Twenty-five years of the audit society: a personal reflection

In this chapter I revisit the motivation and core arguments in Power (1997) and focus on three specific weaknesses raised by critics: UK centrism; the tendency to ‘sample on the dependent variable’; and, despite articulating a logic of auditability, the absence of any theory of the underlying mechanism by which audit society effects persist and mutate. An answer to these criticisms and a possible research agenda has appeared over 20 years later in the form of a dynamic model of the audit trail as a formative process (Power, 2021). The chapter outlines the key elements of this model and suggests how they might inform the next generation of audit society studies focused on organisational microprocesses.