Download pdf - Fear and Risk in Audit

Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Accounting, Organizations and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/ locate /aos

Fear and risk in the audit process

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.0010361-3682/� 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 418 656 3936.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Guénin

-Paracini), [email protected] (B. Malsch), [email protected] (A.M. Paillé). 1 A film by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Henri Guénin-Paracini a,⇑, Bertrand Malsch b, Anne Marché Paillé c

a Université Laval, 2325, rue de la Terrasse, Québec, Québec G1V 0A6, Canadab Queen’s School of Business, 140, Union Street, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canadac Ghent University, Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting, H. Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

a b s t r a c t

Relying on an ethnographic study conducted in the French branch of a big audit firm andusing a psychodynamic perspective to interpret the collected data, we show that auditors’sense of comfort (Pentland, 1993) arises only at the end of the audit process, and that therest of the time, public accountants are inhabited primarily by fear. Fear plays a crucial butambivalent role in auditing. On one hand, auditors and audit firms cultivate this feelingthrough informal and formal techniques to stimulate vigilance, encourage self-surpass-ment, mitigate the anesthetizing effect of habit and maintain reputation. On the otherhand, audit teams’ members strive to alleviate their fear in order to form and convey theirconclusions with a certain degree of comfort. In the field, driven by fear, they manage tofinally become comfortable either by mobilizing their ‘practical intelligence’ (an intelli-gence of the body which helps them handle that which, in their mission, cannot beobtained through the strict execution of standardized procedures) or by adopting defensivestrategies (such as distancing themselves from work-related problems, mechanicallyapplying audit methodologies or relaxing their conception of a job well done). Fear and riskare closely related phenomena. Michael Power (2007a, p. 180) notes that ‘the significantdriver of the managerialization of risk management is an institutional fear and anxiety’.Yet the experience of fear and the role that fear plays in risk management processes is mostoften overlooked in the literature. In this respect, our study contributes to ‘emotionalize’and challenge the cognitive and technical orientation adopted by most academics and reg-ulators in their understanding of audit risks and auditors’ scepticism. We also discuss anumber of avenues for future research with a view to encouraging further examinationof the role that emotions play in the audit process.

� 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Comfort [...] is what you feel at the end of an audit,when you’re just about certain that you’ve done yourjob properly. But you spend the rest of the time feelinganxious. [...]. As an auditor, if you have even a modicum

of professional conscientiousness, you just can’t avoidcaring about your job. In some ways, that’s what we’repaid to do. Our lives aren’t at risk, that’s true, but if Imay draw on my taste in movies, I’d say auditing is tosome extent the wages of fear.1 (One senior interviewedduring the study)

As argued by Maitlis and Ozcelik (2004, p. 375), ‘wenow widely accept organizations as ‘‘emotional arenas’’(Fineman, 1993, p. 9) and acknowledge the emotionally

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.001&domain=pdf

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.001

mailto:[email protected]




http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.001

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03613682

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/aos

H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 265

saturated nature of people’s work experience (Ashforth &Humphrey, 1995)’. Barsade and Gibson (2007, p. 36) notethat ‘[i]n the last 30 years, an ‘‘affective revolution’’ hastaken place, in which academics and managers alike havebegun to appreciate how an organizational lens that inte-grates employee affect provides a perspective missing fromearlier views’.

In the field of auditing, this ‘revolution’ has yet to occur.One of the most widespread accounting stereotypes stilldepicts the auditor as an actor who is almost entirely de-void of feeling (see e.g., Beard, 1994; Bougen, 1994; Dimnik& Felton, 2006). This image is reinforced by the ‘emotionallabor’ (Hochschild, 1983) in which most auditors are askedto engage in order to project and maintain an aura of pro-fessionalism at work: ‘because accounting work is inter-personal, the adoption of an unemotional attitude isactually part of the work and of course ‘‘unemotional’’ isa misnomer for a particular emotional orientation, that ofa professional-seeming coolness consistent with technoc-racy’ (Gill, 2009, p. 34). On the evidence of professionalaudit standards, audit work only appears to involve emo-tionless methods of algorithmic reasoning (Francis,1994). And academic papers devoted to investigating theemotional dimension of public accounting remain extre-mely rare (McPhail, 2004; Nelson & Tan, 2005), with theexception of those examining the causes and/or conse-quences of auditors’ (role) stress (Smith, Derrick, & Koval,2010).

For example, in the prolific audit judgment and deci-sion-making (JDM) literature, only four studies (based onlaboratory experiments) have, to our knowledge, examinedthe impact of affective states on the formation of auditopinions. Bhattacharjee and Moreno (2002) establishedthat when provided with irrelevant, negative affectiveinformation, inexperienced public accountants tend tooverestimate the risk of inventory obsolescence, whileexperienced professionals do not. Schafer (2003) reacheda similar conclusion in respect of the fraud risk assessment.Chung, Cohen, and Monroe (2008) demonstrated that posi-tive-mood auditors have the lowest consensus and makethe least conservative judgments when required to evalu-ate inventories. Finally, Cianci and Bierstaker (2009) indi-cated that public accountants in a negative mood oftenmake poor ethical decisions.

Importantly, the above-mentioned studies are not onlyfew in number: like most of the papers that have addressedthe issue of stress in auditing, they also tend to presentaffective states as being mainly disruptive.2 The assump-tion is that feelings are the antithesis of rationality. How-ever, this assumption has been strongly challenged for atleast two decades. As shown by many researches, affectand reason – far from being antinomic – are in fact interre-lated (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Putman & Mumby, 1993).Whether we like it or not, emotions inform all our choices,actions and interactions, for better or for worse, and are

2 Admittedly, a few articles examining the outcomes of auditor stresshave underlined the positive effects that a moderate level of stress can havein auditing (see e.g., Choo, 1986; Fogarty, Singh, Rhoads, & Moore, 2000).However, the fact remains that there tends to be far more emphasis in theaudit literature on the negative consequences of stress.

themselves profoundly influenced by our working environ-ment (Domagalski, 1999; Fineman, 1996). From this per-spective, emotions need to be thought of as a vital andpermanent aspect of the workplace – an aspect that shapes,and is shaped by, organizational processes, through variousmeans requiring further examination.

In this area, audit research has made scant progress.Although the survey by Garcia and Herrbach (2010) foundthat the audit environment produces a wide range of pleas-ant and unpleasant feelings among auditors, the way inwhich these feelings mold, and are molded by, the auditprocess remains under-researched. Since Humphrey andMoizer (1990), who were the first to emphasize the impor-tance of ‘gut feel’ in auditor decision-making, only a smallnumber of studies have increased our understanding of thesubject: Pentland (1993) showed that public accountantscannot form an audit opinion without ‘getting comfortable’and that acting ritualistically enables them to reach thisaffective state; Carrington and Catasús (2007) added thatthe production of comfort in audit teams requires ‘acts ofcreativity’ to remove a sufficient ‘amount’ of discomfort;some studies have drawn on these analyses to betterunderstand the functioning of audit committees (Gendron& Bédard, 2006; Sarens, De Beelde, & Everaert, 2009; Spira,2002); but beyond this, very little research has been con-ducted to enhance our awareness of the affective dimen-sion of the audit process.

Yet comfort constitutes only a small part of the emo-tional experience of public accountants. This became par-ticularly apparent to us in the course of an ethnographicstudy conducted in the French branch of a big audit firm,aimed at better understanding the work performed byauditors in the field. We found Pentland’s (1993) papertruly stimulating and sometimes observed auditors talkingabout comfort and looking relieved, but in the audit teamswe monitored, signs of comfort nevertheless remained rel-atively rare. Instead, it was not uncommon for us to see ourinformants frowning, turning a bit pale or red, biting theirnails, shaking their legs, getting irritable, looking drawn,sweating, taking pills against stomach ache, holding theirbreath, double checking one thing or the other, and soforth. Altogether, these behaviors were in our eyes moresuggestive of concern than comfort, and our semi-struc-tured interviews confirmed this interpretation.

As stated by the senior quoted in the epigraph, in realaudit settings, comfort only arises at the very end of theaudit task. ‘The rest of the time’, auditors seek to feel com-fortable, but are generally inhabited primarily by fear. Ofcourse, fear is not experienced by them all day long andvaries in intensity from individual to individual anddepending on the circumstances. It may simply take theform of a slight disquiet or degenerate into an oppressiveanxiety. However, in general, public accountants have todeal with this emotion. The present paper aims to providea better understanding of the role of fear in audit practice,focusing specifically on the following questions: (1) Whatexactly is it that auditors worry about? (2) How do auditorsmanage fear in the field? (3) How does fear shape, and howis it shaped by, auditors’ work activity?

To interpret our empirical data and present our results,we mainly used the psychodynamics of work theory

266 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288

developed by Dejours (1993). In adopting a perspective atonce psychological and socio-constructionist, this theoryprovides an interesting insight into the interplay of fearand work activity. Drawing on field studies conducted ina range of industries, Dejours (1993) argues that ‘fear ispresent in all kinds of professional tasks, including in[. . .] office jobs’ (p. 81). He highlights the reasons whyworking generally tends to be a source of fear and indicateshow this feeling usually shapes, and is shaped by, officialwork prescriptions and unofficial techniques and pro-cesses. Based on Dejours’s rich and well-documentedreflections, the present study of fear in auditing may beseen in some sense as a psychodynamic interpretation ofaudit work. In this respect, our findings are not entirelyspecific to the audit profession. To a large extent, they re-flect what working involves in practice and resonate withthe findings of many studies of fear conducted in other sec-tors of activity.3 In a sense, this reinforces the plausibility ofour results and provides ‘a reminder that financial auditingis performed by people doing a job like any other’ (Power,1999, p. 37). To date, the role played by fear in this particular‘job’ has not, however, been studied, and our paper needstherefore to be seen as exploratory.

In the post-Enron climate and after the enactment ofthe Sarbanes–Oxley Act – which is the time and regulatorycontext of our field study – the professional risks associ-ated with auditing and the non-accounting consequencesof sensitive audit decisions have increased dramatically(Malsch & Gendron, 2013). Being attentive to news, calcu-lating, learning from experience and making decisions onthe basis of a mix of trust and distrust, the average auditorhas found himself ‘beset by risks’ (Gill, 2009, p. 82). Wouldhis firm lose the audit? Would his reputation be damaged?Would his career suffer? If one considers that fear is theemotional experience of risk, our observations suggestingthat this emotion is largely experienced by auditors inthe field should hardly come as a surprise: fear and riskare closely related phenomena (Furedi, 2007). Luptonnotes (1999, p. 17) that ‘risk has come to stand as one ofthe focal points of feelings of fear, anxiety and uncertainty’,while Power (2007a, p. 180) observes that ‘the significantdriver of the managerialization of risk management is aninstitutional fear and anxiety’. Yet, while generally associ-ated with the perception of risk, the subjective experienceof fear and the role that fear plays in risk management pro-cesses are most often overlooked in the literature. The fo-cus tends to remain on the notion of risk rather than onthe study of fear. In this respect, our analysis on the rolefear plays in the audit process aims to ‘emotionalize’ andchallenge the dominant cognitive orientation adopted byacademics and regulators in their understanding of auditrisks and auditors’ skepticism. It is designed as a responseto the many recent calls for a richer understanding of

3 The question of the dynamics of fear in the workplace has beenexamined, for example, in studies of managers (Geuser, 2006; Flam, 1993;Jackall, 1988), nurses (Menzies-Lyth, 1960), firefighters (Douesnard &Saint-Arnaud, 2011), construction workers (Dejours, 1993), fighter pilots(Dejours, 1993), funeral staff (Trompette & Caroly, 2004), lumberjacks(Schepens, 2005), prison guards (Demaegdt, 2008), workers in the petro-chemical industry, workers in the nuclear industry (Dejours, 1993),warehousemen and railroaders (Moulinié, 2004), etc.

actual audit practice, which remains poorly understood(e.g. Gendron & Spira, 2009; Hopwood, 1996; Hopwood,1998; Humphrey, 2008; O’Dwyer, 2011; Power, 2003;Skærbæk, 2009). Ultimately, it contributes to the growinginterpretive literature seeking to ‘question rationalized ac-counts of the audit judgement process, and to explore thecomplex ‘‘back stage’’ of practice in its social and organiza-tional context’ (Power, 2003, pp. 379–380).

The remainder of the article begins by providing a de-tailed outline of our research methods, before expoundingour theoretical lens in more depth. Four sections are thendevoted to presenting the results of our analysis, and theimplications of the latter are finally discussed.

Research methods

Data collection

The data reported and analyzed in this paper were col-lected as part of a grounded interpretive field study (Glaser& Strauss, 1967; Van Maanen, 1979) on the work per-formed by auditors in the course of their assignments.The broad objective of the study was to identify and betterunderstand key aspects of audit practice that official auditprescriptions do not address.

As part of this goal, we secured the consent of theFrench branch of a Big Four firm (CAB) to observe severalof its audit teams in their work. The precise number ofaudits to be observed was not determined in advance. Itwas agreed that we would examine as many audits as nec-essary to reach theoretical saturation (Glaser & Strauss,1967). Ultimately, a total of 7 audit teams, including 44auditors (9 partners, 5 managers, 11 seniors and 19 assis-tants), were monitored in real time in June and July 2002and between November 2003 and July 2004. The main cri-teria used for their selection was one of diversity (in termsof industry, firm and audit team size, geography, engage-ment type and duration).

In May 2002, as a preamble to our fieldwork, we beganby examining the various rules imposed on French auditorsby the CNCC (Compagnie nationale des commissaires auxcomptes) and the state, as well as the formal prescriptionsin force within CAB. We focused in particular on the auditmethodology, the standards of documentation, the evalua-tion criteria and the roles imposed by the Big Four on itsemployees. The following month, we were ready to beginthe monitoring process, which included participant obser-vation (Spradley, 1980), examinations of work papers,informal discussions and semi-structured interviews(Spradley, 1979).

We observed auditors at work during 50 of the 88 daysthey took to complete their tasks, yielding 455 h of obser-vation (9.1 h on average per day) and 557 pages of hand-written notes (see Table 1). As noted by Ahrens andMollona (2007, p. 312), compared to inquiries based solelyon interviews, ‘ethnographies can lay more credible claimtowards studying organisational practices’, partly becausedirect observation makes it possible to ‘study taken-for-granted aspects of [. . .] [work] on which organisationalmembers could not report, and to exploit the revealing

Table 1Observations.

Observation phases

Interima Finalb Total

OBSERVATIONSAudit observationsMandate 1 In days 4 – 4

In hours 57 – 57No of handwritten note pages 50 – 50

Mandate 2 In days – 4 4In hours – 36 36No of handwritten note pages – 45 45

Mandate 3 In days 6 8 14In hours 55 62 117No of handwritten note pages 100 67 167

Mandate 4 In days 3 – 3In hours 24 – 24No of handwritten note pages 65 – 65




Total In days 13 37 50In hours 136 319 455No of handwritten note pages 215 342 557

Additional observationsTraining courses – new managersc In days 2

In hours 15No of handwritten note pages 40

Technical information meetingd In days 0.25In hours 2No of handwritten note pages 5

Grand total In days 52.25In hours 472No of handwritten note pages 602

a The interim audit phase is prior to the year-end of the audited financial statements and is used for planning purposes as well as an initial evaluation ofinternal controls.

b The final audit phase occurs after the year-end of the audited financial statements and consists of various procedures performed by auditors tocorroborate their final written report.

c All new CAB managers had to undergo a two day training course in order to develop the skills required by their higher functions.d Technical information meeting are internally developed by CAB in order to remind or update auditors on audit norms and procedures.


tensions between what organisational members say anddo’ (p. 310).

To ensure that we did not miss any significant events inthe course of the monitoring process, we were alwayspresent at the beginning and end of each audit examinedand only chose not to come at other times during theaudits when we thought that nothing new would occurin our absence.

The days we spent with the informants were very in-tense. We remained with the participants when they wereall in their client’s boardroom, accompanied those whowent to see an auditee or to have a coffee, and lunchedwhere and when the teams chose to lunch. Whenever anaudit was performed in a provincial location, we madethe trip with the auditors involved, stayed with themthroughout the duration of their assignment, shared theirinformal social activities, and slept in the same hotel. Inthe field, we were often prompted to ask our informantsfor clarifications, ‘in the heat of the action’, about their

specific goals, the techniques they used, the feelings theyexperienced, etc.

Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with31 auditors from the audit firm (4 partners, 3 managers,8 seniors and 16 assistants). Apart from 2 seniors and 3partners, all these auditors worked for the teams moni-tored during the study. Overall, the total duration of theinterviews amounted to 38 h, summarized in Table 2.Interviews were always conducted outside the auditedcompanies at the end of audit tasks and lasted approxi-mately 1 h. In the course of the interviews, the auditorswere invited to assess the validity of our observationsand to highlight important features of the audit that wehad failed to notice. They were encouraged to elaborateon key aspects of their job and to provide us with informa-tion that would have been impossible to collect throughvisual inspection (concerning, for example, what theyhad thought or felt at critical moments). We did not hesi-tate to question what they were telling us and strongly

Table 2Interviews.

Partners Managers Seniors Assistants Total

INTERVIEWSAudit – interviewsMandate 1 Position 1 1 2 4

Interviewees 1 2 3Time in hours 1 2 3

Mandate 2 Position 1 1 1 2 5Interviewees 1 1 2Time in hours 1 1 2

Mandate 3 Position 2 1 1 2 6Interviewees 1 1 2 4Time in hours 1 1 2.5 4.5

Mandate 4 Position 2 1 2 1 6Interviewees 0Time in hours 0

Mandate 5 Position 1 1 1 3 6Interviewees 1 1 3 5Time in hours 1 1.5 3 5.5

Mandate 6 Position 1 1 3 8 13Interviewees 1 1 7 9Time in hours 1 1.5 7 9.5

Mandate 7 Position 1 2 1 4Interviewees 2 1 3Time in hours 2.5 1 3.5

Total Position 9 5 11 19 44Interviewees 1 3 6 16 26Time in hours 1 3.5 7 16.5 28

Additional – interviews (in hours)Interviews with seniors not within audits 18/07/2002: Senior A 1.5 1.5

19/07/2002: Senior B 1.5 1.5Executive meetingsa 23/09/2003: DHRb 1 1

16/10/2003: DHR&DATc 1 120/02/2004 : DAQRMd 1 1

Debriefing committee meetingse 02/02/2004: DHR&DAT 1.5 1.503/02/2005: DHR&DAT 1.5 1.519/05/2010: DRH 1 1

Grand total (in hours) 8 3.5 10 16.5 38

a Executive meetings were used to plan the research project.b Director of human resources.c Director of audit training.d Director of audit quality and risk management.e Debriefing committee meetings were used to discuss and validate the results of the research project.


encouraged them to challenge our own analyses. In otherwords, each interview was an opportunity to collect sup-plementary data, to highlight the themes that actors con-sidered more or less significant, and to correct and enrichour interpretation of our field notes.

Throughout the research process, various precautionswere taken to ensure that the collected data were reliableand valid. To gain the trust of our informants, we took careto clarify the objectives of the study. We insisted that wewere researchers and not ‘auditors of auditors’ in the payof the Big Four; that our goal was to better understandaudit work as performed in the field with a view to produc-ing several research papers; that complete confidentialityand anonymity were guaranteed4; that our study wouldbe an opportunity for them to reflect on their work habits;and that they would hopefully gain a new perspective on

4 To fulfil this promise, we will use the broad categories ‘assistant’,‘senior auditor’, ‘manager’ and ‘partner’ to refer to the source of our quotesand will not link these quotes to any of the audit assignments listed inTables 1 and 2.

their practices. Ultimately, the significant amount of timewe spent living with auditors enabled us to develop genuinerelationships with them (Patton, 2002). Apart from 3 indi-viduals who remained somewhat on the defensive, all theparticipants gladly cooperated in the study.

In addition, the use of multiple methods of data collec-tion, the diversity of the audits examined and the vast ar-ray of auditors observed and interviewed enabled us tocheck our data through triangulation (Eisenhardt, 1989;Lincoln & Guba, 1985). For example, participant observa-tion was used as a means of questioning and contextual-izing the comments of interviewees, while interviewsserved to supplement, confirm or refute our observations(member checking; Werner & Schoepfle, 1987). Overall,these precautions enabled us to collect evidence deemedcredible enough to be considered for theorizing.

Data analysis

The collected material was analyzed using qualitativeprocedures (Eisenhardt, 1989; Miles & Huberman, 1994).


Following the suggestions of many researchers (Hammers-ley & Atkinson, 1983; Oswald, Schoepfle, & Ahern, 1987;Spradley, 1979), we prepared analytical notes on a veryregular basis – i.e. at the end of each day of observation,interview, and audit. This enabled us to ‘gradually [. . .] de-velop an empathy with the data’ (Dent, 1991, p. 711) andto continuously revise our understanding of them.

Our attention was quickly drawn to a number of unoffi-cial features of audit work, including the role of fear inaudit practice. While our reading of Pentland (1993)’s workhad left us with the impression that comfort was the mainemotion experienced and transmitted within audit teams,our first observations and interviews highlighted the prev-alence of anxiety among auditors. As soon as we came tothis conclusion, themes related to fear such as ‘signs offear’, ‘sources of fear’, ‘effects of fear’ and ‘fear manage-ment’ were incorporated into the coding scheme. In thefield, we became particularly attentive to these issuesand began to discuss them during interviews.

When trying to make sense of our data, we were awarethat the field study was conducted in the aftermath of theEnron’s scandal, the fall of Arthur Andersen, the SarbanesOxley Act vote and the creation of regulatory agenciesindependent from the profession to oversee public com-pany audits. We reasonably assumed that such a modifica-tion of the regulatory environment, by pointing outauditors’ failures and putting pressure on audit firms’internal controls (Malsch & Gendron, 2011), had increasedauditors’ level of professional anxiety. However, we werealso puzzled by the fact that our observations of publicaccountants as fearful professionals contrasted greatlywith official accounts suggesting auditors’ negligence andlack of skepticism.5

This prompted us to explore the literature on emotionsat work in search of a model that might enlighten us (e.g.Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995; Barsade & Gibson, 2007;Domagalski, 1999; Fineman, 1993; Hochschild, 1983;Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004). Along the way, we looked athow risk theorists (e.g. Bauman, 1991; Beck, 1992; Doug-las, 1992) had integrated the treatment of fear, the ‘emo-tion of risk’, in their analysis. Ultimately, we concludedthat the psychodynamic approach – elaborating on howour ‘personal anxieties, fears and yearnings can be seento underpin some of the routines and rituals of work orga-nizations’ or to put it another way, how ‘our deepest exis-tential fears are camouflaged by the very act of workingand organizing’ (Fineman, 1993, p. 2) – was well-suitedto help us better understand the role of fear in the auditprocess. We explored and ‘tried’ various psychodynamicperspectives (e.g. Dejours, 1993; Klein, 1981; Menzies-Lyth, 1960; Stevens, 1990; Wollheim, 1971). Moving backand forth between the latter and the data, we opted forthe ‘psychodynamics of work’ theory developed by Dejours

5 A 2010 discussion paper of the Financial Reporting Council - entitledauditor skepticism: raising the bar - stated for instance: ‘[The issue ofskepticism] is particularly timely as, in the wake of the banking crisis,regulators have challenged audit firms on whether sufficient skepticismswas demonstrated and the need for audit firms to exercise greaterprofessional skepticism was a key message in the Audit Inspection Unit’(p. 3).

(1993) as a means of interpreting our first-order findings(Van Maanen, 1979). In the end, the interpretations wemade on this basis were validated through member check-ing in the course of many interviews. In saying this, we donot contend that Dejours’ (1993) model was the only valu-able framework for interpreting the collected material.Other theoretical perspectives would have brought to lightother facets of the fear-risk relationship in auditing. In thissense, there is absolutely no claim of interpretive closurehere, but only an invitation to further the discussion thatthis paper aims to initiate.

To conclude this section, it is worth noting that analyz-ing emotions presents significant epistemological difficul-ties. The first involves conceptualizing emotions in waysthat can guide empirical research. ‘What is an emotion?’rarely generates the same answer from different individu-als, academics or laymen. In this paper, we use the termemotion in the standard definition of a conscious mentalreaction subjectively experienced as feeling and accompa-nied by physiological and behavioral manifestations(Scherer, 2005). Accordingly, we do not think of emotionsand cognition as two independent dimensions of humanactivity: in our view, actors are not held captive by theiremotive reactions and can mobilize their reflexivity tomanage and act on them. The second epistemological chal-lenge arises from the conceptual proximity and overlapthat can exist between different affective states (Goodwin,Jasper, & Polletta, 2001). Concepts like fear, vigilance, con-fidence, trust and skepticism can be given operationalmeanings in empirical psychology, but they are inherently‘slippery’, not least because there is some ambiguity bothas to whether they are individualistic or collective in nat-ure and as to whether they are attributed by the authorsas external observers or self-reported by auditors as somekind of inner experience (in which case self-deception ispossible).

The only way out of these difficulties is, as far as possi-ble, clarity. In this respect, when we started incorporatingthemes related to fear in our coding scheme, we sought toadopt a definition of fear that would be broad enough tocapture fear through different variations of intensity andduration, but also constraining enough to prevent us fromseeing fear everywhere and confuse it with other familiesof emotions. We were particularly attentive to distinguish-ing, from the beginning, between fear and anguish, whichare commonly confused by individuals experiencing them(see below). By triangulating our data, we ‘‘confirmed’’ ourobservations with interviews and ‘‘controlled’’, to a certainextent, self-deception. Admittedly, we cannot be sure thatour informants correctly labeled their feelings. The rela-tively undefined character of affects constitutes an inher-ent limitation to the study of emotions, but only moreresearch (and certainly not less) will help build a crediblebody of knowledge that will bring forward the ‘affectiverevolution’ in the auditing space.

Fear: the emotion of risk

Fear is often treated as an ‘‘afterthought’’ in today’saudit risks literature; the focus tends to remain on the


cognitive and technical dimensions of risk managementprocesses rather than on the role that fear may play inthe latter. ‘Indeed, [even] in sociological debates, fearseems to have become the invisible companion to debatesabout risk’ (Furedi, 2007, p. 1). And yet it is widelyacknowledged by risk theorists that fear and risk are clo-sely related phenomena (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997).

In his most famous book, Beck (1992) argues that mod-ern society has become a ‘risk society’, in the sense that itis increasingly occupied with debating and managing risksthat it has itself produced. Risk society is faced in particularwith the ‘awkward problem’ of having to make risk man-agement decisions ‘on the basis of more or less unadmittednot-knowing’ (Beck, 2006, p. 335). All possible scenarios,more or less improbable, have to be taken into consider-ation. ‘[T]o knowledge, therefore, drawn from experienceand science, there now also has to be added imagination,suspicion, fiction, [and] fear’ (p. 497). In other words, be-cause we have no means of knowing for sure where riskand safety lie, nothing can be trusted and fear thus poten-tially finds a location in any area of daily life.

For Mary Douglas (1992, p. 10), although ‘anger, hopeand fear are part of most risky situations’, contemporarysocieties, by ‘trying to turn uncertainties into probabilities’,attempt to make risk management accessible to imper-sonal and emotionless administrative regulation, basedon scientific and neutral principles. Blaming, which at allplaces and all times has been a key component of risk man-agement systems, is not banished by the modern dis-course. Rather, it now tends to be expressed in the claimthat ‘real blaming’ is possible – a claim rooted in the polit-ical and moral realm of modernity’s search for order andcertainty. In this sense, ‘real blaming’, that Douglas seesas a fantasy, ‘can be seen as a defence against uncertaintyproduced and reproduced at the cultural level’ (Hollway &Jefferson, 1997, p. 261).

The desire to eliminate uncertainty is also at the heartof Zygmunt Bauman’s conceptualization of modernity(1991). Modernity’s task of tasks, maintains Bauman, isto produce order. According to him, this struggle, alwaysdoomed to be lost, is essentially a flight from the ambiva-lence at the heart of order’s opposite, namely, chaos. Wehave to get used to the idea of ‘living without foundations’(Bauman, 1991, p. 16). However, obsessed with self-scru-tiny, man does not admit contingency and ‘ambivalenceis transformed into the nagging fear of own inadequacy’.Like ‘real blaming’, denying ambivalence functions as a de-fense against the anxiety that may result from uncertainty.

In all three of these major risk theorists’ accounts, asubject is inferred who apprehends and makes sense ofrisks characterizing our society through the experience offear. However, although recognized, this emotional experi-ence is not placed at the heart of the analysis. In particular,its effects on risk perception and risk managementprocesses are not seriously examined. In each case, theconcepts that are brought into play (projection of fear, de-fense against uncertainty and denial of ambivalence),cohering around feelings of fear, would benefit from apsychodynamic perspective for their operational andempirical development (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997). In thispaper, we use the psychodynamics of work theory

elaborated by Dejours as an interpretive tool to betterunderstand and account for how auditors experience andmanage fear when confronted with risks in their work envi-ronment, and how, in return, they experience and managerisks under the influence of this emotion. Dejours’ psychody-namic framework shares many common points with otherpsychodynamic models, focusing in particular on the‘defensive strategies’ which actors may adopt to alleviatetheir anxiety. It nevertheless distinguishes itself in that itrelies not only on an explicit theorization of the subject,but also on an explicit theorization of work and risks atwork, which is very helpful for better understanding theinterplay of fear and risk in the audit process.

Fear and risk at work: Dejours’ psychodynamicperspective

Like most psychologists (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997) andmany sociologists (Furedi, 2007), Dejours (1993) arguesthat fear is an emotion caused by the realization of a risk,whether real or imagined. Accordingly, he uses the word‘fear’ as an umbrella term encompassing a broad range ofaffective states of varying intensity and duration, includingdisquiet, concern, worry, apprehension, anxiety, dread, ter-ror, fright and panic, which are all different types of fear.

However, Dejours (1980) insists that fear should not beconfused with anguish. While both of these feelings implya painful state of suspense, they differ significantly. An-guish emerges from an intrapsychic conflict, i.e. from aconflict between two drives, two desires, two psychoana-lytic structures (such as the id and the super-ego) or twosystems (for example, the conscious and the unconscious).It relates to the personality of the subject, has no prede-fined object (i.e. it may attach itself to absolutely any-thing), and tends to give rise to pathological behaviors.By contrast, fear is caused by a risk regarded as plausibleand whose materialization might impair the actor’s physi-cal or mental integrity. It responds in a somewhat ‘rational’and ‘understandable’ way to a threat largely independentof the person, and may stimulate adaptive and ‘relevant’behaviors.

Fear at work: main object and sources

What first emerges from studies on the psychodynam-ics of work is ‘the existence of fear in the activity of mostworkers’ (Dejours, 1980, p. 30). As noted by Dejours(1980, 1993, 2005), work situations tend to generate fear,which, beyond its various manifestations, often amountsto a fear of failure.

To better understand the prevalence of this type of fearin the workplace, Dejours (1993) draws on two theories: atheory of work derived from the findings of French ergon-omists (e.g. Wisner, 1995) and a theory of the subject in-spired from Freud (1920). According to the first theory,official prescriptions are rarely sufficient to perform a tasksuccessfully. Working fundamentally implies coping withunforeseen events and conflicting requirements and there-fore inventing compromises whose relevance is not guaran-teed in advance. Here lies, argues Dejours (1993, 2005), the


first reason why individuals at work are often afraid to fail:they know that their effectiveness is doomed to be uncer-tain, or, to put it another way, that failure is alwayspossible.

Yet the uncertainty and the risks surrounding their effi-cacy would not be a concern for workers if they were com-pletely indifferent to success. However, people tend toattach great importance to achieving their goals. Most ac-tors leave childhood with an unfinished identity, are inquest of self-accomplishment, and can blossom in two dif-ferent ways: either by succeeding in their erotic life and/orby doing well in a job that makes sense in their biography.In both cases, their self-image depends on the judgmentthat they pass and that is passed on their performances(see also Roberts, 2009). In the workplace, actors strive toattain their objectives when they recognize themselves inwhat they do and, in any case, to benefit from the recogni-tion of their work by others (peers, superiors, clients, etc.).If they succeed and are praised for their achievements,their self-esteem tends to increase; if they fail or areblamed for not being good enough, their self-esteem tendsto decline. In other words, avoiding failure is usually, intheir eyes, a matter of identity. This is the second reasonwhy they often are afraid of failure.

