Episode #3: Cris Shore
Conversations in Anthropology
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The Importance of Trust in Auditing
Auditing is a new form or a type of governmentality. It's individualizing and totalizing at the same time. The idea, this crude basic instrument of financial verification to enable us to have confidence and trust in the books has shifted from a principle of financial accountancy to a mechanism of management in organisations. You're literally replacing professional trust with monitoring scrutiny and inspection. What effect does that have? I don't know about you, but I feel... As soon as a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And so yeah, in an classic Foucauldian sense, auditors are like plague ships - they've drifted across the lake onto the night.
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