The history of technology suggests that some of our most taken for granted objects and instruments have their origins in complex social and economic transformations. From bicycles to computers, from bridges to electric light bulbs, social historians remind us that complex accounts of struggle and competition underlie official narratives of efficiency and functionality. No less is true of managerial technologies: the emergence of cost accounting from the field of engineering illustrates how technical change is often coextensive with competition in markets for expertise. In telling the social history of managerial activities which are often deemed to be self-evident, we need to work through and beyond the progressive accounts of technique which are embedded in pedagogy.
In auditing, we often learn (and teach) that, first, there were arithmetic checks and lots of transactions testing. Then, as organizations grew, auditors realized that they could rely on internal control processes, perform compliance tests and rationally reduce the work on transactions. As the audit process came to focus primarily on systems integrity, a new basis for audit was born. This gave way in turn to risk-based auditing, where auditors focus on high risk areas, gain reliance from the risk-reducing properties of control systems, and develop advanced understandings of business environments and strategies. Such a history tends to be linear, a story of learning and improvement. Often it is told in terms of how auditing might be in the light of how it has been.
Such histories merit much deeper inspection, but not so much because they are simplistic. Everyone really knows that. Rather, we need to understand how the simplicity of these accounts enables them to continue to function as a reference point in the present, as schematic narratives at the level of professional self-understandings of the history of practice and accounts of its potential. We now know that the advent of sampling in the early twentieth century was a messier and more complicated affair than this narrative suggests. We also know that the risk approach developed in the 1980s was intellectually and practically problematic, functioning in part to rationalize existing audit approaches. Indeed, studies of auditing change suggest that technical ‘progress’ has always been the product of an entanglement of economic pressures on firms, social and institutional demands to demonstrate adherence to best practice, and fashion. Yet, these critical accounts of practices do not necessarily denigrate them – they seek in the first instance to tell richer stories of the dynamics of a professional field than is usually available to practitioners themselves.
This collection of papers on the craft of auditing focuses on its very recent history and on the pressures for change which converged on the idea of business risk auditing (BRA).