FEAR AND RISK IN THE AUDIT PROCESS
Henri Guénin-Paracini, CPA, CGA, Ph.D.
Université Laval
2325, rue de la Terrasse
Bureau 5234
Québec (Québec)
Canada G1V 0A6
Email: [email protected]
Bertrand Malsch, MBA, Ph.D.
Queen’s School of Business
140, Union Street
Kingston (Ontario)
Canada K7L 3N6
E-mail: [email protected]
Anne Marché Paillé, Ph.D.
Ghent University
Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting
H. Dunantlaan 2
9000 Ghent
Belgium
Email: [email protected]
Corresponding author: Henri Guénin-Paracini
January 2014
We are grateful to the practitioners who participated in this study. We benefited from the constant
support and encouragements provided by Yves Gendron and Joni Young. We also feel deeply
indebted to reviewers’ insightful comments. We thank participants at the IPA 2009 Emerging
Scholars Colloquium for their challenging remarks.
1
FEAR AND RISK IN THE AUDIT PROCESS
Abstract
Relying on an ethnographic study conducted in the French branch of a big audit firm and using 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 the rest of the time,
public accountants are inhabited primarily by fear. Fear plays a crucial but ambivalent role in
auditing. On one hand, auditors and audit firms cultivate this feeling through informal and formal
techniques to stimulate vigilance, encourage self-surpassment, mitigate the anesthetizing effect of
habit and maintain reputation. On the other hand, audit teams’ members strive to alleviate their
fear in order to form and convey their conclusions with a certain degree of comfort. In the field,
driven by fear, they manage to finally become comfortable either by mobilizing their ‘practical
intelligence’ (an intelligence of the body which helps them handle that which, in their mission,
cannot be obtained through the strict execution of standardized procedures) or by adopting
defensive strategies (such as distancing themselves from work-related problems, mechanically
applying audit methodologies or relaxing their conception of a job well done). Fear and risk are
closely related phenomena. Michael Power (2007a, p. 180) notes that ‘the significant driver 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 most often overlooked in the
literature. In this respect, our study contributes to ‘emotionalize’ and challenge the cognitive and
technical orientation adopted by most academics and regulators in their understanding of audit
risks and auditors’ scepticism. We also discuss a number of avenues for future research with a
view to encouraging further examination of the role that emotions play in the audit process.
Keywords: Auditors; Fear; Risk; Practical intelligence; Defensive strategies.
1
FEAR AND RISK IN THE AUDIT PROCESS
Introduction
Comfort [...] is what you feel at the end of an audit, when you’re just about certain that
you’ve done your job properly. But you spend the rest of the time feeling anxious. [...].
As an auditor, if you have even a modicum of professional conscientiousness, you just
can’t avoid caring about your job. In some ways, that’s what we’re paid to do. Our lives
aren’t at risk, that’s true, but if I may draw on my taste in movies, I’d say auditing is to
some extent the wages of fear.1 (One senior interviewed during the study)
As argued by Maitlis and Ozcelik (2004, p. 375), ‘we now widely accept organizations as
“emotional arenas” (Fineman, 1993, p. 9) and acknowledge the emotionally saturated nature of
people’s work experience (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995)’. Barsade and Gibson (2007, p. 36) note
that ‘[i]n the last 30 years, an “affective revolution” has taken place, in which academics and
managers alike have begun to appreciate how an organizational lens that integrates employee
affect provides a perspective missing from earlier views’.
In the field of auditing, this ‘revolution’ has yet to occur. One of the most widespread
accounting stereotypes still depicts the auditor as an actor who is almost entirely devoid of
feeling (see e.g., Beard, 1994; Bougen, 1994; Dimnik & Felton, 2006). This image is reinforced
by the ‘emotional labor’ (Hochschild, 1983) in which most auditors are asked to engage in order
to project and maintain an aura of professionalism at work: ‘because accounting work is
interpersonal, the adoption of an unemotional attitude is actually part of the work and of course
“unemotional” is a misnomer for a particular emotional orientation, that of a professionalseeming coolness consistent with technocracy’ (Gill, 2009, p. 34). On the evidence of
professional audit standards, audit work only appears to involve emotionless methods of
algorithmic reasoning (Francis, 1994). And academic papers devoted to investigating the
emotional dimension of public accounting remain extremely rare (McPhail, 2004; Nelson & Tan,
2005), with the exception of those examining the causes and/or consequences of auditors’ (role)
stress (Smith, Derrick, & Koval, 2010).
For example, in the prolific audit judgment and decision-making (JDM) literature, only
four studies (based on laboratory experiments) have, to our knowledge, examined the impact of
affective states on the formation of audit opinions. Bhattacharjee and Moreno (2002) established
that when provided with irrelevant, negative affective information, inexperienced public
accountants tend to overestimate the risk of inventory obsolescence, while experienced
professionals do not. Schafer (2003) reached a similar conclusion in respect of the fraud risk
assessment. Chung, Cohen and Monroe (2008) demonstrated that positive-mood auditors have
the lowest consensus and make the least conservative judgments when required to evaluate
inventories. Finally, Cianci and Bierstaker (2009) indicated that public accountants in a negative
mood often make poor ethical decisions.
Importantly, the above-mentioned studies are not only few in number: like most of the
papers that have addressed the issue of stress in auditing, they also tend to present affective states
1
A film by Henri-Georges Clouzot (1953).
2
as being mainly disruptive. 2 The assumption is that feelings are the antithesis of rationality.
However, this assumption has been strongly challenged for at least two decades. As shown by
many researches, affect and reason – far from being antinomic – are in fact interrelated (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 themselves profoundly
influenced by our working environment (Domagalski, 1999; Fineman, 1996). From this
perspective, emotions need to be thought of as a vital and permanent aspect of the workplace – an
aspect that shapes, and is shaped by, organizational processes, through various means requiring
further examination.
In this area, audit research has made scant progress. Although the survey by Garcia and
Herrbach (2010) found that the audit environment produces a wide range of pleasant and
unpleasant feelings among auditors, the way in which these feelings mold, and are molded by, the
audit process remains under-researched. Since Humphrey and Moizer (1990), who were the first
to emphasize the importance of ‘gut feel’ in auditor decision-making, only a small number of
studies have increased our understanding of the subject: Pentland (1993) showed that public
accountants cannot form an audit opinion without ‘getting comfortable’ and that acting
ritualistically enables them to reach this affective state; Carrington and Catasús (2007) added that
the production of comfort in audit teams requires ‘acts of creativity’ to remove a sufficient
‘amount’ of discomfort; some studies have drawn on these analyses to better understand the
functioning of audit committees (Gendron & Bédard, 2006; Sarens, De Beelde, & Everaert, 2009;
Spira, 2002); but beyond this, very little research has been conducted to enhance our awareness
of the affective dimension of the audit process.
Yet comfort constitutes only a small part of the emotional experience of public
accountants. This became particularly apparent to us in the course of an ethnographic study
conducted in the French branch of a big audit firm, aimed at better understanding the work
performed by auditors in the field. We found Pentland’s (1993) paper truly stimulating and
sometimes observed auditors talking about comfort and looking relieved, but in the audit teams
we monitored, signs of comfort nevertheless remained relatively rare. Instead, it was not
uncommon for us to see our informants frowning, turning a bit pale or red, biting their nails,
shaking their legs, getting irritable, looking drawn, sweating, taking pills against stomach ache,
holding their breath, double checking one thing or the other, and so forth. Altogether, these
behaviors were in our eyes more suggestive of concern than comfort, and our semi-structured
interviews confirmed this interpretation.