Fear at work: a cultivated resource

Now, the fear of failure inhabiting workers does notonly impact their inner life experience. It also influencestheir choices, behaviors and attitudes, thereby interactingwith organizational processes in many ways.

The fear of failing, argues Dejours (1993) is often a req-uisite for a job well done: when they are unafraid and over-confident, people tend to act negligently, thus increasingthe likelihood of making serious mistakes. In this sense,as maintained by Hood (2011, p. 184), ‘blame and the fearof blame are not all bad, if we are led to think twice aboutbending or disobeying important rules’. A work environ-ment without professional blame would be one in whichthe only pressure to stay on the right track would haveto come from individual’s own self-image and moral com-pass – ‘notoriously cranky instruments’.

Consequently, a range of methods are used in the work-place to cultivate anxiety, which might otherwise declineover time from the anesthetizing effect of habit (Dejours,1993). Some formal management techniques are designedto achieve this objective, and in the field, workers them-selves sometimes use informal strategies to remain suffi-ciently worried or anxious. For example, in some high-risk jobs, they gladly tell each other stories of frighteningaccidents in order not to forget the risks they face and toremember that official safety measures never provide per-fect protection.

From fear to comfort through practical intelligence

The fear of failure, insists Dejours (2005), is one of themain sources of intelligence at work. Ideally, the positivedynamics triggered by fear is a dynamics of ‘body-propria-tion’ (Henry, 1987). By preparing workers for risks, fearheightens their motor tension and sensory attention. It

drives them to go into a kind of ‘body-to-body’ with themain elements of their working situation and to appropri-ate them in a very personal way. The greater the ‘symbio-sis’ with these elements, the more able people are to ‘feel’them as part of their own body, and thus to perceive thesmallest cues that might indicate risks. As soon as one ofthese cues is noticed (an abnormal sound, smell, visual sig-nal or whatever), individuals react. Since they are at onewith their environment, they are quickly able to outline adiagnosis or to identify a corrective measure. Throughoutthe process, because they are afraid of making a mistake,they regularly return to what they have done in order toverify that nothing has been forgotten and that everythingis as it should be. At this stage, they often use official guid-ance to confirm, revise and legitimize their intuition. Whenthey eventually start to feel reassured, they are able to con-template the fruits of their work, from which they may de-rive different kinds of pleasure.

However, they cannot be certain that they have handledthe situation in a fully efficient and acceptable way. At thispoint, their pleasure thus remains incomplete and theirfear of failure is not entirely relieved. As a result, drivenagain by anxiety, they usually seek to discuss their prac-tices with their colleagues, superiors and/or clients.According to Dejours (1993), discussion is the most crucialpart of the whole process. When the debate is constructive,actors see their work recognized and thus strengthen theiridentity; they may learn from others about how to do bet-ter; the community of practice grows; the unwritten ‘rulesof the job’ are enriched; and with sufficiently flexible man-agement, official directives improve through experiencefeedback.

From fear to comfort through defensive strategies

That said, the outcome may not always be so positive.Although fear plays a central role in the development ofintelligence at work, a specific condition must be met in or-der for fear to produce this positive effect: confidence. Anactor who is afraid of failing would be reluctant to confrontdifficult situations if she had no confidence in her ownability to succeed, the instruments put at her disposal,and the willingness of her colleagues to help her in caseof necessity. She would hardly dare discuss her work withher peers, superiors and clients if she felt completely inse-cure about their willingness to judge her work fairly. Ifthey are overconfident and unworried, workers tend, asnoted above, to act imprudently. However, without anyconfidence in themselves, in others and in their workingtools, they will have a pathogenic fear of failure.

When this occurs, argues Dejours (1993), preventingand managing risks that may harm production is no longera priority: the enemy that people strive to dominate be-comes fear itself, and various ‘defensive strategies’ are thendeveloped in order to suppress this feeling. Operating onthe principle of the ostrich policy, these strategies enableworkers not to think about what worries them. To avoidfacing the risks of the field, an actor may, for example, holeup in her office or not delve deeper in her analyses. How-ever, in order to achieve their full effectiveness, defensivestrategies need to be implemented collectively (Dejours,


1993). Not thinking about obvious risks is difficult and re-quires the complicity of each actor. As a result, the groupusually tends to exert a strong discipline on its membersand to exclude anyone who fails to comply with the socialdefenses in force. When the latter prevail, the organizationexperiences a form of ‘cultural alienation’ (Douglas, 1992):it sinks into a kind of ‘foolishness’ which protects organiza-tional members from the fear that something could gowrong, while also increasing that very probability.

In the remainder of the paper, we mobilize this psycho-dynamic perspective on work to organize and present ourinterpretations of the interplay of fear and risk in the auditprocess.6 First, we specify the main object and sources ofauditors’ fear. We then show that fear tends to be viewedby auditors as a requisite for a job well done (a kind of ‘episte-mic resource’) and that such a view is at the root of many for-mal and informal audit techniques designed to cultivate thisemotion. Finally, the paper provides a detailed examinationof the process through which fear shapes public accountants’practices that in turn alleviate and transform it into comfort.

Auditors’ fear: main object and sources

What is it exactly that auditors worry about? What isthe main object of their fear? Since fear is the emotion ofrisk, which risk makes them feel afraid? To clarify this is-sue, let us return to the conceptual framework on whichprofessional audit standards draw. At the heart of thisframework lies the concept of ‘audit risk’, defined in ISA200 (International Standards on Auditing) as the risk ofinappropriately certifying financial statements with signif-icant anomalies. On the basis of our analyses, this defini-tion, couched in institutional language, provides anaccurate representation of the fear experienced by publicaccountants, i.e. the fear of overlooking a material mis-statement (a fear of failing or of being mistaken).

Doing your job properly means finding a mistake ifthere’s a mistake to be found. Because at the end ofthe process, if you tell people: ‘you can trust thesefinancial statements’ and you’re actually wrong, theconsequences can be truly disastrous. [. . .] We all havea huge responsibility in the matter, from the traineeright up to the partner, who even risks going to prison.So that’s what scares us: getting it wrong. (One senior)

When you control a given section for the first time andit’s a bit complicated, you do your best, but you still have adoubt. You ask yourself: am I missing something reallyimportant here? It’s worrying. (One assistant)

In the rest of this section, we argue that auditors’ fear of‘getting it wrong’ – subjective corollary of the ‘audit risk’ –is the product of two factors, both underlined by the

6 As noted by Radcliffe (1999, p. 345): ‘The writing of ethnography isalways a delicate process, if not a struggle’. There are several possible‘tactics’. For instance, some authors successively present their first- andsecond-order findings in accordance with Van Maanen’s (1979) suggestion(e.g. Fischer, 1996; Dirsmith, Heian, & Covalevski, 1997), while othersprefer a thematic exposition of their results structured according to theiranalytical framework (e.g. Barrett, Cooper, & Jamal, 2005; Pentland, 1993;Radcliffe, 1999). The second of these options was chosen here.

psychodynamics of work: the ‘impossible’ nature of theaudit mission, and auditors’ desire to do a good job.

The audit mission: impossible

The fear of failing to detect significant anomalies resultsfirst from the ‘impossible’ nature of the mission assigned toauditors, and more precisely from auditors’ awareness ofhaving to perform an ‘impossible’ task: although audit pro-fessionals can never be entirely sure that they have notmissed a material misstatement, they are required to ex-press relatively categorical conclusions (Gill, 2009).

In the field, public accountants are confronted with ahigh degree of uncertainty. To begin with, as noted by a se-nior comparing his occupation to the job of a police officer:

We [auditors] are in a more uncomfortable positionthan a policeman investigating a case because thepoliceman knows for a fact that a crime has been com-mitted [...]. In auditing, we’re also required to carry outan investigation, but we don’t actually know if therewas a crime in the first place. So unlike a police detec-tive, we don’t set out with any definite certainties.

Thus, the first uncertainty faced by public accountantsis this: do the audited accounts contain significant anoma-lies? When they begin a job, auditors cannot possibly knowthe answer to this question. But that is not all. One assis-tant observed:

In the accounts of a large company, there are hundredsof thousands of recorded operations. [. . .] When youthink about it [. . .], it makes you feel all dizzy! Becausewhat you’re being asked to do is to put your finger on amistake deemed to be significant in what is essentially agigantic hotchpotch. [. . .] It’s a bit like looking for a nee-dle in a haystack. Where’s the mistake? That is thequestion! It could be anywhere. . . everywhere andnowhere.

In other words, even assuming that an account actuallycontains a misstatement, auditors cannot possibly knowwhere to look for it. In referring to Shakespeare’s Hamlet(‘That is the question!’) and a feeling of dizziness, the assis-tant suggests the extent to which the question ‘Where’sthe mistake?’ may be anxiogenic for her.

In practice, the anxiety induced by this question is madeworse by the fact that auditors do not operate ‘at home’, i.e.within the confines of their audit firm. The financial state-ments that have to be certified, the records that these state-ments synthesize, the various aspects of the ‘reality’ thataccounts are designed to translate and the processes bymeans of which this translation is carried out are all locatedin the audited company. In the latter, where are the ele-ments that may suggest the presence of accountancy er-rors? In order to find them, which factories, warehousesand offices need to be visited? Which pieces of furnitureneed to be searched? Which files and folders need to beexamined? Which documents need to be scrutinized? Inthese documents, which cues need to be extracted? At thestart of a new assignment, auditors do not have the answersto these questions. They have no ‘map’ for finding their wayaround the audited organization, and it is sometimes


possible to see in their eyes, and in their hesitant move-ments, their fear of failing to find the way to the relevantdata.

Yet the questions ‘Where’s the mistake?’ and ‘Whereare the elements necessary to find it?’ would not be partic-ularly distressing if public accountants could peruse theentirety of the ‘mass of accounts’ under investigationunhurriedly and methodically. This is not, however, thecase. Since the means at their disposal are fatally limited,particularly in terms of time and numbers, auditors knowin advance that their research will not be exhaustive. Asone senior remarked, a complete audit would constitutean economic aberration:

You see, in this company, [. . .] if you wanted to checkevery accounting operation based on actual audit evidence,you’d need roughly ten people and you’d have to work foran entire year. [. . .] In purely economic terms it justwouldn’t work out. [. . .] As a result, there aren’t ten of usbut more like three or four, and we don’t have a whole yearto do the job [. . .] but more like two weeks. So we can’t golooking everywhere.

Finally and importantly, contrary to what one mightthink, the extensive body of audit guidance does little toreduce the uncertainties and risks faced by auditors inthe field. As emphasized by many of our informants,blindly relying on official audit technologies would evenactually be the surest way to failure (a source of risk!).Two reasons were given to account for this. First, whilebusiness risk methodologies aim at least partly to reducethe time required to perform an audit task (Knechel,2007), their highly structured elaboration does not appearto be conducive to such a result. The audit team memberswe monitored all agreed on one point, namely that the pre-scribed tools were too ‘unwieldy’ to be applied as such. Forexample, one senior, commenting on the predefined riskassessment matrices, noted: ‘Filling in these templates en-tirely? My god, it would be a never-ending job! [. . .] Youcould easily spend two weeks formalizing them. In thiscase, we only had four days, so you see’. Second, as put for-ward by a number of interviewees, mechanically resortingto formal audit tools would prevent auditors to correctlyfeel the field and would thus be counterproductive. One se-nior noted:

The time you spend filling in a questionnaire is time youdon’t spend in the factory. And if you go all the same,your eyes are riveted on the form, and you may then failto see that right behind it there are machines on theirlast legs. So you miss everything!

This comment provides a good illustration of the riskassociated with technical mediation highlighted by ergon-omists: when standard technologies come between anindividual and her environment, the former may becomeunable to perceive the latter correctly, and if her task in-volves identifying and managing risks, this can be prettyproblematic. In a similar vein, most of our informantssaw the use of statistical tables as not reassuring. One se-nior said: ‘It’s not because a stats chart tells me to examineten amounts that I’ll feel comfortable with it. Perhaps I’llneed more, perhaps I’ll need less. I can’t possibly know thatin advance. What’s important is to feel when you can stop’.

Ultimately, auditing is always a matter of judgment, ofwhich ‘no amount of rationalistic analysis will ever pro-duce a sufficient explanation’ (Pentland, 1993, p. 619). Asnoted by one partner in referring to the obligation forFrench ‘commissaires aux comptes’ to justify their auditopinions:

Managing to feel sufficiently at ease to express an opin-ion is often in itself to attempt the impossible. But pro-ducing a written demonstration of the validity of thisopinion... In my view, it’s a bit like trying to squarethe circle. Isn’t a judgment precisely something that justcan’t be explained? [. . .] [People] assume that auditingsimply involves applying procedures, but that’s animpoverished bureaucratic vision of auditing.

For all the reasons stated above, a statutory audit is atask ridden with uncertainties and risks involving anxio-genic effects. A parallel might be drawn with the situationsfaced by workers in high-risk industries. On this subject,Dejours writes (1993, p. 147, note no. 2): ‘What generatesfear is the perception of a gap between the awareness of arisk and the lack of knowledge about the precise nature ofthe risk. This gap is often the cause of a fear of not beingup to the challenge of the task, either technically or psycho-logically’. Similarly, auditors experience fear in part be-cause their job involves detecting misstatements inaccounts that may or may not exist, without any knowledgeof where such misstatements might be located, without themeans of verifying the entire range of the accounts underinvestigation, and without the possibility of blindly relyingon prescribed audit tools. One manager commented:

We could miss a mistake without even realizing it. I’mafraid that’s the risk of the job. Just because we haven’tfound anything doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’tanything there to find in the first place. Likewise, justbecause we found a serious mistake doesn’t mean therewasn’t another, bigger mistake to find. Has anythingescaped our notice? Fundamentally, there’s no objectivecriterion that means we can be 100% certain.

This comment contains some of the key ideas developedby a number of researchers in the field. For example,Fischer (1996, p. 224) argues that ‘truly objective measuresof audit quality do not exist’, while Power (1999, p. 28) re-marks that ‘[there is a] deep epistemological obscurity ofauditing [. . .], [i.e.] no way of specifying the assurance pro-duction function independently of a practitioner’s ownqualitative opinion process’. Finally, as noted by Pentland(2000, p. 311): ‘No wonder that audits are epistemologi-cally obscure – auditors have adopted the rhetoric of scien-tific methodology without really being able to adopt muchof the substance’. In short, the opinions expressed by pub-lic accountants cannot possibly constitute mathematicalcertainties. Faced with uncertainties and risks, publicaccountants may at best experience a sense of comfort,the central focus of Pentland’s (1993) analysis. However,based on our observations, their work is primarily a causeof fear, particularly since they are required to express rel-atively categorical conclusions.

The audit mission is a mission of certification. The wordis strong: to certify means ‘to guarantee as certain’ (Oxford


English Dictionary); it suggests certainty more than skepti-cism. Admittedly, ISA 200 insists that the assurance to beprovided by an audit is not absolute but reasonable. How-ever, notwithstanding this qualification, a reasonableassurance is still an assurance, i.e. ‘a promise or engage-ment making a thing certain’ (Oxford English Dictionary).In practical terms, auditors, whatever their level of experi-ence, do not have the luxury of displaying indecision. Onesenior remarked: ‘It’s never a good thing to remain at thelevel of uncertainties. [. . .] You can’t submit a summary re-port and say: there are areas of uncertainty’. During one ofthe tasks observed in the course of this study, the managersuddenly exclaimed, turning towards an assistant and atrainee:

This won’t do! You haven’t concluded your report! Thisis unacceptable! Our business is all about certification.[. . .] What you’re asked to do is to adopt a position, tomake a decision and to commit to it. Your job is to writein black and white: ‘there is not a single significant mis-take in the such and such account’ or ‘this is the mistakeand it amounts to such and such’.

In brief, to quote Pentland’s elegant formula (1993, p.611), it behooves the auditor to produce a ‘certification ofthe unknowable’. It is in this sense that we portray auditingas ‘an impossible mission’, typical of the desire of certaintycharacterizing the risk society, despite more or less ‘unad-mitted not knowing’ (Beck, 2006). The phrase ‘impossiblemission’ is borrowed from Freud (1961), who describedas ‘impossible’ the professions ‘in which one can be surebeforehand of achieving unsatisfying results’ (p. 248).

