“He Hears”: An essay celebrating the 25 year anniversary of The Audit Society

Abstract

This paper is a reflection upon The Audit Society and how, 25 years after publication, it has since shaped thinking and research in audit, accounting and accountability. We first discuss the book’s impact in the context of its publication, and highlight the key messages that the book helped to impart. Second, within the broad scope of the book, we focus upon one of its central themes, ‘making things auditable’. We explore how this early idea was productive of an organizational and sociological understanding of audit and auditing practices, and the reasons why it might still be so. In suggesting this, we travel from the book’s macro-structural elaboration of the ‘audit society’ towards a micro-processual analysis of ‘auditability’. We consider in particular two recent works by Power (2015, 2021), and outline their import and future potential in connecting three central themes of audit research: the constitution of the ‘objects’ of audit, auditees’ subjectivities and ‘dispositions’, and the ‘logic’ of the audit trail and audit performativity.