As stated by the senior quoted in the epigraph, in real audit settings, comfort only arises at
the very end of the audit task. ‘The rest of the time’, auditors seek to feel comfortable, but are
generally inhabited primarily by fear. Of course, fear is not experienced by them all day long and
varies in intensity from individual to individual and depending on the circumstances. It may
simply take the form of a slight disquiet or degenerate into an oppressive anxiety. However, in
general, public accountants have to deal with this emotion. The present paper aims to provide a
better understanding of the role of fear in audit practice, focusing specifically on the following
2
Admittedly, a few articles examining the outcomes of auditor stress have underlined the positive effects that a
moderate level of stress can have in auditing (see e.g., Choo, 1986; Fogarty et al., 2000). However, the fact remains
that there tends to be far more emphasis in the audit literature on the negative consequences of stress.
3
questions: 1) What exactly is it that auditors worry about? 2) How do auditors manage fear in
the field? 3) How does fear shape, and how is it shaped by, auditors’ work activity?
To interpret our empirical data and present our results, we mainly used the
psychodynamics of work theory developed by Dejours (1993). In adopting a perspective at once
psychological and socio-constructionist, this theory provides an interesting insight into the
interplay of fear and work activity. Drawing on field studies conducted in a range of industries,
Dejours (1993) argues that ‘fear is present in all kinds of professional tasks, including in […]
office jobs’ (p. 81). He highlights the reasons why working generally tends to be a source of fear
and indicates how this feeling usually shapes, and is shaped by, official work prescriptions and
unofficial techniques and processes. Based on Dejours’s rich and well-documented reflections,
the present study of fear in auditing may be seen in some sense as a psychodynamic interpretation
of audit work. In this respect, our findings are not entirely specific to the audit profession. To a
large extent, they reflect what working involves in practice and resonate with the findings of
many studies of fear conducted in other sectors of activity. 3 In a sense, this reinforces the
plausibility of our results and provides ‘a reminder that financial auditing is 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 needs therefore to be seen as exploratory.
In the post-Enron climate and after the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act – which is
the time and regulatory context of our field study – the professional risks associated with auditing
and the non-accounting consequences of sensitive audit decisions have increased dramatically
(Malsch & Gendron, 2013). Being attentive to news, calculating, learning from experience and
making decisions on the basis of a mix of trust and distrust, the average auditor has found himself
‘beset by risks’ (Gill, 2009, p. 82). Would his firm lose the audit? Would his reputation be
damaged? Would his career suffer? If one considers that fear is the emotional experience of risk,
our observations suggesting that this emotion is largely experienced by auditors in the field
should hardly come as a surprise: fear and risk are closely related phenomena (Furedi, 2007).
Lupton notes (1999, p. 17) that ‘risk has come to stand as one of the focal points of feelings of
fear, anxiety and uncertainty’, while Power (2007a, p. 180) observes that ‘the significant driver of
the managerialization of risk management is an institutional fear and anxiety’. Yet, while
generally associated with the perception of risk, the subjective experience of fear and the role that
fear plays in risk management processes are most often overlooked in the literature. The focus
tends to remain on the notion of risk rather than on the study of fear. In this respect, our analysis
on the role fear plays in the audit process aims to ‘emotionalize’ and challenge the dominant
cognitive orientation adopted by academics and regulators in their understanding of audit risks
and auditors’ skepticism. It is designed as a response to the many recent calls for a richer
understanding of actual audit practice, which remains poorly understood (e.g. Gendron & Spira,
2009; Hopwood, 1996, 1998; Humphrey, 2008; O’Dwyer, 2011; Power, 2003; Skaerbek, 2009).
Ultimately, it contributes to the growing interpretive literature seeking to ‘question rationalized
accounts of the audit judgement process, and to explore the complex “back stage” of practice in
its social and organizational context’ (Power, 2003, pp. 379-380).
3
The question of the dynamics of fear in the workplace has been examined, for example, in studies of managers (De
Geuser, 2006; Flam, 1993; Jackall, 1988), nurses (Menzies-Lyth, 1960), firefighters (Douesnard & Saint-Arnaud,
2010), construction workers (Dejours, 1993), fighter pilots (Dejours, 1993), funeral staff (Trompette & Caroly,
2004), lumberjacks (Schepens, 2005), prison guards (Demaegdt, 2008), workers in the petrochemical industry,
workers in the nuclear industry (Dejours, 1993), warehousemen and railroaders (Moulinié, 2004), etc.
4
The remainder of the article begins by providing a detailed outline of our research
methods, before expounding our theoretical lens in more depth. Four sections are then devoted to
presenting the results of our analysis, and the implications of the latter are finally discussed.
Research methods
Data collection
The data reported and analyzed in this paper were collected as part of a grounded interpretive
field study (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Van Maanen, 1979) on the work performed by auditors in
the course of their assignments. The broad objective of the study was to identify and better
understand key aspects of audit practice that official audit prescriptions do not address.
As part of this goal, we secured the consent of the French branch of a Big Four firm (CAB) to
observe several of its audit teams in their work. The precise number of audits to be observed was
not determined in advance. It was agreed that we would examine as many audits as necessary to
reach theoretical saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Ultimately, a total of 7 audit teams,
including 44 auditors (9 partners, 5 managers, 11 seniors and 19 assistants), were monitored in
real time in June and July 2002 and between November 2003 and July 2004. The main criteria
used for their selection was one of diversity (in terms of industry, firm and audit team size,
geography, engagement type and duration).
In May 2002, as a preamble to our fieldwork, we began by examining the various rules
imposed on French auditors by the CNCC (Compagnie nationale des commissaires aux comptes)
and the state, as well as the formal prescriptions in force within CAB. We focused in particular
on the audit methodology, the standards of documentation, the evaluation criteria and the roles
imposed by the Big Four on its employees. The following month, we were ready to begin the
monitoring process, which included participant observation (Spradley, 1980), examinations of
work papers, informal discussions and semi-structured interviews (Spradley, 1979).
We observed auditors at work during 50 of the 88 days they took to complete their tasks,
yielding 455 hours of observation (9.1 hours on average per day) and 557 pages of handwritten
notes (see Table 1). As noted by Ahrens and Mollona (2007, p. 312), compared to inquiries based
solely on interviews, ‘ethnographies can lay more credible claim towards studying organisational
practices’, partly because direct observation makes it possible to ‘study taken-for-granted aspects
of […] [work] on which organisational members could not report, and to exploit the revealing
tensions between what organisational members say and do’ (p. 310).
[Insert Table 1 here]
To ensure that we did not miss any significant events in the course of the monitoring process, we
were always present at the beginning and end of each audit examined and only chose not to come
at other times during the audits when we thought that nothing new would occur in our absence.
The days we spent with the informants were very intense. We remained with the
participants when they were all in their client’s boardroom, accompanied those who went to see
an auditee or to have a coffee, and lunched where and when the teams chose to lunch. Whenever
an audit was performed in a provincial location, we made the trip with the auditors involved,
stayed with them throughout the duration of their assignment, shared their informal social
activities, and slept in the same hotel. In the field, we were often prompted to ask our informants
5
for clarifications, ‘in the heat of the action’, about their specific goals, the techniques they used,
the feelings they experienced, etc.
Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 31 auditors from the audit firm (4
partners, 3 managers, 8 seniors and 16 assistants). Apart from 2 seniors and 3 partners, all these
auditors worked for the teams monitored during the study. Overall, the total duration of the
interviews amounted to 38 hours, summarized in Table 2. Interviews were always conducted
outside the audited companies at the end of audit tasks and lasted approximately 1 hour. In the
course of the interviews, the auditors were invited to assess the validity of our observations and to
highlight important features of the audit that we had failed to notice. They were encouraged to
elaborate on key aspects of their job and to provide us with information that would have been
impossible to collect through visual inspection (concerning, for example, what they had thought
or felt at critical moments). We did not hesitate to question what they were telling us and strongly
encouraged them to challenge our own analyses. In other words, each interview was an
opportunity to collect supplementary data, to highlight the themes that actors considered more or
less significant, and to correct and enrich our interpretation of our field notes.
[Insert Table 2 here]
Throughout the research process, various precautions were taken to ensure that the collected data
were reliable and valid. To gain the trust of our informants, we took care to clarify the objectives
of the study. We insisted that we were researchers and not ‘auditors of auditors’ in the pay of the
Big Four; that our goal was to better understand audit work as performed in the field with a view
to producing several research papers; that complete confidentiality and anonymity were
guaranteed;4 that our study would be an opportunity for them to reflect on their work habits; and
that they would hopefully gain a new perspective on their practices. Ultimately, the significant
amount of time we spent living with auditors enabled us to develop genuine relationships with
them (Patton, 2002). Apart from 3 individuals who remained somewhat on the defensive, all the
participants gladly cooperated in the study.
In addition, the use of multiple methods of data collection, the diversity of the audits
examined and the vast array of auditors observed and interviewed enabled us to check our data
through triangulation (Eisenhardt, 1989; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). For example, participant
observation was used as a means of questioning and contextualizing the comments of
interviewees, while interviews served to supplement, confirm or refute our observations (member
checking; Werner & Schoepfle, 1987). Overall, these precautions enabled us to collect evidence
deemed credible enough to be considered for theorizing.
Data analysis
The collected material was analyzed using qualitative procedures (Eisenhardt, 1989; Miles &
Huberman, 1994). Following the suggestions of many researchers (Hammersley & Atkinson,
1983; Oswald, Schoepfle, & Ahern, 1987; Spradley, 1979), we prepared analytical notes on a
very regular basis – i.e. at the end of each day of observation, interview, and audit. This enabled
us to ‘gradually […] develop an empathy with the data’ (Dent, 1991, p. 711) and to continuously
revise our understanding of them.
To fulfil this promise, we will use the broad categories ‘assistant’, ‘senior auditor’, ‘manager’ and ‘partner’ to refer
to the source of our quotes and will not link these quotes to any of the audit assignments listed in Tables 1 and 2.
4
6
Our attention was quickly drawn to a number of unofficial features of audit work,
including the role of fear in audit practice. While our reading of Pentland (1993)’s work had left
us with the impression that comfort was the main emotion experienced and transmitted within
audit teams, our first observations and interviews highlighted the prevalence of anxiety among
auditors. As soon as we came to this conclusion, themes related to fear such as ‘signs of fear’,
‘sources of fear’, ‘effects of fear’ and ‘fear management’ were incorporated into the coding
scheme. In the field, we became particularly attentive to these issues and began to discuss them
during interviews.
When trying to make sense of our data, we were aware that the field study was conducted
in the aftermath of the Enron’s scandal, the fall of Arthur Andersen, the Sarbanes Oxley Act vote
and the creation of regulatory agencies independent from the profession to oversee public
company audits. We reasonably assumed that such a modification of the regulatory environment,
by pointing out auditors’ failures and putting pressure on audit firms’ internal controls (Malsch &
Gendron, 2011), had increased auditors’ level of professional anxiety. However, we were also
puzzled by the fact that our observations of public accountants as fearful professionals contrasted
greatly with official accounts suggesting auditors’ negligence and lack of skepticism.5
This prompted us to explore the literature on emotions at 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 at
how risk theorists (e.g. Bauman, 1991; Beck, 1992; Douglas, 1992) had integrated the treatment
of fear, the ‘emotion of risk’, in their analysis. Ultimately, we concluded that the psychodynamic
approach – elaborating on how our ‘personal anxieties, fears and yearnings can be seen to
underpin some of the routines and rituals of work organizations’ or to put it another way, how
‘our deepest existential fears are camouflaged by the very act of working and organizing’
(Fineman, 1993, p. 2) – was well-suited to help us better understand the role of fear in the audit
process. We explored and ‘tried’ various psychodynamic perspectives (e.g. Dejours, 1993; Klein,
1981; Menzies-Lyth, 1960; Stevens, 1990; Wollheim, 1971). Moving back and forth between the
latter and the data, we opted for the ‘psychodynamics of work’ theory developed by Dejours
(1993) as a means of interpreting our first-order findings (Van Maanen, 1979). In the end, the
interpretations we made on this basis were validated through member checking in the course of
many interviews. In saying this, we do not contend that Dejours’ (1993) model was the only
valuable framework for interpreting the collected material. Other theoretical perspectives would
have brought to light other facets of the fear-risk relationship in auditing. In this sense, there is
absolutely no claim of interpretive closure here, but only an invitation to further the discussion
that this paper aims to initiate.
To conclude this section, it is worth noting that analyzing emotions presents significant
epistemological difficulties. The first involves conceptualizing emotions in ways that can guide
empirical research. ‘What is an emotion?’ rarely generates the same answer from different
individuals, academics or laymen. In this paper, we use the term emotion in the standard
definition of a conscious mental reaction subjectively experienced as feeling and accompanied by
5
A 2010 discussion paper of the Financial Reporting Council - entitled auditor skepticism: raising the bar - stated
for instance: ‘[The issue of skepticism] is particularly timely as, in the wake of the banking crisis, regulators have
challenged audit firms on whether sufficient skepticisms was demonstrated and the need for audit firms to exercise
greater professional skepticism was a key message in the Audit Inspection Unit’ (p. 3).
7
physiological and behavioral manifestations (Scherer, 2005). Accordingly, we do not think of
emotions and cognition as two independent dimensions of human activity: in our view, actors are
not held captive by their emotive reactions and can mobilize their reflexivity to manage and act
on them. The second epistemological challenge arises from the conceptual proximity and overlap
that can exist between different affective states (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001). Concepts
like fear, vigilance, confidence, trust and skepticism can be given operational meanings in
empirical psychology, but they are inherently ‘slippery’, not least because there is some
ambiguity both as to whether they are individualistic or collective in nature and as to whether
they are attributed by the authors as external observers or self-reported by auditors as some kind
of inner experience (in which case self-deception is possible).
The only way out of these difficulties is, as far as possible, clarity. In this respect, when
we started incorporating themes related to fear in our coding scheme, we sought to adopt a
definition of fear that would be broad enough to capture fear through different variations of
intensity and duration, but also constraining enough to prevent us from seeing fear everywhere
and confuse it with other families of emotions. We were particularly attentive to distinguishing,
from the beginning, between fear and anguish, which are commonly confused by individuals
experiencing them (see below). By triangulating our data, we “confirmed” our observations with
interviews and “controlled”, to a certain extent, self-deception. Admittedly, we cannot be sure
that our informants correctly labeled their feelings. The relatively undefined character of affects
constitutes an inherent limitation to the study of emotions, but only more research (and certainly
not less) will help build a credible body of knowledge that will bring forward the ‘affective
revolution’ in the auditing space.
