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Auditing as the poetic production of assurance
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm Business School.
Stockholm University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm Business School.
(English)Manuscript (preprint) (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Based on in-depth interviews with auditors, this paper contributes to the studies on the social constitution of auditing and the production of comfort by focusing on how auditors craft knowledge in an audit engagement. By viewing the auditor as an author, actor and audience of and in the audit engagement, we show how knowledge of an auditee’s accounting is produced through a process that involves the creation of an imaginary space for the representation of the auditee’s accounting in the audit plan; the performance of real actions that determine the existence of the audit object, its occurrence and its conformity with standards; as well as an inference into an audit opinion that is enabled by the unity of the audit’s logical sequence of actions and the emergence thereby of a clear and essential representation of the auditee’s accounting. Following Aristotle’s Poetics, we characterise this process as one of artistic imitation and the creative discovery of knowledge. Taking this view, we also revisit the audit comfort theory and propose a third way between the realist and constructivist perspectives on auditing.

Keywords [en]
Auditing, Catharsis, Comfort, Knowledge, Mimesis, Poetics
National Category
Business Administration
Research subject
Business Administration
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-203595OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-203595DiVA, id: diva2:1649859
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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Citation style
  • apa
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