Lastly, an audit mission is not merely ‘‘impossible’’, butis also generally considered essential. As noted by the se-nior quoted at the beginning of this section, ‘the conse-quences [of an audit failure] can be truly disastrous’. Onepartner observed: ‘For the few amnesiacs out there, the re-cent scandals will have refreshed their memories’. So let usimagine for one moment being in an auditor’s position: thetask with which she is entrusted seems logically unachiev-able, yet she knows that she cannot allow herself to failsince her failure could have disastrous repercussions. Un-der such conditions, who would not be afraid of failing?Perhaps somebody who remains unconcerned by suchmatters and cares very little about detecting mistakes inan account. However, this does not appear to be the casefor auditors, whose fear of failure is also the result of theirdesire to achieve a high standard in their work.

Auditors’ desire to do a good job

As argued by Dejours (1993, p. 225), ‘most healthy sub-jects’ want to provide a high-quality service at work. Underthis angle, the majority of public accountants can be said tobe ‘healthy’. Based on our analyses, some of them attachgreat importance to being good at what they do, partly be-cause the audit mission resonates with their own biogra-phy. When asked about the roots of her professionaldedication, one assistant gave the following answer:

What drives me is telling myself that I work in the ser-vice of truth. I’m totally committed to the idea of truth.

That’s probably because of my education. [. . .] Checkingthat accounts are telling the truth is really important tome [. . .]. It’s in tune with my principles. [...] I think welive in a society that’s dying from a lack of ethics, andI tell myself that in some way I have a role to play in try-ing to improve the situation.

One striking feature of this account is how the subjectappropriates the quest for truth assigned to statutory audi-tors; how she conceives this quest as a reflection of hereducation, principles, beliefs, and so on, and how she iden-tifies with this mission. When she is engaged in an audittask, she feels that she is ‘in tune’ with herself. In the samevein, one manager observed:

Shareholders, suppliers, customers, banks, anyone whoreads accounts: they’re our clients. [. . .] I tell myselfthat [. . .] we all know them [...]. For example, [. . .] I’vegot a friend who works in a private business bank andhe spends his time reading financial statements. Myfather-in-law is a small-time speculator: he’s a share-holder. So ultimately those are the people I work for.

Again, this comment suggests how some auditors givemeaning to the mission that is entrusted to them by law,especially when this mission is assigned a specific valueby other aspects of their personal life – for example, whena shareholder, a customer, a supplier, etc., is embodied intheir eyes by a loved one whom they wish to protect,and to whom they hope to be useful. In the eyes of theseauditors, failing to detect a material error somehow meansbetraying oneself, and this is partly why they are afraid ofbeing mistaken.

However, for the majority of the public accountants ob-served in this study, the reader of the accounts was too ab-stract, remote and disembodied a figure to give rise tosufficient mobilization. By contrast, all of the informantsfelt driven in some way or another by their concern forother people’s opinions – i.e. by their desire to be recog-nized as good at their job or to avoid hurtful criticisms(Anderson-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 2001; Gill, 2009; Korn-berger, Justesen, & Mouritsen, 2011).

‘To hear my senior say I’ve done a good job is a realboost to my morale!’ The comment of this assistant illus-trates the process governing her approach to auditing: con-gratulated for her work, she takes the complimentpersonally (‘I’m doing a good job’), thus strengtheningher identity, and this prospect is precisely what motivatesher to do her very best. To fulfill their expectations interms of self-achievement, some auditors go further. Theyfeel the need to stand out and to outperform their peers inorder to be viewed (and to view themselves) as excellent.This may involve securing a large bonus, an unprecedentedpay rise or an exceptional promotion. For example, one se-nior noted: ‘If I work like nuts, I don’t mind telling you it’sbecause I want to jump [a hierarchical level]’. Likewise, onemanager said: ‘I have a very clear goal – to become a part-ner – and I’m working hard to achieve it’.

However, before achieving such a target, there aremany criticisms to be avoided that may impact an auditor’ssense of self-worth. The risk and fear of being sanctionedby a superior was displayed by many of our informants.


For example, one manager told a senior auditor during oneof the missions: ‘You’d better take a good look at the cashaccounts. We completely botched the job last time, andthere’s no way I’m going to get shot down by [...] [the part-ner] again!’ In his study on ‘Accountant’s truth’, Gill (2009,p. 25) makes similar observations: ‘When I asked Simonwhen he had had to behave cautiously at work, he toldme about a time when he realized he had forgotten toput a value added tax return in with its covering letter toa client. Simon was afraid: ‘those few moments were terri-ble’. Although Simon wanted to conceal his mistake, heneeded reassurance from someone else that he was behav-ing appropriately [...] What was at stake was Simon’s moregeneral self-presentation as competent which he fearedthat even this small error might undermine’ (p. 25).

Finally, it is worth noting that auditors’ hierarchicalsuperiors are not the only ones providing good or poorassessments. Auditees may also pass judgment on thework performed by public accountants. As noted by one se-nior: ‘When I say goodbye to a client and he says some-thing nice because I’ve been useful to him, I’m asdelighted as can be. It’s very gratifying. It’s to hear thingslike that that I work so hard’. This is another good exampleof the sequence ‘recognition of the work done, identitygratification, desire to do well’. However, it is also fre-quently out of a fear of being criticized by their interlocu-tors and in order to protect their self-esteem that auditorsare so keen to perform at their best. One assistant com-mented: ‘Some [auditees] [. . .] will leap at your throat ifthey think you’re not up to the job. So I only ever consultthem if I know I’m perfectly prepared, and I make it a pointof honor of finding out what might be wrong about theiraccounts’.

To summarize, being both aware of performing an‘‘impossible mission’’ and keen to achieve a high standardin their work, auditors are inhabited by the fear of failing todetect significant anomalies. As noted by Gills (2009, p.136), ‘They want to maintain a standard of professionalismin [. . .] [the] pursuit [of their tasks] despite not being ableto articulate that standard, [. . .] they make strenuous at-tempts to do so despite the obstacles they face’, but theycan never be sure to succeed and feel afraid for that reason.Now, public accountants’ fear of failure does not only im-pact their inner life experience. It also significantly influ-ences their choices, behaviors and attitudes, therebyinteracting with the audit process in at least two differentways: on one hand, auditors tend to see fear as a valuable‘resource’ needing to be cultivated; on the other hand, theystrive to alleviate it before the end of the audit engage-ment, which is necessary for them to form and conveytheir conclusions.

Auditors’ fear: a cultivated resource

Fear seen as a requisite for a job well done

One senior made the following comment:

We all experience fear [. . .] to a greater or lesser degree,and it’s probably what keeps us on our toes. If you don’ttake the job seriously, you’re bound to miss something

that’s really serious. It can be right there in front of you.Worrying about getting something wrong is what max-imizes your chances of being effective.

Many of our informants emphasized the connection be-tween effectiveness and the fear of failure. In their eyes,fear enables them to remain vigilant. Accordingly, an audi-tor who fails to display any fear may become a source of‘risk’ and thus a matter of concern for her colleagues. Forinstance, one manager noted:

[Such and such] is really very bright. The only thing thatworries me sometimes is her detachment, her Zen atti-tude whatever the circumstances. I know her well and Iknow it’s the impression she wants to give. Still, I’d pre-fer it if she looked a tad more worried from time to time– so I could stop having to worry myself.

Focusing on comfort, Pentland (1993) argues that thisfeeling is communicated from the bottom to the top ofthe audit hierarchy as a basic product. By Pentland’s ac-count, every member of an audit team derives part of hercomfort from the comfort displayed by her subordinates.This may be the case at the very end of an audit task. How-ever, as the manager quoted above appears to suggest, if anauditor’s sense of comfort is experienced at too early astage in the audit process, she is unlikely to reassure hersuperior, who will instead begin to worry. Our conclusionson the subject converge with those reached by Dejours(1993), according to whom fear is a stimulating factorcausing subjects to surpass themselves. Most auditors areaware of this, and in some cases may worry that they arenot sufficiently anxious.

The risk and fear of not being sufficiently anxious

As Dejours (1993, pp. 138–139), remarks, even in themost anxiogenic situations, habit produces ataraxic effects:‘In one of the factories we studied [. . .], which had been im-planted locally for several decades [. . .] and which had seenevery generation of equipment and manufacturing process,it transpired that fear reached at least a high level’. Some ofour informants clearly identified habit as a risk factor, akind of sedative of the fear of failure and of the vigilancethat such fear induces. According to them, working on anaudit task for several years may have this effect. One seniorcommented:

I’ve been working on the same audit [. . .] for nearly fiveyears now. So now I really feel at home in the companyI’m auditing. [. . .] In fact, there are many positiveaspects to working like that [...]. But at the same time,perhaps that’s also the greatest danger: [. . .] whenyou’re at home, you feel safe, and that’s precisely what’srisky: your vigilance is sort of numbed.

As noted by the senior, habit is not only negative. It is anecessary condition for the development of practical com-petence and is synonymous with experience. However,experience is not altogether positive, particularly if it givesrise to excessive self-confidence. One partner noted:

Taking on the audit of a company’s accounts is a bit liketackling a high summit. You’re faced with a huge


challenge, equipped with instruments which, in view ofthe scale of the task, are completely inadequate. To besuccessful in situations like that, you need to have alot of experience and to remain aware of the dangersentailed at all times. [. . .] There are excellent moun-tain-climbers who die because they lose sight of thatawareness as they gain in experience and competence.Same thing for us auditors. The more experienced webecome, the more we need to cultivate a sense ofhumility. Otherwise we’re condemned to falling.

The point emphasized by the partner is reminiscent ofthe paradox of success (Audia, Locke, & Smith, 2000) orof Icarus (Miller, 1992). The paradox is that our mainstrength is sometimes our worst enemy. Like Icarus, audi-tors with substantial experience, blinded by their owncompetence, run the risk of falling from a lack of humility.

As for novices, they must beware of another kind of risk:boredom. Auditing has the reputation of being on occasiona boring occupation (Power, 1999). It is particularly true forassistants, who may be given repetitive tasks during large-scale jobs. In such cases, their fear of failure may benumbed. When asked about this issue, one assistant said:

Last year, we were auditing the accounts of a group thatincluded lots of companies. My task was to control thebank reconciliations of all the companies. [...] Checkingbank reconciliations is really important: [. . .] you haveto be very careful. [. . .] But when you’ve done I don’tknow how many reconciliations in a single day, andeverything always seems to be OK, you soon get bored.You’re bound to start operating mechanically, and evento stop focusing at all on what you’re doing, and that’swhat’s dangerous. [...] [So] you’ve got to find a way ofstaying focused.

This auditor knows that she must remain vigilant, buther task is monotonous. Though she is physically present,her mind is elsewhere. As she puts it herself, ‘that’s what’sdangerous’. For her, it is a matter of concern. She is keen to‘find a way of staying focused’ and to keep her fear of fail-ing alive. The techniques devised by public accountants toachieve this represent what we call their ‘know-how-to-keep-worrying’.

Auditors’ know-how-to-keep-worrying

Auditors can develop ingenious informal techniques toremain sufficiently anxious in case of habit or boredom.Here are a few examples, based on our observations. Afterexplaining that auditing the same firm chronically for sev-eral years could potentially anesthetize her vigilance, thesenior quoted in the previous subsection commented:

‘Chronic rhymes with anesthetic!’ [...] That’s a saying ofmine that comes to mind in such circumstances. It’s alying proverb: it prompts me to stay alert, which beliesthe saying since the anesthetic accordingly cannot takeeffect.

Here, it is by devising a specific linguistic expressionthat the auditor is able to cultivate her fear when routinethreatens it. She describes this expression as a ‘lying

proverb’, since thinking of it in the relevant context para-doxically turns it into a counter-truth. The proverb func-tions as a prophecy that is not self-fulfilling but self-destructive. It is not an instance of a performative use oflanguage (Austin, 1962), but a counter-performativespeech act – in our view a psychological instrument ofgreat beauty and elegance.

The second example of a ‘technique for maintainingfear’ was provided by a partner who compared her workto climbing a high mountain. As we listened to her, ourattention was drawn to a photograph in a slim frame hungrelatively high on the wall to the right of her desk. It was apicture of a mountain climber suspended in a void, alone,climbing a vertical rock face without a rope or an ice axe,and using only the sheer strength of his hands and feet.Noticing our interest in the picture, the auditorcommented:

As you can see, that picture sums up everything I’ve justtold you. I put it there not to lose sight of that. All I needto do is turn my head, catch a glimpse of it, and in afraction of a second it reminds me that I have to stayvigilant. I call it my ‘alarm-photo’.

‘Alarm-photo’: more than the picture it describes, it isthe pun that is striking here, giving a wonderfully con-densed image of the function of ‘alarm clock’ ascribed tothe photo. As soon as the partner’s sense of danger risksbeing numbed by her considerable experience, the picturesets off an alarm bell in her mind that awakens her fear ofmaking a mistake. Quite apart from its purely decorativerole, the function of the device is thus also operative andpractical, transformed as it is into a tool for remaining vig-ilant. Lastly, the assistant who claimed to experience bore-dom when performing highly repetitive tasks explained:

‘When I get landed with a chain ticking job, my trick isto avoid using the usual tick mark. [. . .] I prefer to use amore convoluted one, which [. . .] will require a little bitmore effort, a little bit more time, and that will force mymind to stay glued to my paperwork instead of goinginto automatic pilot’.

Interestingly, while using a ‘‘tick mark’’ often symbol-izes all that is monotonous and repetitive about audit prac-tice, the assistant turns it here into the very essence of hisstruggle against the numbing effects of routine. Onceagain, this is a good illustration of the ingeniousness ofwhich auditors are capable in trying to keep intact theirfear and thereby manage the risk of being mistaken. Manyother examples of informal ‘‘techniques for maintainingfear’’ could have been given. However, the cultivation ofanxiety in public accountants is not only left to their owninitiative. A number of formal audit procedures also playa significant role in this respect.

Formal audit procedures in the service of fear

As argued by Dejours (1980), Dejours (1993), variousformal management techniques are designed to cultivatefear in organizations. In high-risk industries for example,warning posters, alarms, protective helmets and securityinstructions serve as constant reminders that an accident


is always possible. In most firms, surveillance systems,evaluation rituals and punitive practices constantly main-tain employees’ personal career at risk. Promotion policiesand work process reengineering often awaken their anxi-ety by disrupting their habits. Auditing is no exception.

For example, the frequency of use of the term ‘risk’ inofficial audit instructions arguably plays the same role aswarning posters in certain factories: by constantly expos-ing auditors to the message that they are navigating in arisky environment, the term contributes to maintaining aclimate of fear in the workplace. The obligation for everyauditor to sign her work papers also participates to sustainsuch a climate. As argued by Pentland (1993, p. 613), ‘[anauditor’s] signature [. . .] gives comfort to those who seeit’. Before that, however, signatures serve to cultivate pub-lic accountants’ fear of failure by causing every audit teammember to feel personally responsible for their work andpotential mistakes.7 One manager made the following com-ment to a trainee:

Tell me, am I dreaming or have you not signed some ofyour paperwork? [. . .] I told you that when it comes toauditing you have to learn to commit yourself; thatmeans signing everything you do! It’s the fact of signingthat helps to develop a sense of what responsibilityactually is. [. . .] Your initials must appear on every sin-gle document you write. You’re responsible for every bitof paperwork you produce. Here you’ve just got to getused to associating your name with your work.Understood?

Associating one’s name with one’s work: it would bedifficult to express more clearly how a public accountant’sidentity is connected to her work as a result of ‘signing off’.When other people’s judgments are directed at an auditor’sachievements, it is the destiny of this identity that isplayed out. In this sense, the formal review and evaluationprocess in force in audit firms is another mechanism serv-ing to maintain public accountants in a state of fear. Oneneed only observe the nervous, furtive glances that anauditor directs at those who check her sections to under-stand the level of anxiety generated by this practice: thereviewer frowns and the auditor’s identity wavers; the re-viewer smiles and her identity is reinforced. For publicaccountants who present for the most part an impeccableacademic record, a poor evaluation is usually a vexingexperience. One assistant noted: ‘When I was at school, Ionly ever got excellent results. A bad mark always mademe feel sick. I take it really personally’. Yet a ‘bad mark’is not only vexing. It may also have highly detrimental ef-fects, particularly in terms of professional reputation (Gill,2009). Based on the following comment from one senior, itis easy to see why the evaluation process sustains auditors’fear of failure, given the reputational risk involved:

7 Many psychological studies have shown that there is a strongcorrelation between the feeling of personal responsibility and the emotionof fear (see e.g., Startup & Davey, 2003). As noted by André (2009), workers’anxiety is all the more important today since modern organizations andsocieties tend to promote individualistic values, with success and failurebeing ascribed to the individual and not to the collective (see also Douglas,1992; Guénin-Paracini & Gendron, 2010; Malsch, Tremblay, & Gendron,2012).