Fear: the emotion of risk
Fear is often treated as an “afterthought” in today’s audit risks literature; the focus tends to
remain on the cognitive and technical dimensions of risk management processes rather than on
the role that fear may play in the latter. ‘Indeed, [even] in sociological debates, fear seems to
have become the invisible companion to debates about risk’ (Furedi, 2007, p. 1). And yet it is
widely acknowledged by risk theorists that fear and risk are closely related phenomena (Hollway
& Jefferson, 1997).
In his most famous book, Beck (1992) argues that modern society has become a ‘risk
society’, in the sense that it is increasingly occupied with debating and managing risks that it has
itself produced. Risk society is faced in particular with the ‘awkward problem’ of having to make
risk management decisions ‘on the basis of more or less unadmitted not-knowing’ (Beck, 2006, p.
335). All possible scenarios, more or less improbable, have to be taken into consideration. ‘[T]o
knowledge, therefore, drawn from experience and science, there now also has to be added
imagination, suspicion, fiction, [and] fear’ (p. 497). In other words, because we have no means of
knowing for sure where risk and safety lie, nothing can be trusted and fear thus potentially finds a
location in any area of daily life.
For Mary Douglas (1992, p. 10), although ‘anger, hope and fear are part of most risky
situations’, contemporary societies, by ‘trying to turn uncertainties into probabilities’, attempt to
make risk management accessible to impersonal and emotionless administrative regulation, based
on scientific and neutral principles. Blaming, which at all places and all times has been a key
component of risk management systems, is not banished by the modern discourse. Rather, it now
tends to be expressed in the claim that ‘real blaming’ is possible – a claim rooted in the political
8
and moral realm of modernity’s search for order and certainty. In this sense, ‘real blaming’, that
Douglas sees as a fantasy, ‘can be seen as a defence against uncertainty produced and reproduced
at the cultural level’ (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997, p. 261).
The desire to eliminate uncertainty is also at the heart of Zygmunt Bauman’s
conceptualization of modernity (1991). Modernity’s task of tasks, maintains Bauman, is to
produce order. According to him, this struggle, always doomed to be lost, is essentially a flight
from the ambivalence at the heart of order’s opposite, namely, chaos. We have to get used to the
idea of ‘living without foundations’ (Bauman, 1991, p. 16). However, obsessed with selfscrutiny, man does not admit contingency and ‘ambivalence is transformed into the nagging fear
of own inadequacy’. Like ‘real blaming’, denying ambivalence functions as a defense against the
anxiety that may result from uncertainty.
In all three of these major risk theorists’ accounts, a subject is inferred who apprehends
and makes sense of risks characterizing our society through the experience of fear. However,
although recognized, this emotional experience is not placed at the heart of the analysis. In
particular, its effects on risk perception and risk management processes are not seriously
examined. In each case, the concepts that are brought into play (projection of fear, defense
against uncertainty and denial of ambivalence), cohering around feelings of fear, would benefit
from a psychodynamic perspective for their operational and empirical development (Hollway &
Jefferson, 1997). In this paper, we use the psychodynamics of work theory elaborated by Dejours
as an interpretive tool to better understand and account for how auditors experience and manage
fear when confronted with risks in their work environment, and how, in return, they experience
and manage risks under the influence of this emotion. Dejours’ psychodynamic framework shares
many common points with other psychodynamic models, focusing in particular on the ‘defensive
strategies’ which actors may adopt to alleviate their anxiety. It nevertheless distinguishes itself in
that it relies not only on an explicit theorization of the subject, but also on an explicit theorization
of work and risks at work, which is very helpful for better understanding the interplay of fear and
risk in the audit process.
Fear and risk at work: Dejours’ psychodynamic perspective
Like most psychologists (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997) and many sociologists (Furedi, 2007),
Dejours (1993) argues that 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
of affective states of varying intensity and duration, including disquiet, concern, worry,
apprehension, anxiety, dread, terror, fright and panic, which are all different types of fear.
However, Dejours (1980) insists that fear should not be confused with anguish. While
both of these feelings imply a painful state of suspense, they differ significantly. Anguish
emerges from an intrapsychic conflict, i.e. from a conflict between two drives, two desires, two
psychoanalytic structures (such as the id and the super-ego) or two systems (for example, the
conscious and the unconscious). It relates to the personality of the subject, has no predefined
object (i.e. it may attach itself to absolutely anything), and tends to give rise to pathological
behaviors. By contrast, fear is caused by a risk regarded as plausible and whose materialization
might impair the actor’s physical or mental integrity. It responds in a somewhat ‘rational’ and
‘understandable’ way to a threat largely independent of the person, and may stimulate adaptive
and ‘relevant’ behaviors.
9
Fear at work: main object and sources
What first emerges from studies on the psychodynamics of work is ‘the existence of fear in the
activity of most workers’ (Dejours, 1980, p. 30). As noted by Dejours (1980, 1993, 2005), work
situations tend to generate fear, which, beyond its various manifestations, often amounts to a fear
of failure.
To better understand the prevalence of this type of fear in the workplace, Dejours (1993)
draws on two theories: a theory of work derived from the findings of French ergonomists (e.g.
Wisner, 1995) and a theory of the subject inspired from Freud (1920). According to the first
theory, official prescriptions are rarely sufficient to perform a task successfully. Working
fundamentally implies coping with unforeseen events and conflicting requirements and therefore
inventing compromises whose relevance is not guaranteed 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 uncertain, or, to put it another way, that failure is always possible.
Yet the uncertainty and the risks surrounding their efficacy would not be a concern for
workers if they were completely indifferent to success. However, people tend to attach great
importance to achieving their goals. Most actors leave childhood with an unfinished identity, are
in quest of self-accomplishment, and can blossom in two different ways: either by succeeding in
their erotic life and/or by doing well in a job that makes sense in their biography. In both cases,
their self-image depends on the judgment that they pass and that is passed on their performances
(see also Roberts, 2009). In the workplace, actors strive to attain their objectives when they
recognize themselves in what they do and, in any case, to benefit from the recognition 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 are blamed for not being good
enough, their self-esteem tends to decline. In other words, avoiding failure is usually, in their
eyes, a matter of identity. This is the second reason why they often are afraid of failure.
Fear at work: a cultivated resource
Now, the fear of failure inhabiting workers does not only impact their inner life experience. It
also influences their choices, behaviors and attitudes, thereby interacting with organizational
processes in many ways.
The fear of failing, argues Dejours (1993) is often a requisite for a job well done: when
they are unafraid and overconfident, people tend to act negligently, thus increasing the likelihood
of making serious mistakes. In this sense, as maintained by Hood (2011, p. 184), ‘blame and the
fear of blame are not all bad, if we are led to think twice about bending or disobeying important
rules’. A work environment without professional blame would be one in which the only pressure
to stay on the right track would have to come from individual’s own self-image and moral
compass – ‘notoriously cranky instruments’.
Consequently, a range of methods are used in the workplace to cultivate anxiety, which
might otherwise decline over time from the anesthetizing effect of habit (Dejours, 1993). Some
formal management techniques are designed to achieve this objective, and in the field, workers
themselves sometimes use informal strategies to remain sufficiently worried or anxious. For
example, in some high-risk jobs, they gladly tell each other stories of frightening accidents in
order not to forget the risks they face and to remember that official safety measures never provide
perfect protection.
