The Audit Society¶
Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford University Press.
Cited by¶
6 citations across 6 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Accountability
- A physician loses their license; a lawyer is disbarred; a researcher's paper is retracted
This sourceDocuments the migration of audit practices from financial accounting into universities, hospitals, environmental regulation, and public-sector performance management.
- A physician loses their license; a lawyer is disbarred; a researcher's paper is retracted
- Checks and Balances
- Checks and balances function partly as mechanisms to address information asymmetry between principals and agents, an oversight architecture Power (1997) anatomizes in The Audit Society.
This sourceFirst systematic exploration of audit as a principle of social organization and control; demonstrates that the transparency-and-verification pattern transfers across institutional domains as a generic technology of accountability and oversight.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Power's own abstract supports audit as an oversight architecture rooted in demands for accountability and control, but it never frames this as remedying information asymmetry between principals and agents.
“This book argues that the rise of auditing has its roots in political demands for accountability and control.”
- Checks and balances function partly as mechanisms to address information asymmetry between principals and agents, an oversight architecture Power (1997) anatomizes in The Audit Society.
- External Analytic Challenge
- Arrangements that keep the vocabulary while dropping one of them are common, precisely because the surviving parts are the visible ones.
This sourceArgues verification practices routinely retain their visible form while decoupling from the activity they are supposed to check, so the surviving parts read as diligence while the corrective relation has been dropped.
- Arrangements that keep the vocabulary while dropping one of them are common, precisely because the surviving parts are the visible ones.
- Nominal vs. Actual Control
- Declared versus enacted compliance (data-protection, financial-controls, information-security documentation versus actual discipline), espoused values versus lived culture, standard of care versus routine practice in medicine, building codes versus as-constructed buildings, recipe versus as-cooked, and service-level agreement versus observed service level all carry the same two-register structure.
This sourceAnalyzes how audit and compliance regimes can certify documented procedure while diverging from operational reality — 'audit as ritual' — supporting the broad declared-versus-enacted compliance, espoused-versus-lived-culture, and standard-versus-practice cases of the two-register structure.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Power's abstract backs the declared-versus-enacted compliance case — audit demands living "uneasily with their operational capabilities" — but says nothing about the other five domain pairings.
“The author argues that the new demands and expectations of audits live uneasily with their operational capabilities.”
- Declared versus enacted compliance (data-protection, financial-controls, information-security documentation versus actual discipline), espoused values versus lived culture, standard of care versus routine practice in medicine, building codes versus as-constructed buildings, recipe versus as-cooked, and service-level agreement versus observed service level all carry the same two-register structure.
- Transparency
- Transparency generalizes to any system where stakeholders have legitimate interest in processes, decisions, or state — a generalization Power (1997) traces in his analysis of the "audit society," in which the audit ritual migrates from financial accounting into universities, hospitals, environmental regulation, and public-sector performance management as a generic technology of verification.
This sourceTraces the migration of audit practices from financial accounting into universities, hospitals, environmental regulation, and public-sector performance management; demonstrates that the structural pattern of transparency-and-verification transfers across institutional domains as a generic technology of accountability.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Power's abstract documents audit spreading from financial accounting into medical, environmental, teaching and value-for-money domains, but not a general transparency proposition.
“In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others.”
- Transparency generalizes to any system where stakeholders have legitimate interest in processes, decisions, or state — a generalization Power (1997) traces in his analysis of the "audit society," in which the audit ritual migrates from financial accounting into universities, hospitals, environmental regulation, and public-sector performance management as a generic technology of verification.
- Validation
- Regulatory & compliance: Audit validation (does the organization meet stated standards?); IT system validation in regulated environments (finance, healthcare) confirming that systems meet compliance requirements; third-party certification (ISO 9001, SOC 2) as external validation, a regime Power (1997) analyzes in his sociology of "the audit society."
This sourceTraces the migration of audit practices from financial accounting into universities, hospitals, environmental regulation, and public-sector performance management; demonstrates that the structural pattern of transparency-and-verification transfers across institutional domains as a generic technology of accountability.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Power's abstract backs the claim only at the level of a general audit/verification regime spreading across domains (including quality and technology audits); it names no certification standard and no IT-system validation regime.
“In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others.”
- Regulatory & compliance: Audit validation (does the organization meet stated standards?); IT system validation in regulated environments (finance, healthcare) confirming that systems meet compliance requirements; third-party certification (ISO 9001, SOC 2) as external validation, a regime Power (1997) analyzes in his sociology of "the audit society."
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 4 of 6 citations: 4 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296034.001.0001 ×2
- https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-audit-society-9780198289470 ×1
Registry ID ref:967615c13cdd · see in the full table