You get very quickly labelled in an auditing firm. [. . .][For example] your superior has it in for you, his friendsask him how you’re doing, he pulls you to pieces, andlittle by little you get a reputation as a numskull. [. . .]To avoid getting caught up in something like that,you’ve just got to do everything you can to avoid gettingpoor assessments.

Finally, several mechanisms serve to prevent auditorsfrom becoming too self-assured. For example, the promo-tion policy dictating their career progression leads themto assume greater responsibilities almost every year. Assoon as they begin to feel comfortable with the tasks theyare used to performing, auditors find themselves con-fronted with new challenges that, though exciting, mayalso awaken their fear of making mistakes. In the samevein, the changes in audit methodologies regularly im-posed on auditors tend to maintain them in a state of anx-iety by breaking their routine (see e.g., Barrett et al., 2005;Curtis & Turley, 2007).

Altogether, these formal devices contribute to produc-ing and reproducing what might be called a ‘culture of fear’within audit firms (Furedi, 1997; Glassner, 1999). Auditors’fear is not a purely individual, intrapersonal phenomenonelicited in the body by a given stimulus and involving amore or less automatic, biologically determined process.Fear, like risk, is also socially constructed. As part of thisstudy, we were able to observe trainees and assistants per-forming their ever first audit and to meet them again a fewmonths later. At the beginning, they rarely displayed signsof fear: having graduated from the best French universities,and seduced by the image of rationality shown by the CABmethodology, they appeared to be extremely self-confi-dent. However, over time, we found that they graduallylearned (1) to interpret audit work as a risky and uncertaintask in which it is normal and salutary to be afraid of fail-ing and (2) to subtly exhibit fear through their expressionsand gestures in order to reassure their hierarchicalsuperiors.

Yet while acculturated auditors tend to see fear as a re-source worth cultivating, they also see it as an emotionthat needs to be alleviated and transformed into comfortbefore the end of the audit engagement. Although comfortis anything but comforting when it is premature, it re-mains the ultimate goal to be achieved (Pentland, 1993).In practice, how do auditors move from fear to comfort?Our interpretive analysis suggests that their fear of failingto detect material misstatements may lead them to oper-ate this ‘emotional transition’ through two very differentprocesses: depending on the circumstances, auditors mayalleviate their fear by mobilizing their practical intelli-gence or by resorting to defensive strategies.

From fear to comfort through practical intelligence

As noted earlier, auditors are confronted in the fieldwith deep uncertainties that official audit standards arepowerless to reduce completely. ‘The audit risk model[. . .] simply cannot tell an auditor what to do or how todo it [. . .] because it is [. . .] an ‘‘empty abstraction’’’ (Fran-cis, 1994, p. 255). In order to achieve a sense of comfort


without overlooking the complexity of their work, auditorsthus need to mobilize their practical intelligence.

When certain conditions are met, their fear of failurehelps them to do so, triggering a two-stage process. Atthe start of an audit, public accountants know that the ac-counts assigned to them may contain serious mistakes.However, they ignore if such mistakes actually exist andwhere they might be located. Initially, therefore, their fearis largely caused by ignorance. It remains very general andunfocused, providing them with only a limited guide foraction. In a first stage, they thus seek to ‘clarify’ it: theystrive to operate a shift from a nebulous fear of ‘not know-ing where to look’ to an awareness of ‘where to be afraidand to what degree’; from a relatively vague and elusivefear to a set of localized and measured concerns (described,for example, as weak, strong or moderate), much easier tomanage and ‘suppress’ by carrying out various tests. Oncethese concerns have been quelled, auditors begin to feelreassured. However, the risk that their controls will finallyturn out to be inadequate still exists, and they know it. In asecond stage, they thus often go back over the work theyhave done to review it, becoming comfortable enough onlyonce this work is, in their view, of sufficient quality.

In institutional language, this process of transformingand alleviating fear is referred to as the process of assess-ing risks of material misstatement and responding tothem. On the evidence of professional audit standards,such a process seems to be purely cognitive and disem-bodied. However, in the field, it is primarily through theirbody ‘‘activated’’ by fear that auditors can perceive andmanage audit risks. The practical intelligence that fearstimulates and that enables auditors to move from fearto comfort is fundamentally an intelligence of the body.Cognition is obviously involved, but it heavily relies on‘‘techniques of the body’’ (Mauss, 1973), whose inventionand use are governed by fear. The general dynamics ob-served are as follows. By preparing public accountantsfor risks, fear heightens their motor tension and sensoryattention. Stimulated by their fear of failing to detectmaterial misstatements, these professionals are promptedto go into a kind of ‘body-to-body’ with the main ele-ments of their work situation. The more they appropriatethese elements ‘‘physically’’, the more able they are to feelthem as part of their own body, and thus to perceive cuesthat may indicate risks or absence of risks. Based on ourobservations, the main risks that are thus ‘‘corporally’’identified and managed by auditors aiming to clarify andalleviate their fear are, in order, those associated withtheir workspace, their work time, their work tools, andtheir work’s conclusions.

Managing the worrying workspace

‘What do auditors really do when they are on site with aclient?’ (Pentland, 1993, p. 605). A possible answer to thisquestion is that among other things, driven by their fear offailure, auditors leave the workroom that has been as-signed to them several times a day and walk, stop walking,watch, listen, touch, and walk again. At first sight, thisobservation may seem trivial. However, such ‘techniquesof the body’ (walking, stopping, watching, etc.), triggered

by fear, actually play a central role in the process oftransforming and alleviating auditors’ anxiety: the betteracquainted and the more inhabited auditors become withthe space of the audited firm and what it contains (objects,documents, work processes, etc.), the better able they areto feel in their own body ‘where to be afraid and to whatdegree’. The more they move, see, hear and touch to per-ceive signs that might indicate audit risks, the better ablethey are to turn their initial fear of failure into specific con-cerns prompting them to further their investigation. Onesenior crossing the courtyard of her client’s factory lookedup and remarked: ‘That’s funny, they’re going to do workson the roof. You might say it’s about time too, given thestate of the building. I’ll have to take a look at the fundsset aside for large-scale repairs’. One partner claimed:‘Once you’ve done the groundwork you need to do to geta feel for the terrain, I can assure you that ultimately youknow exactly what to verify’. Another partner commented:

You’ve got to be able to feel, almost physically, where amistake is likely to occur, and where, by contrast, thereis almost no risk. So you can’t just get somebody to sitdown in an office and explain the procedures that aresupposedly in place in the company. You need toengage with the real world. Take for instance the caseof the purchase cycle. If you want to analyze it, you haveto go to the delivery bay to observe how the goods areunloaded [and] [. . .] counted [. . .]. Then you have to fol-low the course of the delivery notes right up to theaccounts department, to travel with them, to stopwhenever they stop, and at every stage you have toforce yourself to [. . .] stay on the outlook for the slight-est clue and to follow every lead. That’s a metaphor, butat the end of the job, you’ve got to feel that your feet aresore and your hands are black from the grease in thefactory and the ink from the accounting documents.

As she mentioned the grease, the partner showed herleft hand, symbolizing the business activity of the auditedfirm. As she referred to the ink, she showed her right hand,representing accountancy. In between, there is the rest ofher body, and we understand that what she is acting outis the way in which an auditor can become one withaccounting processes, ‘to feel, almost physically, where amistake is likely to occur’. According to her, public accoun-tants whose body does not carry the marks of these pro-cesses cannot claim to have done what is needed toperceive where audit risks are located, since they will haveremained at the surface of things without seeking to ‘en-gage with the real world’. In the field, engagement meansmoving (so that ‘your feet are sore’) and pausing (‘at everystage’), in order to ‘stay on the outlook for the slightestclue’ suggesting the presence of risks. According to thisinformant, it is all a matter of ‘following leads’. The analogybetween auditing and the activity of a tracker is indicativeof the ‘‘corporal’’ relationship that auditors, whose body ismoved and made more sensitive by fear, can have withtheir workspace – a relationship from which some of theirintuitions about audit risks emerge. It also suggests howauditors may gradually reach a conclusion, with all sensesalerted by anxiety.


In short, by repeatedly leaving their workroom to scru-tinize other parts of the audited organization, publicaccountants, moved by their fear of failure, bodily appro-priate this organization in a way that enables them to feelwhere significant anomalies are likely to be found: theytransform a huge, unfamiliar and therefore vaguely worry-ing space (the site of the audited entity as first encoun-tered) into an aggregate of distinct spaces presentingspecific risks and raising specific concerns. However, thechallenge for them is to complete this transformation be-fore the end of the audit. Accordingly, time is another ele-ment that auditors strive to appropriate with their body inorder to alleviate their fear of failing.

Managing the anxiogenic work time

Because auditors rarely have more than a few weeks oreven days to check and validate the result of a year’s worthof accounting, an audit task is always for them a raceagainst time. As a result, driven by their fear of missing amaterial mistake, they tend to work with their eyes rivetedon their watch or computer clock, and easily allow them-selves to be inhabited by the seconds ticking by, withwhich their body is not long to enter into resonance. Inthe field, under the influence of fear, they do not only walk:they walk rapidly, and sometimes run or take shortcuts.They do not only write: they write swiftly, concisely, anduse abbreviations. They do not only speak: they speakbriefly and with parsimony. What they can do promptlywithout impairing the quality of their work is generallydone as quickly as possible. One senior commented:‘Auditing a company’s financial statements is like defusinga bomb that’s ticking away: [. . .] it’s a matter of speed’. Theanalogy with the bomb defusal process shows how anxio-genic the audit mission can be. The faster auditors work(stimulated by fear), the more auditing they can carryout, and the more auditing they can carry out, the morereassured they become.

However, audit professionals do not merely synchro-nize their moves and movements with the movement ofthe second hand of the clock. In order to gain a better holdon time, they also strive to be corporally inhabited by thefull duration (Bergson, 1907) of the audit they are perform-ing. For example, they devise instruments such as workschedule tables in order to visualize the tasks that have al-ready been performed and the tasks that have yet to becompleted. They know that ‘tomorrow is constructed to-day’ (as one senior put it), and regularly slow down to savetime later. They frequently project themselves into theyear-end audit when carrying out the interim visit, andconversely consult the interim file when designing theircorroborative tests. At every moment, their body (like thebody of any worker) stores in memory the lessons of pastexperiences and is guided by the future they aspire tobuild. As a result, they are able to sense how to shape theiractions in the present so as to mold the becoming of theiranxiety.

Finally, driven once again by their fear of not detecting amaterial misstatement and the desire to alleviate this feel-ing, auditors have a tendency to work as long as possible,regardless of their time budget (McNair, 1991; Pentland,

1993). Staying physically at work for long hours (Pentland,1993) clearly constitutes a ‘technique of the body’ thatplays an important role in the process of fear alleviation.As remarked by one senior: ‘Auditing is a never-endingjob. You can always do more, check something else, [. . .]and because you don’t want to have any regrets, well, thatoften means you work night and day. How could you getcomfortable with regrets?’

In short, as a result of the corporal relationship they cul-tivate with it, auditors appropriate time in a very personaland operative way. They transform their work time, whichis short, imposed from the outside, made up of a successionof abstract instants, and therefore relatively anxiogenic,into a time of working – longer, chosen, seen as a flow ofconcrete mutations that they can shape (‘tomorrow is con-structed today’), and therefore more reassuring.

Managing the un-reassuring audit tools

When working conditions do not inhibit their practicalintelligence, public accountants, as is now apparent, domore than use official audit tools to transform and alleviatetheir initial anxiety. As emphasized earlier, blindly relyingon such technologies would even actually be, in their eyes,a source of risk. Should we now conclude that standardtools are entirely useless to auditors seeking to alleviatetheir fear of failure? Surely not. If they did not exist, publicaccountants would feel very uncomfortable. As noted byone senior: ‘Having all these techniques at your disposalmeans you don’t set out empty-handed – you don’t feelcompletely naked’. That said, to produce their full ‘ataraxiceffects’ otherwise than by merely existing, formal audittools usually need to be significantly ‘‘remolded’’ by theirusers. For example, one senior noted:

The [risks assessment] matrices the firm bombards uswith are too complex. It’s often impossible or pointlessto fill them in completely, and sometimes they don’teven enable us to deal with all the relevant information.So for every job, I re-create a matrix that’s more adaptedto the company and that I can finalize before the dead-line is up.

This comment is of general application. Based on ourobservations, official audit tools are rarely used as suchby auditors striving to move from fear to comfort throughpractical intelligence: the tools with which practitionersdo not feel at ease are often simply ignored, while othersare transformed into instruments ‘more adapted’ to theworking context.

To operate this transformation, public accountants lar-gely rely, once again, on their body stimulated by fear. Tobegin with, they draw extensively on the gut feelings thatthey have gained in the field and which they seek to for-malize. For example, none of the informants started outfrom questionnaires to identify areas of risk. Rather, theyused questionnaires (as well as other forms) retrospec-tively, as a means of formalizing, validating and justifyingtheir intuitive conclusions achieved by walking, pausing,observing, touching, etc. Similarly, when statistical tableswere used (which was rare), public accountants utilizedthem to rationalize (and sometimes refine) the number


of elements that they considered intuitively reasonable tocheck.8 Both of these examples are representative. In prac-tice, official audit tools usually constitute artifacts that audi-tors transform and use to clarify, account for and developtheir feelings of where to be afraid and how to manage risks.They are generally not used as a guide for action and deci-sion-making, but provide a kind of ‘‘grammar’’ and ‘‘lexicon’’that audit professionals subjectively appropriate in order toset down in writing their preliminary intuitions.

Formalizing intuitions through the use of transformedaudit tools is a critical stage of the audit process. As longas this has not been done, auditors’ gut feelings remain rel-atively vague, potentially misleading and illegitimate; theydo not enable public accountants to feel comfortable. Now,precisely because gut feelings are elusive, their formaliza-tion is all but an easy, logical and straightforward endea-vor. In the field, it requires groping in the dark, andresults from a series of handlings that gradually lead tothe desired outcome. The instruments that auditors fash-ion on the basis of official technologies to formalize theirintuitions and alleviate their fear of failing are thus notcognitively designed first to then be mechanically utilized.Rather, they are progressively manufactured in the courseof the audit task, through a process of trial and errorinvolving several manual treatments.

The way in which risk assessment matrices and corrob-orative tests are re-created on the basis of standard devicesprovides a good example of this process. Based on ourobservations, as soon as they have gained sufficient in-sights by visiting all parts of the audited company, publicaccountants return to the workroom, settle down at theirdesk, and lay out around them (i.e. around their body)the accounts that need to be audited, the documents ob-tained here and there, and the written notes taken in thefield. Gathered in this way, the various elements are easierto apprehend at a glance and can thus be literally better‘com-prehended’. Some of the data they contain are thenselected and manually transferred onto a work paper. Atthe outset, the work paper is usually structured and pre-sented according to the model found in the previous year’saudit file. However, this initial arrangement often subse-quently evolves: lines or columns are added, inverted orsuppressed, particular records are highlighted, new calcu-lations are inserted, etc., and the ‘‘handcrafted assemblage’’that is thus produced – sometimes re-worked severaltimes before reaching its final form – is what ultimatelyconstitutes the intended instrument.