10
From fear to comfort through practical intelligence
The fear of failure, insists Dejours (2005), is one of the main sources of intelligence at work.
Ideally, the positive dynamics triggered by fear is a dynamics of ‘body-propriation’ (Henry,
1987). By preparing workers for risks, fear heightens their motor tension and sensory attention. It
drives them to go into a kind of ‘body-to-body’ with the main elements of their working situation
and to appropriate them in a very personal way. The greater the ‘symbiosis’ with these elements,
the more able people are to ‘feel’ them as part of their own body, and thus to perceive the
smallest cues that might indicate risks. As soon as one of these cues is noticed (an abnormal
sound, smell, visual signal or whatever), individuals react. Since they are at one with their
environment, they are quickly able to outline a diagnosis or to identify a corrective measure.
Throughout the process, because they are afraid of making a mistake, they regularly return to
what they have done in order to verify that nothing has been forgotten and that everything is as it
should be. At this stage, they often use official guidance to confirm, revise and legitimize their
intuition. When they eventually start to feel reassured, they are able to contemplate the fruits of
their work, from which they may derive different kinds of pleasure.
However, they cannot be certain that they have handled the situation in a fully efficient
and acceptable way. At this point, their pleasure thus remains incomplete and their fear of failure
is not entirely relieved. As a result, driven again by anxiety, they usually seek to discuss their
practices with their colleagues, superiors and/or clients. According to Dejours (1993), discussion
is the most crucial part of the whole process. When the debate is constructive, actors see their
work recognized and thus strengthen their identity; they may learn from others about how to do
better; the community of practice grows; the unwritten ‘rules of the job’ are enriched; and with
sufficiently flexible management, official directives improve through experience feedback.
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 of intelligence at work, a specific condition must be met in order for fear to produce
this positive effect: confidence. An actor who is afraid of failing would be reluctant to confront
difficult situations if she had no confidence in her own ability to succeed, the instruments put at
her disposal, and the willingness of her colleagues to help her in case of necessity. She would
hardly dare discuss her work with her peers, superiors and clients if she felt completely insecure
about their willingness to judge her work fairly. If they are overconfident and unworried, workers
tend, as noted above, to act imprudently. However, without any confidence in themselves, in
others and in their working tools, they will have a pathogenic fear of failure.
When this occurs, argues Dejours (1993), preventing and managing risks that may harm
production is no longer a priority: the enemy that people strive to dominate becomes fear itself,
and various ‘defensive strategies’ are then developed in order to suppress this feeling. Operating
on the principle of the ostrich policy, these strategies enable workers not to think about what
worries them. To avoid facing the risks of the field, an actor may, for example, hole up in her
office or not delve deeper in her analyses. However, in order to achieve their full effectiveness,
defensive strategies need to be implemented collectively (Dejours, 1993). Not thinking about
obvious risks is difficult and requires the complicity of each actor. As a result, the group usually
tends to exert a strong discipline on its members and to exclude anyone who fails to comply with
the social defenses in force. When the latter prevail, the organization experiences a form of
‘cultural alienation’ (Douglas, 1992): it sinks into a kind of ‘foolishness’ which protects
11
organizational members from the fear that something could go wrong, while also increasing that
very probability.
In the remainder of the paper, we mobilize this psychodynamic perspective on work to
organize and present our interpretations of the interplay of fear and risk in the audit process.6
First, we specify the main object and sources of auditors’ fear. We then show that fear tends to be
viewed by auditors as a requisite for a job well done (a kind of ‘epistemic resource’) and that
such a view is at the root of many formal and informal audit techniques designed to cultivate this
emotion. Finally, the paper provides a detailed examination of 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 is the main object of their fear? Since fear is
the emotion of risk, which risk makes them feel afraid? To clarify this issue, let us return to the
conceptual framework on which professional audit standards draw. At the heart of this
framework lies the concept of ‘audit risk’, defined in ISA 200 (International Standards on
Auditing) as the risk of inappropriately certifying financial statements with significant anomalies.
On the basis of our analyses, this definition, couched in institutional language, provides an
accurate representation of the fear experienced by public accountants, i.e. the fear of overlooking
a material misstatement (a fear of failing or of being mistaken).
Doing your job properly means finding a mistake if there’s a mistake to be found.
Because at the end of the process, if you tell people: ‘you can trust these financial
statements’ and you’re actually wrong, the consequences can be truly disastrous. […]
We all have a huge responsibility in the matter, from the trainee right 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 and it’s a bit complicated, you do
your best, but you still have a doubt. You ask yourself: am I missing something really
important 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 psychodynamics of
work: the ‘impossible’ nature of the audit mission, and auditors’ desire to do a good job.
The audit mission: impossible
The fear of failing to detect significant anomalies results first from the ‘impossible’ nature of the
mission assigned to auditors, and more precisely from auditors’ awareness of having to perform
an ‘impossible’ task: although audit professionals can never be entirely sure that they have not
missed a material misstatement, they are required to express relatively categorical conclusions
(Gill, 2009).
As noted by Radcliffe (1999, p. 345): ‘The writing of ethnography is always a delicate process, if not a struggle’.
There are several possible ‘tactics’. For instance, some authors successively present their first- and second-order
findings in accordance with Van Maanen’s (1979) suggestion (e.g. Fischer, 1996; Dirsmith, Heian, & Covalevski,
1997), while others prefer a thematic exposition of their results structured according to their analytical framework
(e.g. Barrett, Cooper, & Jamal, 2005; Pentland, 1993; Radcliffe, 1999). The second of these options was chosen here.
6
12
In the field, public accountants are confronted with a high degree of uncertainty. To begin
with, as noted by a senior comparing his occupation to the job of a police officer:
We [auditors] are in a more uncomfortable position than a policeman investigating a
case because the policeman knows for a fact that a crime has been committed [...]. In
auditing, we’re also required to carry out an investigation, but we don’t actually know
if there was a crime in the first place. So unlike a police detective, we don’t set out with
any definite certainties.
Thus, the first uncertainty faced by public accountants is this: do the audited accounts contain
significant anomalies? When they begin a job, auditors cannot possibly know the answer to this
question. But that is not all. One assistant observed:
In the accounts of a large company, there are hundreds of thousands of recorded
operations. […] When you think about it […], it makes you feel all dizzy! Because
what you’re being asked to do is to put your finger on a mistake deemed to be
significant in what is essentially a gigantic hotchpotch. […] It’s a bit like looking for a
needle in a haystack. Where’s the mistake? That is the question! It could be
anywhere… everywhere and nowhere.
In other words, even assuming that an account actually contains a misstatement, auditors cannot
possibly know where to look for it. In referring to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (‘That is the question!’)
and a feeling of dizziness, the assistant suggests the extent to which the question ‘Where’s the
mistake?’ may be anxiogenic for her.
In practice, the anxiety induced by this question is made worse by the fact that auditors do
not operate ‘at home’, i.e. within the confines of their audit firm. The financial statements that
have to be certified, the records that these statements synthesize, the various aspects of the
‘reality’ that accounts are designed to translate and the processes by means of which this
translation is carried out are all located in the audited company. In the latter, where are the
elements that may suggest the presence of accountancy errors? In order to find them, which
factories, warehouses and offices need to be visited? Which pieces of furniture need to be
searched? Which files and folders need to be examined? Which documents need to be
scrutinized? In these documents, which cues need to be extracted? At the start of a new
assignment, auditors do not have the answers to these questions. They have no ‘map’ for finding
their way around the audited organization, and it is sometimes possible to see in their eyes, and in
their hesitant movements, their fear of failing to find the way to the relevant data.
