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Auditors and the resilience of the neoliberal myth: The debacle of HQ Bank
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm Business School, Accounting.
(English)Manuscript (preprint) (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

While crises in the financial sphere are commonly understood as failures of auditors and signs of the collapse of the neoliberal system, recent accounting studies have shown how these crises paradoxically strengthen neoliberalism and the position of auditors in society. This paper focuses on this paradox, which in previous studies has been explained with the mythical self-reinforcement of neoliberalism through the scapegoating of auditors (and sometimes other governing actors) in moments of crisis to re-establish order and make the audit profession ‘sacred’. Mobilising the Girardian mythography of the gospels, the present paper provides an alternative account to the scapegoating explanation. The analysis of a spectacular financial debacle (HQ Bank in Sweden) reveals how support from powerful allies as well as the referral to the financial market, as a supra being that transcends (i.e. acts upon) all social actors, saved the accused auditors from being scapegoated and gave auditing the position of an indispensable mediator between the capital market and social actors. Through their mediation, auditors push social actors to act in bad faith (i.e. to lie to themselves about the futility of their agency against a capital market that ultimately decides) to allow the calculative activities to continue to make sense. Based on this study, (i) the ability of auditing to represent is viewed as being conditioned by the creation of imaginary spaces for representation, and (ii) the resilience of neoliberalism can be explained by its ability to incite individuals to act in a kind of bad faith, which paradoxically strengthens their faith in its promises about a better future. 

Keywords [en]
Auditing, Audit failures, Myth construction, [Mis-]knowledge, Méconnaissance, Neoliberalism.
National Category
Business Administration
Research subject
Business Administration
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-203589OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-203589DiVA, id: diva2:1649849
Available from: 2022-04-05 Created: 2022-04-05 Last updated: 2022-04-05
In thesis
1. Before Audit: Essays on the necessity of imagination
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Before Audit: Essays on the necessity of imagination
2022 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

The audit society idea has radically influenced our conception of auditing with its critique of the functionalist view that sees auditing as an objective verification of steady facts. The audit society thesis argues that auditing is a ‘technology of representation’ and auditors are involved in the construction of facts they are supposed to verify. In this constructivist thesis, auditing is an undefinable ‘powerful vague idea’ that takes different forms depending on contexts. The present dissertation criticises this relativisation of the concept of auditing but agrees with the audit society idea about the representational ability of auditing. Adopting mimesis as a conceptual framework and drawing on the works of Aristotle, Derrida, Girard and Dupuy, the present dissertation advances a thesis that supplements the audit society idea by arguing that before being a ‘technology of representation’, auditing or rather the auditors’ role is to generate imaginary spaces for representation. The papers that constitute the dissertation show how these imaginary spaces are generated indicatively, counterfactually and heuristically through auditors’ enactment of a mediating and supplementary role in relation to the capital market and accounting representation. In the present dissertation, auditors verify a reality that is impossible to represent in the physical space by recontextualising it to generated imaginary worlds that can take the form of (i) an ‘existential’ space that allows for the neutralisation of [the struggles of] politics, and for social actors to find meaning for their subjectivity, (ii) a space for the stabilisation of a realisable vision that links the future with its past, and (iii) a space for making the practice of certification of accounting representation possible. By highlighting the imaginary, which can be conceived as a world of possibilities that are in effect real conditions for fact construction, the present thesis makes possible a reconciliation between the opposing functionalist and constructive perspectives on auditing.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, 2022. p. 50
Keywords
Auditing, Mimesis, Possibilities, The Audit Society, Imagination, Ontology, Verification
National Category
Business Administration
Research subject
Business Administration
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:su:diva-203596 (URN)978-91-7911-848-8 (ISBN)978-91-7911-849-5 (ISBN)
Public defence
2022-05-25, Bergsmannen, Aula Magna, Frescativägen 6 and online via Zoom, public link is available at the department website, Stockholm, 14:00 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2022-05-02 Created: 2022-04-05 Last updated: 2022-04-21Bibliographically approved

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