In brief, by walking, pausing, watching, listening, speed-ing, inhabiting the full duration of the audit, staying atwork for long hours, and manually re-shaping official audittools to formalize their intuitions about audit risks, audi-tors whose practical intelligence is not inhibited graduallyturn their initial and elusive fear of failure into a set of spe-cific concerns, which they then quell through various testsadjusted to this goal. Within the temporal limits of theaudit engagement, by means of various techniques of thebody triggered and regulated by fear, they transform the

8 In other words, in audit teams as at the institutional level (see e.g.,Carpenter & Dirsmith, 1993; Power, 1992), sampling primarily serves tolegitimize auditors’ decisions.

space of the audited entity – huge, singular, initially un-known, sometimes dirty, ugly, disordered, and thereforesomewhat worrisome – into the space of their audit file –familiar, standard, clean, rather aesthetic, ordered, andthus relatively reassuring. As a result, they begin to experi-ence a sense of relief or pre-comfort. At this stage, they arenot, however, entirely liberated from their fear of missing amaterial mistake: the risk (called ‘detection risk’ in ISA200) of failing to find an anomaly because of insufficientaudit procedures still exists. Driven by what is left of theirinitial anxiety, auditors then often go back over the workthat they have done to pass judgment on it. They onlymove from pre-comfort to comfort when this judgment ispositive. As we will now see, such a judgment is, onceagain, largely informed by physical sensations.

Managing the fear of concluding

In the field, once they get to the end of an audit task,auditors tend to return, however briefly, to their completedwork in order to assess it. The following comment by onesenior illustrates the common practice that involves goingback over one’s deeds for fear of having been careless:

When I was a student and I was living in a maid’s room[. . .], I often asked myself just before leaving the build-ing if I had remembered to lock my door. That was myparticular fear. So I had to go back up the stairs to makesure the door was bolted, and the exertion wasn’talways pointless. Now, it’s the same thing with mywork. I check it twice rather than once, just in case.

‘Is the work that I have performed good enough to sup-port my opinion?’ Most auditors striving to calm their fearof failure appear to be inhabited by this question. How dothey answer it? How do they come to the conclusion thattheir work is ready for submission, i.e. that they do notneed to be afraid anymore? Based on our observations,the main criteria they use to judge that it is acceptablefor them to stop working are twofold, and both are of aphysical nature.

The first is the degree of fatigue. Reaching a point of sat-uration indicates to auditors that they have done their verybest and that they can do no more. In the field, it is oftenfatigue that leads public accountants to loosen their grip.One assistant noted:

I decide to submit my sections for review [. . .] when Iget sick of them, when I’ve gone back a hundred timesover my work and everything seems to be OK. [. . .] It’sa bit like when you write a cover letter. You read it overand over again to make sure you haven’t made a spell-ing mistake, but at some point [. . .] you feel tired, andthat’s when you finally decide to send it off. You tellyourself that you’ve worked on it for long enough, thatit must be good as it is.

In the same vein, one senior remarked: ‘When I’m fedup, provided I didn’t spare any effort, this tells me twothings: first, that my work is acceptable as it stands, andsecond, that it is acceptable for me to feel tired and tomove on’.


However, weariness is not enough. Auditors, like allworkers, may also judge the quality of their work in termsof the pleasure it gives them when they look back at it. Thefollowing excerpt from an interview with another senior isparticularly informative in this respect:

Us: How do you know that the work you’ve done is OK?Senior: Well, that’s a very difficult question. . . I think it’sa general feeling. What I do is to look at my sections,and [. . .] there will come a time when not a single detailwill bother me anymore. All the pieces of the puzzlefinally seem to fit together, everything seems to flow[. . .]. So it’s a kind of ‘wow’ feeling! [. . .] It’s a feelingof relief, and also a feeling of satisfaction. I say tomyself: ‘that’s it, it’s good as it stands, all is beautiful’.Us: ‘All is beautiful’? Hum, that’s interesting. Would yousay that the aesthetic dimension of your work papers isimportant to you? Is it important in the process thatmakes you feel comfortable?Senior: Yes, definitely! Because in the end, it’s an overallimpression that leads you to conclude that your work isOK. So the visual dimension, the ‘aesthetic’ dimension,as you call it, is essential. When your work papers arewell presented, well written – in short when you findtheir form pleasing – it helps to make you feel good.Good and proud, I’d say.Us: Proud? Could you expand on that, please?Senior: Yes. I think that, ultimately, you feel comfortablewhen you feel proud of your work. You look at whatyou’ve done and it shows you what you’ve been ableto do. It’s a feeling of self-fulfillment. So it’s a wholerange of sensations, I mean pleasant sensations, thatleads you to conclude that your work is over.

Thus, ultimately, for public accountants whose practicalintelligence has not been impeded by unfavorable workingconditions, pleasure generates comfort – a pleasure thatresults from a feeling of accomplishment. Yet accordingto most of our informants, pleasure usually remainsincomplete as long as the work has not been validated bya peer, who will often be more experienced. Until this hap-pens, auditors cannot be entirely certain that they havecarried out their tasks efficiently and to a satisfactory stan-dard. Accordingly, driven by what is left of their initial anx-iety, they often look forward to the result of the reviewprocess. While the perspective of the latter, as noted earlier,first cultivates their fear of failure, its outcome is needed todefinitively alleviate this feeling, and is a crucial part of anaudit. Pentland (1993) argues that audit team membersdraw their own comfort from the comfort of their subordi-nates. Based on our observations, we maintain that theopposite is also true. When the review is performed con-structively and leaves room for dialogue, public accoun-tants see the utility and beauty of their work recognizedand thus increase their feeling of accomplishment. Theylearn from their superiors what they should do in the fu-ture to better alleviate their fear of failure. Last but notleast, they are no longer the only person to take the riskand responsibility for their conclusions.

Unfortunately, things may not always go as smoothly asthis. While fear plays a central role in the development andmobilization of auditors’ practical intelligence (intelligence

of the body), a specific condition needs to be met in orderfor this feeling to produce such a positive effect: confi-dence. If they are overconfident and unworried, publicaccountants may be inclined to act imprudently, but with-out any confidence in themselves, in the resources put attheir disposal, and in the willingness of their superiors tojudge their work fairly, they will usually experience aparalyzing fear of failure that can be very harmful. Whenthis occurs, detecting significant anomalies is no longer apriority for them: the enemy that they seek to dominatebecomes fear itself, and they then develop various defen-sive strategies to suppress this feeling.

From fear to comfort through defensive strategies

Fear without confidence

Commenting on the risk factors that may make auditorsfeel highly anxious, one senior noted:

[As a senior, your anxiety increases dramatically] whenyou anticipate that you won’t be able to carry out theentire program by the deadline [...]. When I worked asan assistant, it was more like: am I going to be able tounderstand and treat all the information? [...] I dreamtI was drowning under a sea of documents [. . .].I actuallyhad nightmares about it! [. . .] Remaining at the level ofuncertainties is never a good thing. When that’s thecase, people often assume you haven’t done your jobproperly. [. . .] So yes, [when there still remains a degreeof uncertainty], you have to find a way to turn it into acertainty. And sometimes, it’s just a matter of ‘‘style’’.But that’s where I reckon things become unacceptable.Because it’s a binary issue you know: [. . .] either you’reable to conclude or you’re not. [. . .] But yes, [sometimesyou feel you can’t conclude and yet you still conclude allthe same], by wrapping everything up in fancy wordsand using stylistic formulas. And I think that’s the maincause of anxiety.

This quote illustrates the kind of fear experienced byauditors when they have little confidence in their ownability to succeed (‘am I going to be able to. . .’), in the re-sources they use (in terms of time budget, information,etc.), and in how their superiors will evaluate their work(‘people often assume you haven’t done your job prop-erly’). In such circumstances, their main apprehension isno longer simply a fear of missing material misstatements.Rather, it turns into an oppressive anxiety (potentiallycausing ‘nightmares’) of not being capable of alleviatingtheir initial fear. The more time passes, the more auditorsforesee the moment where they will be forced to expressan opinion without feeling comfortable (i.e. the momentwhere they will have to commit precisely what they aresupposed to combat, namely a distortion of the truth using‘stylistic formulas’), and this usually causes ethical suffer-ing (‘that’s where I reckon things become unacceptable[. . .] and I think that’s the main cause of anxiety’). How-ever, when faced with such a risk, public accountants donot remain inactive. Instead, they seek to devise strategiesto protect their mental health.


Auditors’ defensive strategies

Based on our observations, auditors’ defensive strate-gies can be classified into two categories. First, publicaccountants who are unable to alleviate their fear of failurethrough practical intelligence usually ensure to ignore theelements of risks that worry them too much. For managersand partners, this is not difficult: they only have to hole upin their office, i.e. not visit the teams they are supposed tosupervise, and to rely on audit files to form their auditopinions. As a matter of fact, we saw these actors only veryrarely when we were in audited organizations. For assis-tants and senior (who are in the front line), forgetting therisky nature of the field is more challenging, but varioustechniques enable them to do it. The following commentby one of our informants is instructive in this respect.

This year, we had a major resource issue in January. [. . .]So all we did was to audit the high-risk sections quickly,and forget about the rest. [...] We worked for 15 h a day,including weekends. As far as I’m concerned, I’m com-fortable with what I saw [. . .]. I’m able to tell myself thatwhat we did we did properly, but... [...]. Conducting anin-depth analysis involves getting your hands dirty,and there are two things that may make us reluctantto do that. The first is: will I be able to understandeverything I’m going to be told? And the second is: willI get anything out of it? You can never know in advance,and when in doubt, you’re better off not committingyourself. So the first priority has got to be this: get thebasic checks done, and only do what you feel most com-fortable with. [...] In any case, the fewer problems weuncover, the better people feel. No problems, no issues,everything’s OK, everything’s just dandy!

Several of the defensive strategies observed in thecourse of this study are illustrated in this quote. To avoidthinking about the risks that are likely to make them feeltoo anxious, auditors tend to drastically reduce the scopeof their investigation (‘all we did was to audit the high-risksections quickly’) and to apply standardized proceduresboth mechanically (‘get the basic checks done’) and relent-lessly (‘15 h a day, including weekends’). As argued byPower (2009, p. 852): ‘Rule-based compliance [. . .] can betheorized as a defence against anxiety and enables [. . .]agents to feel that their work conforms to legitimised prin-ciple’ (see also, McGivern & Ferlie, 2007). For publicaccountants, remaining in a state of intense activity andadopting a routine behavior is an effective strategy againstcogitating. It gives them an effective way of performingnumerous and seemingly legitimate tests while actuallycarrying out superficial analyses. When the deadlines aretoo tight, ‘digging’ deeper means running the risk of nothaving the time or the ability (‘will I be able to under-stand’) to deal with the issues identified, i.e. the risk ofnot resolving uncertainties. Under these conditions, it ispreferable for audit team members to ‘do only what theyfeel most comfortable with’. In this way, they can maintainthe impression that ‘everything’s OK’, and thus reach andconvey an easily-earned sense of comfort (‘the fewer prob-lems we uncover, the better people feel’).

When they go back over their work and seek to convincethemselves that they were right not to pursue their analysesfurther, auditors are not short on arguments. For instance, itis always possible for them to think that what they have ne-glected to do would not have been productive, simply be-cause the reverse is just as uncertain (‘when in doubt,you’re better off not committing yourself’). In the sameway, giving their trust to some audited companies or someaccounts may enable them to rationalize their decision notto audit a given accounting operation. More generally, be-cause the quality of their work is doomed to remain unob-servable, including by themselves (Fischer, 1996), auditorsalways have the possibility of assuming that they workedwell when it suits them to do so and of invoking the auditmethodology in an incantatory way to abolish any doubtsthey might have on the subject. For example, some publicaccountants we questioned about the elements they chosenot to verify answered laconically: ‘Auditing is based onpolls!’ or ‘that’s what the risk approach is all about!’ In orderto justify their belief that they had achieved a high standardof auditing, others said: ‘We have applied the official meth-od in its broad outline’. In our view, the tendency to reducethe audit task to the application of formal procedures argu-ably functions as a defensive gesture. When auditors cannotmobilize their practical intelligence to achieve a sense ofcomfort, the surest way for them to alleviate their anxietyis to deny the role that this intelligence may play in the field.Acting and regarding oneself as an ‘audit machine’ (Pent-land, 1993, p. 614) is a dehumanizing experience, but it isalso a good way of not feeling worried. Robots do not think,they do not have any emotion, and the absence of emotionsconstitutes a form of ‘comfort’.

In the long run, however, one of the most effective de-fenses against mental suffering at work involves loweringone’s conception of a job well done and anaesthetizingone’s moral sense (see e.g., Flam, 1993). This is the secondcategory of defensive strategies used by some publicaccountants in order to alleviate their excessive fear of fail-ure. When their desire to do a good job makes them exces-sively afraid of failing, they gradually abandon it and findother motivations to wake up in the morning and go towork. In his study, Gill (2009, p. 13) notes that ‘the vastmajority of interviewees [. . .] said that their motivationto do accounting work was instrumental, enabling themto gain a qualification, money, status, and so on’. Ourobservations confirm it: seeking to get the biggest bonuspossible or striving to satisfy auditees rather than share-holders are goals that often come to occupy a prominentplace in the mind of audit team members. For example,one of our informants remarked:

The reader of the accounts... I’ve never met the guy. Idon’t know his name or what he looks like (laughs).Apart from the people on my team, the two people Isee here all day long are Mr. [...] [X] [the head accoun-tant] and Mrs. [...] [Y] [in charge of customer and sup-plier accounts]. Strictly speaking, by law, they’reperhaps not the people I work for, but in practicethey’re the people I do my job with. So my ambition,what I want, is that they get something out of me beingthere, something that’s useful to them.


Now, to gain their full effectiveness, the defensive strat-egies used by public accountants need to be collectivelyadopted. Not thinking about obvious risks is a difficult taskand requires the complicity of everyone in the group. As aresult, auditors who fail to conform to the defenses in forcein their team and firm usually find themselves sanctionedby their superiors, in one way or another. When such de-fenses prevail, audit teams and audit firms come to looklike mini-societies in which creativity is near zero, and asFineman (1993, p. 28) puts it: ‘The extreme is a form of[. . .] madness, where people are motivated to ignore warn-ing signs that something is going wrong’. For his part, Dej-ours talks of ‘cultural alienation’. The idea is the same.When a group of auditors invests all its efforts into numb-ing its perception of reality, it sinks into a kind of ‘foolish-ness’, which ‘shelter[s] [. . .] [its] members from the anxietythat something terrible could go wrong, while also increas-ing that very probability’ (Fineman, 1993, p. 29). For nowmany years, numerous researchers have denounced themechanization and commercialization of the accountingprofession and their negative effects on auditors’ compe-tence and independence (see e.g., Hopwood, 1998).However, the deep causes of these two phenomena (espe-cially the roots of commercialization) are still somewhatunder-researched. On the basis of our study, one couldinterpret both tendencies as partly resulting from the mas-sive adoption, by public accountants, of defenses againstanxiety.

9 i.e. Self-confidence, confidence in work instruments and confidence incolleagues.

Discussion

By focusing on fear, our paper suggests that we need toreconsider the notion of risk in the audit process from anemotional perspective. While a number of authors, includ-ing Francis (1994), have denounced the pseudo-scientificnature of the following mathematical formula, this formulatakes on a different meaning if the term risk is replaced bythe term fear:

AR ¼ IR � CR � DR

According to the algebraic language used in the equa-tion, localizing and measuring fear translates as determin-ing, for every significant account, and statement bystatement, the level of inherent risk (IR) and control risk(CR). Yet from a subjective point of view, what is involvedis fear. In audit records, assessing the combined risk(IR � CR) formalized for a given item is simply anotherway of referring to the auditor’s fears about this item. Forexample, it is the fact of strongly fearing that there mightbe an anomaly in the stock valuation that leads the auditorto describe the corresponding risk as high.

In some sense, fear can be regarded as the practical,subjective, non-programmable and non-codifiable corol-lary of the notion of risk. From this perspective, researchon the risk society (Beck, 1992) and the explosion of riskmanagement systems implies that we need to considerthe emergence of a society of fear and to examine the pro-liferation of fear management systems. As noted by Power(2007a, p. 129): ‘Reputation has come to be seen as both atrisk and at the limits of conventional management control.

It has become a governing risk object of large organizationsand is infused with both fear and opportunity’. In light ofour analysis, the exacerbated concern with reputationalrisk (a secondary risk) in organizations appears to besymptomatic of a defensive state of mind reminiscent ofthe ostrich policy practiced by auditors. In an attempt torespond to the increasing social demands for corporate so-cial responsibility, a growing number of organizations(among which big audit firms) exorcise their fear of seeingtheir reputation tarnished by adopting hyper-standardized(but also hyper deresponsibilizing) systems for assessingtheir socio-environmental performance or by redefiningthe moral criteria related to the pursuit of their sociallyresponsible agenda to further their own interests (Malsch,2013).