Yet the questions ‘Where’s the mistake?’ and ‘Where are the elements necessary to find
it?’ would not be particularly distressing if public accountants could peruse the entirety of the
‘mass of accounts’ under investigation unhurriedly and methodically. This is not, however, the
case. Since the means at their disposal are fatally limited, particularly in terms of time and
numbers, auditors know in advance that their research will not be exhaustive. As one senior
remarked, a complete audit would constitute an economic aberration:
You see, in this company, […] if you wanted to check every accounting operation
based on actual audit evidence, you’d need roughly ten people and you’d have to work
for an entire year. […] In purely economic terms it just wouldn’t work out. […] As a
result, there aren’t ten of us but more like three or four, and we don’t have a whole year
to do the job […] but more like two weeks. So we can’t go looking everywhere.
13
Finally and importantly, contrary to what one might think, the extensive body of audit guidance
does little to reduce the uncertainties and risks faced by auditors in the field. As emphasized by
many of our informants, blindly relying on official audit technologies would even actually be the
surest way to failure (a source of risk!). Two reasons were given to account for this. First, while
business risk methodologies aim at least partly to reduce the time required to perform an audit
task (Knechel, 2007), their highly structured elaboration does not appear to be conducive to such
a result. The audit team members we monitored all agreed on one point, namely that the
prescribed tools were too ‘unwieldy’ to be applied as such. For example, one senior, commenting
on the predefined risk assessment matrices, noted: ‘Filling in these templates entirely? My god, it
would be a never-ending job! […] You could easily spend two weeks formalizing them. In this
case, we only had four days, so you see’. Second, as put forward by a number of interviewees,
mechanically resorting to formal audit tools would prevent auditors to correctly feel the field and
would thus be counterproductive. One senior noted:
The time you spend filling in a questionnaire is time you don’t spend in the factory.
And if you go all the same, your eyes are riveted on the form, and you may then fail to
see that right behind it there are machines on their last legs. So you miss everything!
This comment provides a good illustration of the risk associated with technical mediation
highlighted by ergonomists: when standard technologies come between an individual and her
environment, the former may become unable to perceive the latter correctly, and if her task
involves identifying and managing risks, this can be pretty problematic. In a similar vein, most of
our informants saw the use of statistical tables as not reassuring. One senior said: ‘It’s not
because a stats chart tells me to examine ten amounts that I’ll feel comfortable with it. Perhaps
I’ll need more, perhaps I’ll need less. I can’t possibly know that in advance. What’s important is
to feel when you can stop’.
Ultimately, auditing is always a matter of judgment, of which ‘no amount of rationalistic
analysis will ever produce a sufficient explanation’ (Pentland, 1993, p. 619). As noted by one
partner in referring to the obligation for French ‘commissaires aux comptes’ to justify their audit
opinions:
Managing to feel sufficiently at ease to express an opinion is often in itself to attempt
the impossible. But producing a written demonstration of the validity of this opinion...
In my view, it’s a bit like trying to square the circle. Isn’t a judgment precisely
something that just can’t be explained? […] [People] assume that auditing simply
involves applying procedures, but that’s an impoverished bureaucratic vision of
auditing.
For all the reasons stated above, a statutory audit is a task ridden with uncertainties and risks
involving anxiogenic effects. A parallel might be drawn with the situations faced by workers in
high-risk industries. On this subject, Dejours writes (1993, p. 147, note n°2): ‘What generates
fear is the perception of a gap between the awareness of a risk and the lack of knowledge about
the precise nature of the risk. This gap is often the cause of a fear of not being up to the challenge
of the task, either technically or psychologically’. Similarly, auditors experience fear in part
because their job involves detecting misstatements in accounts that may or may not exist, without
any knowledge of where such misstatements might be located, without the means of verifying the
entire range of the accounts under investigation, and without the possibility of blindly relying on
prescribed audit tools. One manager commented:
14
We could miss a mistake without even realizing it. I’m afraid that’s the risk of the job.
Just because we haven’t found anything doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t anything
there to find in the first place. Likewise, just because we found a serious mistake
doesn’t mean there wasn’t another, bigger mistake to find. Has anything escaped our
notice? Fundamentally, there’s no objective criterion that means we can be 100%
certain.
This comment contains some of the key ideas developed by a number of researchers in the field.
For example, Fischer (1996, p. 224) argues that ‘truly objective measures of audit quality do not
exist’, while Power (1999, p. 28) remarks that ‘[there is a] deep epistemological obscurity of
auditing […], [i.e.] no way of specifying the assurance production function independently of a
practitioner’s own qualitative opinion process’. Finally, as noted by Pentland (2000, p. 311): ‘No
wonder that audits are epistemologically obscure – auditors have adopted the rhetoric of scientific
methodology without really being able to adopt much of the substance’. In short, the opinions
expressed by public accountants cannot possibly constitute mathematical certainties. Faced with
uncertainties and risks, public accountants 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 cause of fear, particularly since they are required to express relatively categorical conclusions.
The audit mission is a mission of certification. The word is strong: to certify means ‘to
guarantee as certain’ (Oxford English Dictionary); it suggests certainty more than skepticism.
Admittedly, ISA 200 insists that the assurance to be provided by an audit is not absolute but
reasonable. However, notwithstanding this qualification, a reasonable assurance is still an
assurance, i.e. ‘a promise or engagement making a thing certain’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In
practical terms, auditors, whatever their level of experience, do not have the luxury of displaying
indecision. One senior remarked: ‘It’s never a good thing to remain at the level of uncertainties.
[…] You can’t submit a summary report and say: there are areas of uncertainty’. During one of
the tasks observed in the course of this study, the manager suddenly exclaimed, turning towards
an assistant and a trainee:
This won’t do! You haven’t concluded your report! This is unacceptable! Our business
is all about certification. […] What you’re asked to do is to adopt a position, to make a
decision and to commit to it. Your job is to write in black and white: ‘there is not a
single significant mistake in the such and such account’ or ‘this is the mistake and 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 of the unknowable’. It is in this sense that we portray auditing as ‘an impossible
mission’, typical of the desire of certainty characterizing the risk society, despite more or less
‘unadmitted not knowing’ (Beck, 2006). The phrase ‘impossible mission’ is borrowed from
Freud (1961), who described as ‘impossible’ the professions ‘in which one can be sure
beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results’ (p. 248).
Lastly, an audit mission is not merely “impossible”, but is also generally considered
essential. As noted by the senior quoted at the beginning of this section, ‘the consequences [of an
audit failure] can be truly disastrous’. One partner observed: ‘For the few amnesiacs out there,
the recent scandals will have refreshed their memories’. So let us imagine for one moment being
in an auditor’s position: the task with which she is entrusted seems logically unachievable, yet
she knows that she cannot allow herself to fail since her failure could have disastrous
repercussions. Under such conditions, who would not be afraid of failing? Perhaps somebody
15
who remains unconcerned by such matters and cares very little about detecting mistakes in an
account. However, this does not appear to be the case for auditors, whose fear of failure is also
the result of their desire to achieve a high standard in their work.
