Auditing, hermeneutics, and subjectivity

Abstract

I argue that our understanding of auditing as a normatively hermeneutical (interpretative) practice is deformed by the emergence of scientism and technocratic rationality in auditing, and, relatedly, that the auditor's understanding of auditing's judgmental character is displaced by the recent development of and reliance on highly structured audit methodologies. The result is that auditing no longer knows “itself” as a hermeneutical practice, with the further consequence that auditors may lose their capacity for moral and critical reasoning and hence for moral agency with respect to their actions qua auditor. For this claim I draw on Aristotelian arguments about phronesis or practical ethical reasoning about good action. The point is not that there is an earlier Golden Age of auditing to recover, but rather that the auditor's potentiality for realizing “the good” in auditing through phronesis is eroded by the technocratic deformity of practice.