Our analysis of fear helps reconfigure the relationshipbetween comfort, confidence and fear in the audit processfrom the perspective of risk. On one hand, it suggests thatconfidence9 without fear is a risky cocktail for auditors, whowill perhaps not be sufficiently vigilant in carrying out theirmission. On the other hand, it shows that fear without con-fidence is also a dangerous mix, which may induce auditorsto maintain at a distance (and thus ignore) the inherent risksof their responsibilities. Ultimately, a sense of fear curbed byconfidence and a sense of confidence tempered by fear iswhat enables public accountants to develop their practicalintelligence, and thus to become comfortable without over-looking the risks of their job.

These different configurations and their effects high-light the complexity of the ‘emotional labor’ required ofaudit team members. ‘Emotional labor’ refers to the ‘man-agement of feeling to create a publicly observable facialand bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wageand therefore has exchange value’ (Hochschild, 1983, p.7). From this point of view, auditors need to ‘sell’ two con-flicting emotional strategies. They cannot allow them-selves to exhibit excessive self-confidence for fear ofalarming their superiors and colleagues. Yet neither canthey exhibit excessive anxiety, for they might then conveya sense of panic to their clients and colleagues. ‘Auditing isto some extent the wages of fear’, said the senior quoted inthe paper’s epigraph: in exchange for their ‘wages of fear’,auditors are required to perform a subtle but complexwork, having to strike a right balance between containedconfidence and contained fear.

Although it can be difficult, in practice, to distinguishbetween emotional and cognitive activities, the experienceof fear among auditors is a hybrid process. On the onehand, fear is an essentially emotional experience whenauditors are filled with apprehension in foreseeing the‘impossible’ and ‘obscure’ nature of their task. On the otherhand, fear becomes an essentially cognitive experiencewhen they use it as a resource enabling them to remainvigilant.

The cognitive component implies that auditors’ fear is,to a certain extent, manageable. Accordingly, our findingsmay help redirect the discussion surrounding the risk


associated with auditors’ lack of skepticism towards a dif-ferent perspective. Regulatory debates about this issue areoften articulated around two questions: Is skepticism aninnate or acquired condition? Can more be done to pro-mote it? These two questions are obviously related. If pro-fessional skepticism is innate, then much less can be donethan if it is an acquired trait of character. Unsurprisingly,the angle adopted by the accounting industry to addressthe problem is rather technical and normative. For in-stance, the Financial Reporting Council claimed in 2010that the auditing standards had been revised to make themmore rigorous and ‘impose requirements on all auditors toperform certain procedures which, while normally under-taken by a skeptical auditor, were not always performedin practice’ (FRC, 2010, p. 14).

The present study suggests that this normative ap-proach may not be relevant. Since most auditors in thefield experience fear, most should also be ‘naturally’ drivento maintain a relatively high level of professional skepti-cism. Accordingly, the puzzling question should be: whyis it not the case? Our study suggests that when they feeltoo afraid, auditors tend to adopt a number of defensivestrategies enabling them not to think about the audit risksthat have to be managed. Therefore, one part of the solu-tion may lie in encouraging these actors to develop their‘practical intelligence’, helping them handle that which,in their mission, cannot be obtained through the strictexecution of ‘predefined scripts’. No normative approachwill increase significantly auditors’ level of skepticism.‘Accountants can only deal with so much prescriptive com-plexity, and the more of it there is the more pragmaticallythey must approach the rules in order to get anythingdone’ (Gill, 2009, p. 147). What may be required from reg-ulators, audit firms, and maybe the entire society, is a cul-tural revolution: the recognition that the audit mission isan ‘impossible’ one, that norms may have anxiogenic ef-fects, and that ‘audit machines’ (Pentland, 1993) are naïveauditors. This normative conclusion against normativitydoes not mean that risk management is useless and thatnothing can be done. Psychodynamics is a clinical bodyof knowledge. It does not simply help diagnose profes-sional suffering, but also offers ‘‘techniques’’ to relieveand heal. We do not have enough space to explain the lat-ter in more detail, but they certainly constitute a promisingavenue to stimulate alternative thinking on audit riskmanagement.

Risks and fear can find a location in any area of organi-zations’ life (Power, 2007a). Auditors are far from being theonly individuals to experience fear at work when they feel‘beset by risks’. The psychodynamic mechanisms betweenfear and risk also apply to their clients. From that perspec-tive, our study offers challenging implications for auditors’involvement in client risk management. As observed byKnechel (2007, p. 399), an important aspect of a businessrisk approach is the need to interview and interact with awide range of actors within a client’s organization and ‘toreach conclusions about the competence and forthright-ness of specific people. Most auditors are usually morecomfortable judging documents than people. Being human,auditors are susceptible to smooth, honest-sounding an-swers in spite of their technical training and professional

mandate for skepticism’. In his study, Gill (2009, p. 25)notes: ‘Surrounded by performers, my interviewees weresometimes unsure what to believe, and left feeling consid-erable anxiety because they had no way of knowingwhether appearances were meaningful’. As the volume ofaudit evidence derived from ‘client inquiry’ has expandedin a business risk audit, the ability to judge people hasbecome more critical. According to Knechel (2007), thisability develops ‘with experience, maturity and repeatedinteractions among stakeholders’. If one agrees that fearis the emotional marker of risks, then auditors should per-haps be better trained to exert their capacity to assess bothcognitive and affective aspects of their interactions withauditees. In other words, maybe they should learn todetect and interpret signs of fear. Here again, another‘revolution’ is needed to ‘emotionalize’ the approach toknowledge encouraged in universities, accounting firmsand professional bodies. To paraphrase Power (1991, pp.339-340), ‘learning [business risk auditing] is describedto students as similar to learning to ride a bike, i.e. notan intellectual process’, and even less an emotionalexperience.

Conclusion

The purpose of our paper was to contribute to the studyof the emotional dimension of auditing. Relying on an eth-nographic enquiry conducted in the French branch of a BigFour firm and using the psychodynamics of work theory tointerpret the data, we highlighted the key influence of fearin the audit process.

(1) What exactly is it that auditors worry about? Con-fronted with technical knowledge and methodologi-cal standards’ limitations, auditors are neverthelessasked to certify the unknowable (i.e. to turn uncer-tainties into quasi certitudes), while being oftenreminded by the media that a failure on their partcan have serious consequences. This ‘impossiblemission’ creates fear within them. They are afraidof not detecting significant anomalies (a risk alwayspresent in auditing), and feel especially anxiousabout the judgments that they and others may poseover their possible mistakes. Interestingly, theirimage of public accountants as all-powerful profes-sionals, which is constructed and projected by bigaudit firms and professional orders, contrasts withauditors’ own perception of their work.

(2) How do auditors manage fear in the field? Althoughfear is not experienced by these actors all day longand varies in intensity depending on circumstances,auditors have to deal with this emotion and manageit in two different ways. On the one hand, they cul-tivate fear through informal and formal techniquesto stimulate vigilance, encourage self-surpassment,mitigate the anesthetizing effect of habit and main-tain reputation. On the other hand, they strive toalleviate their fear before the end of each auditengagement, in order to form and convey their con-clusions with a certain degree of comfort. In thefield, they finally become comfortable (i.e. quell


their fear) either by mobilizing their ‘practical intel-ligence’ (which helps them handle that which, intheir mission, cannot be obtained through the strictexecution of standardized procedures) or by adopt-ing defensive strategies (such as distancing them-selves from work-related problems, mechanicallyapplying audit methodologies, or relaxing their con-ception of a job well done).

(3) How does fear shape, and how is it shaped by, auditors’work activity? Cultivating fear, mobilizing practicalintelligence or adopting defensive strategies deeplyimpacts auditors’ work. It molds auditors’ concep-tion of standards, interactions with clients, relation-ships with colleagues, and many other aspects of theaudit process, for better or for worse. Unfortunately,public accountants seem to be currently prisoner ofa recursive relation between fear and risk. In auditfirms, attempts to improve audit risks managementpractices today often result in the multiplication offormal procedures tending to increase rather thandecrease auditors’ anxiety and disillusionment. Inthat sense, auditors’ fear can function as a viciouscircle, which, if pushed to its extreme, may turn intoa kind of collective and dangerous blindness. Yet,once again, fear is not a bad emotion per se. Fear isas important for firemen as it is for auditors. To besure, our intention is neither to denigrate fear norto discredit audit, but to show how the emotion offear (and not abstract technique) is a condition ofoperability for auditors in the field. In sum, the mainimplication which falls out of our study is the neces-sity to distinguish between good, functional fear(nurturing practical intelligence) and pathogenicanxiety (triggering defensive strategies).

It is now generally accepted that audit is not simply aneutral technology designed to verify financial informa-tion. We know that it is also, and perhaps above all, asocially constructed process aimed essentially at legitima-tion (Power, 2003). In the early 1990s, Humphrey andMoizer (1990, p. 235) expressed what was at the time aradical view: ‘Above all, audit judgment research needsto start from the premise that professional expertise isnot exogenously determined but is socially constructed’.The present paper contributes to confirm this view. Fear,like any emotion, is not ‘naturally’ imposed on individuals.It is learned. Auditors learn to be afraid, and they learn itthrough a whole range of control and surveillancemechanisms exercised around them and described in thisarticle.

That said, our psychodynamic approach adds a furtherdimension to social constructivism. As noted by Fineman(1993, p. 13):

The social construction of organizations [. . .] is inten-sely subjective and personal. We are informed thatwork organizations, as well as producing goods and ser-vices, are also sites where individuals make meaning forthemselves, and have their meanings shaped. The pro-found emotional basis for this is only hinted at. [. . .]Social constructionism does not ask much about what

is ‘beneath’ the actor’s actions. [. . .] [P]sychodynamictheorists [. . .] have more to contribute here.

The fear experienced by auditors is not only the productof a socially constructed system, external to the individual.It also finds its source in the deep and autonomous struc-tures of subjectivity, and is itself a powerful source of ac-tions informing public accountants’ practices. Resultingfrom the audit process (socially constructed), it deeplyinfluences the social construction of this process in return,in a positive or negative way depending on the context.

By highlighting the way in which fear is shaped by andshapes auditors’ practices, our paper also brings to the forethe important role that the body plays in the audit process.It is through their body that auditors can experience fear,and through their body again, moved and stimulated byfear, that they are able to perceive and manage the risksassociated with their workspace, their work time, theirwork tools, and the controls that they have performed. Inthe field, the practical intelligence that fear sometimestriggers is fundamentally an intelligence of the body.Although it has been largely overlooked in audit research,the body represents, in auditing like in other work activi-ties, an instrument in its own right, on a par with question-naires, matrices, computers, and so on. Even when theyadopt defensive strategies, it is often by maintaining theirbody at a distance from the risks that worry them to muchthat auditors manage not to think about these risks. In thestudy of the social world, attention to the body has beencharacterized as ‘an absent presence’ (Shilling, 1993, p.19). ‘Studies of ‘‘society’’ or ‘‘institutions’’ assume butrarely examine how social practices are embodied and, inthis sense, rely upon human embodiment for their enact-ment’ (Hassard, Holliday, & Willmott, 2000, p. 4). This pa-per is an invitation to bring the body back into research onauditors, not as an instrument of physical labor, but byconsidering how it operates as a medium of organizingpractices.

Notwithstanding their prevailing image as pure minds,auditors are not cold, disembodied machines. The subjec-tive relationship that they maintain with the main ele-ments of their working situations and their institutionalenvironment (Suddaby, 2010) operates through the med-ium of their emotions, feelings, and corporal sensations.Whether it be managing the ambiguity of their mission,the worrying character of their workspaces, the pressureof time (Andersen-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 2005), their ca-reer progression (Kornberger et al., 2011), professional fail-ure (Gendron & Spira, 2010), the adaptation to newmanagement methods (Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Sam-uel, 1998), or the relationship with auditees, auditors areconstantly struggling with their fears, their frustrations,their disappointments, their anger, their joys, and manyother kinds of emotions and perceptions. Where work ischaracterized as ‘mental’, as is typically the case with audi-tors, ‘the study of organizational behavior tends to repre-sent human beings as cognitive processors comprisingperceptions and motivations who design structures andmanage meanings. [. . .] Such understandings pay scantattention to how thoughts and feelings, body and mind,sentiment and calculation are bound together even as they


are dissociated from each other’ (Hassard et al., 2000, p. 4).It is our hope that this study will promote discussion of theembodied and emotional quality of auditing in a way thatcounteracts the tendency to represent public accountants‘as bloodless designers or executors of organizational func-tions’ (Hassard et al., 2000, p. 12).

In empirical terms, the research program that we wishto initiate includes four main areas. The first area involvesrefining our analysis. The experience of fear at work variesaccording to the nature of the risks involved: an electricianspecialized in high tension lines is afraid of being electro-cuted, a surgeon is fearful of not performing a successfuloperation, and an office clerk may worry about being un-able to reach the deadline for submitting a report requiredby her superior. It also varies according to temper, ability,and the level of knowledge that an actor has of her envi-ronment (Douglas, 1992; Freud, 1920). Last but not least,size could also be an important variable for fear, with audi-tors of large clients – ‘‘too big to audit’’ - being perhapsmore fearful than others. In sum, the intensity of auditors’fear may vary according to their responsibilities, the orga-nizational environment in which they perform their task,and their level of knowledge. In this respect, further re-search is required to provide a more detailed descriptionand understanding of the experience of fear among audi-tors based on client’s features or on characteristics suchas auditors’ professional rank, gender, personality type, etc.

The second area involves extending the study of publicaccountants’ fear to closely related emotions such as guiltand shame that also play an important role in work prac-tices. Like fear, guilt and shame are located at the intersec-tion of the psychological and the social. On the one hand,they are caused by a collapse of self-esteem. On the otherhand, they are related to a social situation in which a neg-ative image of the self is given by another person. As such,they are among the mechanisms that generate a conscious-ness of alterity, while triggering at the same time anawareness of the self through fear and confrontation withthe disapproval of others (Goffman, 1990; Nussbaum,2010). In this sense, guilt and shame are not only a mani-festation of the logic of social differentiation, but also apowerful manifestation of the power and domination is-sues governing social relationships in work settings (Bour-dieu, 1977). Social violence and humiliation are common inworkplaces (Czarniawska, 2008; Hershcovis, 2011; Neu-man & Baron, 1998). What role do guilt and shame playin audit firms? How are these key affective mechanismsof self-control and social regulation constructed in thework environment of public accountants? To what extentdo accounting systems contribute to stigmatizing certainsocial categories, thus causing humiliation?

The third area involves examining the relationship be-tween the institutional structures of firms and control sys-tems on the one hand and the experience of fear on theother hand. As we showed, fear is not only an emotion: itis also a culture (Tudor, 2003). Institutionalized beliefand value systems represent an important source of differ-ence, not only between cultures, but also between organi-zations (Douglas, 1992; Power, 2007b). The attribution ofblame and failure – something which has not spared theaccounting profession in recent years (Guénin-Paracini &

Gendron, 2010) – varies from one organization to another(Malsch et al., 2012), from one accounting firm to another,and from one control system to another. What types ofcontrol systems lead to what types of fear? Do certainaccounting systems promote a culture of fear more thanothers? How do the experience of fear and its effects varyfrom one system to another?

The last area implies a more general consideration ofthe political role of accounting and control systems in theproduction and management of fear. In discussing theseminal paper by Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, andNahapiet (1980), Richard Mason (1980, p. 29) made the fol-lowing comment:

In social systems, uncertainty breeds anxiety. Account-ing information serves the social purpose of abating andobjectifying anxiety in a manner similar to the processof institutionalization, rationalization and the establish-ment of symbolic order. In sum, the role of the account-ing profession in society is to absorb uncertainty and toabate social anxiety.