Auditors’ desire to do a good job
As argued by Dejours (1993, p. 225), ‘most healthy subjects’ want to provide a high-quality
service at work. Under this angle, the majority of public accountants can be said to be ‘healthy’.
Based on our analyses, some of them attach great importance to being good at what they do,
partly because the audit mission resonates with their own biography. When asked about the roots
of her professional dedication, one assistant gave the following answer:
What drives me is telling myself that I work in the service of truth. I’m totally
committed to the idea of truth. That’s probably because of my education. […] Checking
that accounts are telling the truth is really important to me […]. It’s in tune with my
principles. [...] I think we live in a society that’s dying from a lack of ethics, and I tell
myself that in some way I have a role to play in trying to improve the situation.
One striking feature of this account is how the subject appropriates the quest for truth assigned to
statutory auditors; how she conceives this quest as a reflection of her education, principles,
beliefs, and so on, and how she identifies with this mission. When she is engaged in an audit task,
she feels that she is ‘in tune’ with herself. In the same vein, one manager observed:
Shareholders, suppliers, customers, banks, anyone who reads accounts: they’re our
clients. […] I tell myself that […] we all know them [...]. For example, […] I’ve got a
friend who works in a private business bank and he spends his time reading financial
statements. My father-in-law is a small-time speculator: he’s a shareholder. So
ultimately those are the people I work for.
Again, this comment suggests how some auditors give meaning to the mission that is entrusted to
them by law, especially when this mission is assigned a specific value by other aspects of their
personal life – for example, when a shareholder, a customer, a supplier, etc., is embodied in their
eyes by a loved one whom they wish to protect, and to whom they hope to be useful. In the eyes
of these auditors, failing to detect a material error somehow means betraying oneself, and this is
partly why they are afraid of being mistaken.
However, for the majority of the public accountants observed in this study, the reader of
the accounts was too abstract, remote and disembodied a figure to give rise to sufficient
mobilization. By contrast, all of the informants felt driven in some way or another by their
concern for other people’s opinions – i.e. by their desire to be recognized as good at their job or
to avoid hurtful criticisms (Anderson-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 2001; Gill, 2009; Kornberger,
Justesen, & Moritsen, 2011).
‘To hear my senior say I’ve done a good job is a real boost to my morale!’ The comment
of this assistant illustrates the process governing her approach to auditing: congratulated for her
work, she takes the compliment personally (‘I’m doing a good job’), thus strengthening her
identity, and this prospect is precisely what motivates her to do her very best. To fulfill their
expectations in terms of self-achievement, some auditors go further. They feel the need to stand
out and to outperform their peers in order to be viewed (and to view themselves) as excellent.
This may involve securing a large bonus, an unprecedented pay rise or an exceptional promotion.
For example, one senior noted: ‘If I work like nuts, I don’t mind telling you it’s because I want to
16
jump [a hierarchical level]’. Likewise, one manager said: ‘I have a very clear goal – to become a
partner – and I’m working hard to achieve it’.
However, before achieving such a target, there are many criticisms to be avoided that may
impact an auditor’s sense of self-worth. The risk and fear of being sanctioned by a superior was
displayed by many of our informants. For example, one manager told a senior auditor during one
of the missions: ‘You’d better take a good look at the cash accounts. We completely botched the
job last time, and there’s no way I’m going to get shot down by [...] [the partner] again!’ In his
study on ‘Accountant’s truth’, Gill (2009, p. 25) makes similar observations: ‘When I asked
Simon when he had had to behave cautiously at work, he told me about a time when he realized
he had forgotten to put a value added tax return in with its covering letter to a client. Simon was
afraid: ‘those few moments were terrible’. Although Simon wanted to conceal his mistake, he
needed reassurance from someone else that he was behaving appropriately [...] What was at stake
was Simon’s more general self-presentation as competent which he feared that even this small
error might undermine’ (p. 25).
Finally, it is worth noting that auditors’ hierarchical superiors are not the only ones
providing good or poor assessments. Auditees may also pass judgment on the work performed by
public accountants. As noted by one senior: ‘When I say goodbye to a client and he says
something nice because I’ve been useful to him, I’m as delighted as can be. It’s very gratifying.
It’s to hear things like that that I work so hard’. This is another good example of the sequence
‘recognition of the work done, identity gratification, desire to do well’. However, it is also
frequently out of a fear of being criticized by their interlocutors and in order to protect their selfesteem that auditors are so keen to perform at their best. One assistant commented: ‘Some
[auditees] […] will leap at your throat if they think you’re not up to the job. So I only ever
consult them if I know I’m perfectly prepared, and I make it a point of honor of finding out what
might be wrong about their accounts’.
To summarize, being both aware of performing an “impossible mission” and keen to
achieve a high standard in their work, auditors are inhabited by the fear of failing to detect
significant anomalies. As noted by Gills (2009, p. 136), ‘They want to maintain a standard of
professionalism in […] [the] pursuit [of their tasks] despite not being able to articulate that
standard, […] they make strenuous attempts to do so despite the obstacles they face’, but they can
never be sure to succeed and feel afraid for that reason. Now, public accountants’ fear of failure
does not only impact their inner life experience. It also significantly influences their choices,
behaviors and attitudes, thereby interacting with the audit process in at least two different ways:
on one hand, auditors tend to see fear as a valuable ‘resource’ needing to be cultivated; on the
other hand, they strive to alleviate it before the end of the audit engagement, which is necessary
for them to form and convey their 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’t take 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 maximizes your chances of being effective.
17
Many of our informants emphasized the connection between effectiveness and the fear of failure.
In their eyes, fear enables them to remain vigilant. Accordingly, an auditor who fails to display
any fear may become a source of ‘risk’ and thus a matter of concern for her colleagues. For
instance, one manager noted:
[Such and such] is really very bright. The only thing that worries me sometimes is her
detachment, her Zen attitude whatever the circumstances. I know her well and I know
it’s the impression she wants to give. Still, I’d prefer 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 this feeling is communicated from the bottom
to the top of the audit hierarchy as a basic product. By Pentland’s account, every member of an
audit team derives part of her comfort from the comfort displayed by her subordinates. This may
be the case at the very end of an audit task. However, as the manager quoted above appears to
suggest, if an auditor’s sense of comfort is experienced at too early a stage in the audit process,
she is unlikely to reassure her superior, who will instead begin to worry. Our conclusions on the
subject converge with those reached by Dejours (1993), according to whom fear is a stimulating
factor causing subjects to surpass themselves. Most auditors are aware of this, and in some cases
may worry that they are not sufficiently anxious.
The risk and fear of not being sufficiently anxious
As Dejours (1993, pp. 138-139) remarks, even in the most anxiogenic situations, habit produces
ataraxic effects: ‘In one of the factories we studied […], which had been implanted locally for
several decades […] and which had seen every generation of equipment and manufacturing
process, it transpired that fear reached at least a high level’. Some of our informants clearly
identified habit as a risk factor, a kind of sedative of the fear of failure and of the vigilance that
such fear induces. According to them, working on an audit task for several years may have this
effect. One senior commented:
I’ve been working on the same audit […] for nearly five years now. So now I really feel
at home in the company I’m auditing. […] In fact, there are many positive aspects to
working like that [...]. But at the same time, perhaps that’s also the greatest danger: […]
when you’re at home, you feel safe, and that’s precisely what’s risky: your vigilance is
sort of numbed.
