this mathematics insofar as it can no longer enumerate such different domains (Strathern 1992, 215n41, quoting Rapport, Strathern’s emphasis).
In preceding sections, we have used activities relating to the conduct of performance auditing to illustrative purpose. In particular, we have aimed to elucidate some conventions and cultural forms of auditing and explored some ways in which they may be changing. Inspired by Marilyn Strathern and Donna Haraway, we see such “seeds of change” as relating to a process of cultural transformation in which auditing is imploding on top of, or alongside, its explosions.
In the quotation above, Strathern refers to a “merographic amalgam of pluralism”. Pluralism is here understood epistemologically, as indicating that many perspectives might always be taken on any given case. The notion of merography (a word whose root, mero, means fraction) points to the often- implicit pluralist idea that each perspective taken on each case adds to a general body of knowledge. In epistemological pluralism, knowledge is thus gained in a dual process. On the one hand, one gets to ‘know more’ by examining more cases. On the other hand, one may ‘know more’ by adopting new perspectives on existing cases.
In a formulation that resonates with the view from performance auditing that we have tried to establish, Strathern notes that “if the assumption is that much of what is invisible is what is simply not yet made visible, then there will always be more to learn about the organization, further realities to uncover” (2000c, 312). The proliferation of performance audit and its ambition to delve into evermore aspects of the regularities of organizational life seem, indeed, to point in this direction.
Strathern’s central observation in the introductory quote, however, is that “a postplural world has ‘lost’ this mathematics”. The post-plural designates a world in which epistemological pluralism is fragmenting, and, in a sense, collapsing under its own weight. On the one hand, this is a consequence of the empirical observation that one will never be able to exhaust the cases that can be investigated. On the other hand, it is a consequence of the analytical realization that the proliferation of perspectives, embedded in methods, approaches and questions do not add up, because they continues to open up to an indefinite horizon of inquiry that can have no endpoint. We might say that the post-plural indicates a situation in which the suggestion that ‘the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know’ – and, indeed, cannot know – is taken to its logical end. This line of thinking provides us with some tentative signposts of where audit might be headed. The proliferation of audit loops provides us with a sense of direction.
As we have argued, auditors operate simultaneously on a terrain of control and
a terrain of learning. This duality is operationalized in an infrastructure of auditing that takes the form of a series of interactive loops, weaving in and out of organizations, through which audit knowledge is made. Here we make the further suggestion that this looping infrastructure makes the question of perspective central to this navigational feat. This is contrary to how auditors see it; for, as we have seen, a terrain of learning. This duality is operationalized in an infrastructure of auditing that takes the form of a series of interactive loops, weaving in and out of organizations, through which audit knowledge is made. Here we make the further suggestion that this looping infrastructure makes the question of perspective central to this navigational feat. This is contrary to how auditors see it; for, as we have seen,
Nevertheless, perspectives are embedded in audit processes in multiple ways. There are views (for example, from research) that lead to strategies, there are signs that lead to specification of particular audit themes and areas, and there are choices that lead to even more specific audit questions. Finally, there are concrete decisions about what will count as the relevant ‘data-sets’ of formal documentation, and about how to interpret the relation of such documents to the mass of informal, qualitative knowledge, gathered from audit visits. Additionally we have noted how the need to access ‘deeper’ and, in some ways, ‘more relevant’ knowledge about organizations has required the more or less ad hoc adoption of participatory social science methods, shorn, however, of explicit conceptual guidance. Rather than mechanically determined by procedure, auditing is thus also contingent and perspectival in multiple ways.
In particular, perspectives proliferate because the making of audit knowledge engages auditors in complex loops of interaction with those they evaluate and those who, in turn, evaluate them. One consequence of this situation is that audit organizations become subject to tensions comparable to those present in the organizations they monitor. These loops, we have suggested, are nudging auditing into a kind of Harawayian “wormhole,” from which it may emerge as a “quite other” form of knowledge-making practice.
Specifically, audit loops are indicative of a situation in which there are multiple auditing aims, which do not necessarily add up to a larger whole, and partners proliferate alongside the questions that may be asked of organizations. This is the sense in which, even as auditing may have exploded, as Power argued, it has also Specifically, audit loops are indicative of a situation in which there are multiple auditing aims, which do not necessarily add up to a larger whole, and partners proliferate alongside the questions that may be asked of organizations. This is the sense in which, even as auditing may have exploded, as Power argued, it has also
What does seem to be imploding is auditing as a cultural form of evaluation based on formal detachment and rigid procedural rule following and as an epistemology relying on “mechanical objectivity”. The ideal of detachment is imploding in a situation where audit by necessity implicate organizations and auditors
in a looping infrastructure. 13 And the ideal of mechanical objectivity is challenged in a situation where a multiplicity of perspectival choices and decisions underpin audit
knowledge; in which knowledge is constructed through relations rather than through an “objective gaze.”
Even so, formal detachment and mechanical objectivity remain central to auditors’ own conceptualization of their work and roles. Thus, an epistemology very akin to Porter’s mechanical objectivity is upheld as the official ideal, though it doesn’t characterize the practice of auditing very precisely. In this sense formal and participatory auditing processes co-exist, co-evolve, and alternate at different moments in time. We see these simultaneously complementary and frictional aspects of auditing as generated by practical efforts to contain and manage the paradoxes of postplural knowledge making in a world still assumed to be plural.