Emotions are not politically neutral. Some emotionsweigh heavily on the organization and health of our dem-ocratic environment: ‘When we meet in society, if we havenot learned [. . .] imagining in one another inner faculties ofthought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, becausedemocracy is built upon respect and concern, and these inturn are built upon the [emotional ability] to see other peo-ple as equal human beings’ (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 6). Fear isan extremely powerful emotional resource from a politicalperspective (Goodwin et al., 2001). It is by exploiting orplaying on fear and defeatism that dangerous ideologiesare able to gain legitimacy and to achieve a degree of nor-mality. It is also by conquering their fear that some actorsfind the courage to stand up to oppression. If, as suggestedby Mason (1980), accounting and control systems are sys-tems designed to alleviate fear, it follows that the account-ing profession has a responsibility to ensure that thesesystems can be used emotionally, not only as instrumentsof domination, but also as levers of democratic action.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the practitioners who participated inthis study. We benefited from the constant support andencouragements provided by Yves Gendron and JoniYoung. We also feel deeply indebted to reviewers’ insight-ful comments. We thank participants at the IPA 2009Emerging Scholars Colloquium for their challengingremarks.

References

Ahrens, T., & Mollona, M. (2007). Organisational control as culturalpractice – A shop floor ethnography of a Sheffield steel mill.Accounting, Organizations and Society, 32, 305–331.

Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2001). Tests of time:Organizational time-reckoning and the making of accountants intwo multi-national accounting firms. Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 26, 99–122.

Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2005). ‘Helping them toforget’. The organizational embedding of gender relations in publicaudit firms. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 30, 469–490.

http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0361-3682(14)00017-8/h0005











André, C. (2009). Les états d’âme. Un apprentissage de la sérénité. Paris:Odile Jacob.

Ashforth, B. E., & Humphrey, R. H. (1995). Emotion in the workplace: Areappraisal. Human Relations, 48, 97–125.

Audia, P. G., Locke, E. A., & Smith, K. G. (2000). The paradox of success: Anarchival and a laboratory study of strategic persistence followingradical environmental change. Academy of Management Journal, 43,837–853.

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Barrett, M., Cooper, D. J., & Jamal, J. (2005). Globalization and the

coordinating of work in multinational audits. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 30, 1–24.

Barsade, S. G., & Gibson, D. E. (2007). Why does affect matter inorganizations? Academy of Management Perspectives, 21, 36–59.

Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press.Beard, V. (1994). Popular culture and professional identity:

Accountants in the movies. Accounting, Organizations and Society,19, 303–318.

Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.Beck, U. (2006). Living in the world risk society. Economy and Society, 35,

329–345.Bergson, H. (1907). L’évolution créatrice. Paris: Presse Universitaire de

France.Bhattacharjee, S., & Moreno, K. (2002). The impact of affective information

on the professional judgments of more experienced and lessexperienced auditors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15,361–377.

Bougen, P. D. (1994). Joking apart: The serious side to the accountantstereotype. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 19, 319–335.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Remarques provisoires sur la perception sociale ducorps. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 14, 51–54.

Burchell, S., Clubb, C., Hopwood, A. G., Hughes, J., & Nahapiet, J. (1980).The roles of accounting in organizations and society. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 5, 5–27.

Carpenter, B., & Dirsmith, M. (1993). Sampling and the abstraction ofknowledge in the auditing profession: An extended institutionaltheory perspective. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 18, 41–63.

Carrington, T., & Catasús, B. (2007). Auditing stories about discomfort:Becoming comfortable with comfort theory. European AccountingReview, 1, 35–58.

Choo, F. (1986). Job stress, job performance, and auditor personalitycharacteristics. Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, 5, 17–34.

Chung, J. O. Y., Cohen, J. R., & Monroe, G. S. (2008). The effect of moods onauditors’ inventory valuation decisions. Auditing: A Journal of Practice& Theory, 27, 137–159.

Cianci, A. M., & Bierstaker, J. L. (2009). The impact of positive and negativemood on the hypothesis generation and ethical judgments ofauditors. Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, 28, 119–144.

Covaleski, M. A., Dirsmith, M. W., Heian, J. B., & Samuel, S. (1998). Thecalculated and the avowed: Techniques of discipline and strugglesover identity in Big Six public accounting firms. Administrative ScienceQuarterly, 43, 293–327.

Curtis, E., & Turley, S. (2007). The business risk audit – A longitudinal casestudy of an audit engagement. Accounting, Organizations and Society,32, 439–461.

Czarniawska, B. (2008). Humiliation: A standard organizational product?Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 19, 1034–1053.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the humanbrain. New York: Putnam.

Dejours, C. (1980). Anxieté et travail. Travail et Emploi, 5, 29–42.Dejours, C. (1993). Travail usure mentale: De la psychopathologie à la

psychodynamique du travail. Paris: Bayard Éditions.Dejours, C. (2005). Le facteur humain. Paris: Presse Universitaire de France.Demaegdt, C. (2008). Méfiance, violence et sexualisation secondaire dans

le métier de surveillance. Travailler, 20, 77–97.Dent, J. F. (1991). Accounting and organizational cultures: A field study of

the emergence of a new organizational reality. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 16, 705–732.

Dimnik, T., & Felton, S. (2006). Accountant stereotypes in moviesdistributed in North America in the twentieth century. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 31, 129–155.

Dirsmith, M. W., Heian, J. B., & Covalevski, M. A. (1997). Structure andagency in an institutionalized setting: The application and socialtransformation of control in the Big Six. Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 22, 1–27.

Domagalski, T. A. (1999). Emotion in organizations: Main currents.Human Relations, 52, 833–852.

Douesnard, J., & Saint-Arnaud, L. (2011). Le travail des pompier: Un métierau service de l’autre. Travailler, 26, 35–53.

Douglas, M. (1992). Risk and blame: Essays in cultural theory. London:Routledge.

Eisenhardt, R. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research.Academy of Management Review, 14, 532–550.

Financial Reporting Council (2010). Auditor skepticism: Raising the bar.Discussion paper. <http://www.frc.org.uk/getattachment/2a1e0146-a92c-4b7e-bf33-305b3b10fcd2/Discussion-Paper-Auditor-Scepticism-Raising-the-Ba.aspx> (last consultation on 10.09.13).

Fineman, S. (1993). Organizations as emotional arenas. In S. Finenam(Ed.), Emotion in organizations (pp. 9–35). London: Sage Publications.

Fineman, S. (1996). Emotion and organizing. In S. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W.Nord (Eds.), The handbook of organization studies (pp. 543–564).Califormia: Sage publications.

Fischer, M. J. (1996). ‘‘Real-izing’’ the benefits of new technologies as asource of audit evidence: An interpretive field study. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 21, 219–242.

Flam, H. (1993). Fear, loyalty and greedy organizations. In S. Fineman(Ed.), Emotion in Organizations (pp. 58–75). London: Sage.

Fogarty, T. J., Singh, J., Rhoads, G. K., & Moore, R. K. (2000). Antecedentsand consequences of burnout in accounting: Beyond the role stressmodel. Behavioral Research in Accounting, 12, 31–67.

Francis, J. R. (1994). Auditing, hermeneutics, and subjectivity. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 19, 235–269.

Freud, S. (1920). A general introduction to psychoanalysis. New York: Boniand Liveright.

Freud, S. (1961). Analysis terminable and interminable. In J. Strachey(Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works ofSigmund Freud (pp. 209–253). London: Hogarth Press. Original workpublished 1937.

Furedi, F. (1997). The culture of fear: Risk taking and the morality of lowexpectations. London: Cassell.

Furedi, F. (2007). The only thing we have to fear is the ‘culture of fear’itself. Spiked. <http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/3053#.Ui4VbRbbWQs> (last consultation on 10.09.13).

Garcia, A., & Herrbach, O. (2010). Organisational commitment, roletension and affective states in audit firms. Managerial AuditingJournal, 25, 226–239.

Gendron, Y., & Bédard, J. (2006). On the constitution of audit committeeeffectiveness. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 31, 211–239.

Gendron, Y., & Spira, L. F. (2009). What went wrong? The downfall ofArthur Andersen and the construction of controllability boundariessurrounding financial auditing. Contemporary Accounting Research, 26,987–1027.

Gendron, Y., & Spira, L. F. (2010). Identity narratives under threat: A studyof former members of Arthur Andersen. Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 35, 275–300.

Geuser de, F. (2006). Travail du manager et ergonomie des instruments degestion. PhD thesis, HEC Paris, France.

Gill, M. (2009). Accountant’s truth. Knowledge and ethics in the financialworld. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory:Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine PublishingCompany.

Glassner, B. (1999). The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of thewrong things. New York: Basic.

Goffman, E. (1990). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity.London: Penguin Group.

Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2001). Passionate politics: Emotionsand social movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Guénin-Paracini, H., & Gendron, Y. (2010). Auditors as modernpharmakoi: Legitimacy paradoxes and the production of economicorder. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 21, 134–158.

Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, R. (1983). Ethnography: Principles in practice.New York: Routledge.

Hassard, J., Holliday, R., & Willmott, H. (2000). Introduction. In J. Hassard,R. Holliday, & H. Willmott (Eds.), Body and organization (pp. 1–14).London: Sage.

Henry, M. (1987). La barbarie. Paris: Grasset.Hershcovis, S. M. (2011). ‘‘Incivility, social undermining, bullying...oh

my!’’: A call to reconcile constructs within workplace aggressionresearch. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32, 499–519.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of humanfeeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (1997). The risk society in an age of anxiety:Situating fear and crime. The British Journal of Sociology, 48, 255–266.

Hood, C. (2011). The blame game: Spin, bureaucracy, and self-preservation ingovernment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hopwood, A. G. (1996). Introduction. Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 21, 217–218.




















































































http://www.frc.org.uk/getattachment/2a1e0146-a92c-4b7e-bf33-305b3b10fcd2/Discussion-Paper-Auditor-Scepticism-Raising-the-Ba.aspx


























http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/3053#.Ui4VbRbbWQs

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/3053#.Ui4VbRbbWQs













































Hopwood, A. G. (1998). Exploring the modern audit firm: An introduction.Accounting, Organizations and Society, 23, 515–516.

Humphrey, C. (2008). Auditing research: A review across the disciplinarydivide. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 21, 170–203.

Humphrey, C., & Moizer, P. (1990). From techniques to ideologies: Analternative perspective on the audit function. Critical Perspectives onAccounting, 1, 217–238.

Jackall, R. (1988). Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Klein, M. (1981). Love, guilt and reparation and other works. London:Hogarth Press.

Knechel, R. W. (2007). The business risk audit: Origins, obstacles andopportunities. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 4(5), 383–408.

Kornberger, M., Justesen, L., & Mouritsen, J. (2011). ‘When you makemanager, we put a big mountain in front of you’: An ethnography ofmanagers in a Big 4 Accounting Firm. Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 36, 514–533.

Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA:Sage.

Lupton, D. (1999). Risks. London: Routledge.Maitlis, S., & Ozcelik, H. (2004). Toxic decision processes: A study of

emotion and organizational decision making. Organization Science, 15,375–393.

Malsch, B. (2013). Politicizing the expertise of the accounting industry inthe realm of corporate social responsibility. Accounting, Organizationand Society, 38, 149–168.

Malsch, B., & Gendron, Y. (2011). Reining in auditors: On the dynamics ofpower surrounding an ‘‘innovation’’ in the regulatory space.Accounting, Organizations and Society, 36, 456–476.

Malsch, B., & Gendron, Y. (2013). Re-theorizing change: Institutionalexperimentation and the struggle for domination in the field of publicaccounting. Journal of Management Studies, 5, 871–899.

Malsch, B., Tremblay, M.-S., & Gendron, Y. (2012). Sense-making incompensation committees: A cultural theory perspective.Organization Studies, 33, 389–421.

Mason, R. O. (1980). Discussion of the roles of accounting in organizationsand society. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 5, 29–30.

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and society, 2, 70–88.McGivern, G., & Ferlie, E. (2007). Playing tick-box games: Interrelating

defenses in professional appraisal. Human Relations, 60, 1361–1385.McNair, C. J. (1991). Proper compromises: The management control

dilemma in public accounting and its impact on auditor behavior.Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16, 635–653.

McPhail, K. (2004). An emotional response to the state of accountingeducation: Developing accounting students’ emotional intelligence.Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 15, 629–648.

Menzies-Lyth, I. (1960). Social systems as a defense against anxiety.Human Relations, 13, 95–121.

Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: Anextended sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Miller, D. (1992). Le paradoxe d’Icare. Comment les grandes entreprises setuent à réussir. Paris: Eska.

Moulinié, V. (2004). Peur, méfiance et défi face à la machine. Terrain,Revue d’ethnologie de l’Europe, 43, 47–62.

Nelson, M., & Tan, H. T. (2005). Judgment and decision making research inauditing: A task, person, and interpersonal interaction perspective.Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, 24, 41–71.

Neuman, J. H., & Baron, R. A. (1998). Workplace violence and workplaceaggression: Evidence concerning specific forms, potential causes, andpreferred targets. Journal of Management, 24, 394–419.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit. Oxford: Princeton University Press.O’Dwyer, B. (2011). The case of sustainability assurance: Constructing a

new assurance service. Contemporary Accounting Research, 28,1230–1266.

Oswald, W. G., Schoepfle, G. M., & Ahern, J. (1987). Systematic fieldwork.Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative evaluation and research methods.Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Pentland, B. T. (1993). Getting comfortable with the numbers: Auditingand the micro-production of macro order. Accounting, Organizationsand Society, 18, 605–620.

Pentland, B. T. (2000). Will auditors take over the world? Program,technique and the verification of everything. Accounting, Organizationsand Society, 25, 307–312.

Power, M. (1991). Educating accountants: Towards a critical ethnography.Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16, 333–353.

Power, M. (1992). From common sense to expertise: Reflections on theprehistory of audit sampling. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17,37–62.

Power, M. (1999). The Audit Society: Rituals of verification. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Power, M. (2003). Auditing and the production of legitimacy. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 28, 379–394.

Power, M. (2007a). Organized uncertainty: Designing a world of riskmanagement. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Power, M. (2007b). Business risk auditing–debating the history of itspresent. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 32, 379–382.

Power, M. (2009). The risk management of nothing. Accounting,Organizations and Society, 34, 849–855.

Putman, L. L., & Mumby, D. K. (1993). Organizations, emotion and themyth of rationality. In S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in organizations(pp. 36–57). London: Sage Publications.

Radcliffe, V. S. (1999). Knowing efficiency: The enactment of efficiency inefficiency auditing. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 24, 333–362.

Roberts, J. (2009). No one is perfect: The limits of transparency and anethic for ‘intelligent’ accountability. Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 34, 957–970.

Sarens, G., De Beelde, I., & Everaert, P. (2009). Internal audit: A comfortprovider to the audit committee. The British Accounting Review, 41,90–106.

Schafer, B. (2003). Affect and accountability in auditor judgment. PhD thesis,University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.

Schepens, F. (2005). Error is human, not professional: Lumberjacks andaccidents. Sociologie de travail, 1, 1–16.

Scherer, K. R. (2005). What are emotions? And how can they bemeasured? Social Science Information, 44, 695–729.

Shilling, C. (1993). The body and social theory. London: Sage Publications.Skærbæk, P. (2009). Public sector auditor identities in making efficiency

auditable: The National Audit Office of Denmark as independentauditor and modernizer. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34,971–987.

Smith, K. J., Derrick, P. L., & Koval, M. R. (2010). Stress and its antecedentsand consequences in accounting settings: An empirically derivedtheoretical model. Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research, 13,113–142.

Spira, L. F. (2002). The audit committee: Performing corporate governance.London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Spradley, J. P. (1979). The ethnographic interview. New York: Holt, Rinehartand Winston.

Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York: Holt, Rinehartand Winston.

Startup, H. M., & Davey, G. C. L. (2003). Inflated responsibility and the useof stop rules for catastrophic worrying. Behaviour Research andTherapy, 41, 495–503.

Stevens, A. (1990). On Jung. London: Routledge.Suddaby, R. (2010). Challenges for institutional theory. Journal of

Management Inquiry, 19, 14–20.Trompette, P., & Caroly, S. (2004). En apparté avec les morts. . . Peur,

larmes et rire au travail: Les métiers du funéraire. Terrain, Revued’ethnologie de l’Europe, 43, 63–84.

Tudor, A. (2003). A (macro) Sociology of Fear? The Sociological Review, 51,248–256.

Van Maanen, J. (1979). Qualitative methodology. Beverly Hills: Sage.Werner, O., & Schoepfle, G. M. (1987). Systematic Fieldwork. Beverly Hills:

Sage.Wisner, A. (1995). Réflexions sur l’ergonomie (1962–1995). Toulouse:

Octarès.Wollheim, R. (1971). Freud. Glasgow: Fontana.








































































































