As noted by the senior, habit is not only negative. It is a necessary condition for the development
of practical competence and is synonymous with experience. However, experience is not
altogether positive, particularly if it gives rise to excessive self-confidence. One partner noted:
Taking on the audit of a company’s accounts is a bit like tackling a high summit.
You’re faced with a huge challenge, equipped with instruments which, in view of the
scale of the task, are completely inadequate. To be successful in situations like that, you
need to have a lot of experience and to remain aware of the dangers entailed at all
times. […] There are excellent mountain-climbers who die because they lose sight of
that awareness as they gain in experience and competence. Same thing for us auditors.
The more experienced we become, the more we need to cultivate a sense of humility.
Otherwise we’re condemned to falling.
The point emphasized by the partner is reminiscent of the paradox of success (Audia, Locke, &
Smith, 2000) or of Icarus (Miller, 1992). The paradox is that our main strength is sometimes our
18
worst enemy. Like Icarus, auditors with substantial experience, blinded by their own competence,
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 occasion a boring occupation (Power, 1999). It is particularly true for
assistants, who may be given repetitive tasks during large-scale jobs. In such cases, their fear of
failure may be numbed. When asked about this issue, one assistant said:
Last year, we were auditing the accounts of a group that included lots of companies.
My task was to control the bank reconciliations of all the companies. [...] Checking
bank reconciliations is really important: […] you have to be very careful. […] But
when you’ve done I don’t know how many reconciliations in a single day, and
everything always seems to be OK, you soon get bored. You’re bound to start operating
mechanically, and even to stop focusing at all on what you’re doing, and that’s what’s
dangerous. [...] [So] you’ve got to find a way of staying focused.
This auditor knows that she must remain vigilant, but her task is monotonous. Though she is
physically present, her mind is elsewhere. As she puts it herself, ‘that’s what’s dangerous’. For
her, it is a matter of concern. She is keen to ‘find a way of staying focused’ and to keep her fear
of failing alive. The techniques devised by public accountants to achieve this represent what we
call their ‘know-how-to-keep-worrying’.
Auditors’ know-how-to-keep-worrying
Auditors can develop ingenious informal techniques to remain sufficiently anxious in case of
habit or boredom. Here are a few examples, based on our observations. After explaining that
auditing the same firm chronically for several years could potentially anesthetize her vigilance,
the senior quoted in the previous subsection commented:
‘Chronic rhymes with anesthetic!’ [...] That’s a saying of mine that comes to mind in
such circumstances. It’s a lying proverb: it prompts me to stay alert, which belies the
saying since the anesthetic accordingly cannot take effect.
Here, it is by devising a specific linguistic expression that the auditor is able to cultivate her fear
when routine threatens it. She describes this expression as a ‘lying proverb’, since thinking of it
in the relevant context paradoxically turns it into a counter-truth. The proverb functions as a
prophecy that is not self-fulfilling but self-destructive. It is not an instance of a performative use
of language (Austin, 1962), but a counter-performative speech act – in our view a psychological
instrument of great beauty and elegance.
The second example of a ‘technique for maintaining fear’ was provided by a partner who
compared her work to climbing a high mountain. As we listened to her, our attention was drawn
to a photograph in a slim frame hung relatively high on the wall to the right of her desk. It was a
picture 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 auditor commented:
As you can see, that picture sums up everything I’ve just told you. I put it there not to
lose sight of that. All I need to do is turn my head, catch a glimpse of it, and in a
fraction of a second it reminds me that I have to stay vigilant. I call it my ‘alarmphoto’.
19
‘Alarm-photo’: more than the picture it describes, it is the pun that is striking here, giving
a wonderfully condensed image of the function of ‘alarm clock’ ascribed to the photo. As soon as
the partner’s sense of danger risks being numbed by her considerable experience, the picture sets
off an alarm bell in her mind that awakens her fear of making a mistake. Quite apart from its
purely decorative role, the function of the device is thus also operative and practical, transformed
as it is into a tool for remaining vigilant. Lastly, the assistant who claimed to experience boredom
when performing highly repetitive tasks explained:
‘When I get landed with a chain ticking job, my trick is to avoid using the usual tick
mark. […] I prefer to use a more convoluted one, which […] will require a little bit
more effort, a little bit more time, and that will force my mind to stay glued to my
paperwork instead of going into automatic pilot’.
Interestingly, while using a “tick mark” often symbolizes all that is monotonous and repetitive
about audit practice, the assistant turns it here into the very essence of his struggle against the
numbing effects of routine. Once again, this is a good illustration of the ingeniousness of which
auditors are capable in trying to keep intact their fear and thereby manage the risk of being
mistaken. Many other examples of informal “techniques for maintaining fear” could have been
given. However, the cultivation of anxiety in public accountants is not only left to their own
initiative. A number of formal audit procedures also play a significant role in this respect.
Formal audit procedures in the service of fear
As argued by Dejours (1980, 1993), various formal management techniques are designed to
cultivate fear in organizations. In high-risk industries for example, warning posters, alarms,
protective helmets and security instructions serve as constant reminders that an accident is always
possible. In most firms, surveillance systems, evaluation rituals and punitive practices constantly
maintain employees’ personal career at risk. Promotion policies and work process reengineering
often awaken their anxiety by disrupting their habits. Auditing is no exception.
For example, the frequency of use of the term ‘risk’ in official audit instructions arguably
plays the same role as warning posters in certain factories: by constantly exposing auditors to the
message that they are navigating in a risky environment, the term contributes to maintaining a
climate of fear in the workplace. The obligation for every auditor to sign her work papers also
participates to sustain such a climate. As argued by Pentland (1993, p. 613), ‘[an auditor’s]
signature […] gives comfort to those who see it’. Before that, however, signatures serve to
cultivate public accountants’ fear of failure by causing every audit team member to feel
personally responsible for their work and potential mistakes.7 One manager made the following
comment to a trainee:
Tell me, am I dreaming or have you not signed some of your paperwork? […] I told
you that when it comes to auditing you have to learn to commit yourself; that means
signing everything you do! It’s the fact of signing that helps to develop a sense of what
7
Many psychological studies have shown that there is a strong correlation between the feeling of personal
responsibility and the emotion of fear (see e.g., Startup & Davey, 2003). As noted by André (2009), workers’ anxiety
is all the more important today since modern organizations and societies tend to promote individualistic values, with
success and failure being ascribed to the individual and not to the collective (see also Douglas, 1992; Malsch,
Tremblay, & Gendron, 2012; and Guénin-Paracini & Gendron, 2010).
20
responsibility actually is. […] Your initials must appear on every single document you
write. You’re responsible for every bit of paperwork you produce. Here you’ve just got
to get used to associating your name with your work. Understood?
Associating one’s name with one’s work: it would be difficult to express more clearly how a
public accountant’s identity is connected to her work as a result of ‘signing off’. When other
people’s judgments are directed at an auditor’s achievements, it is the destiny of this identity that
is played out. In this sense, the formal review and evaluation process in force in audit firms is
another mechanism serving to maintain public accountants in a state of fear. One need only
observe the nervous, furtive glances that an auditor directs at those who check her sections to
understand the level of anxiety generated by this practice: the reviewer frowns and the auditor’s
identity wavers; the reviewer smiles and her identity is reinforced. For public accountants who
present for the most part an impeccable academic record, a poor evaluation is usually a vexing
experience. One assistant noted: ‘When I was at school, I only ever got excellent results. A bad
mark always made me feel sick. I take it really personally’. Yet a ‘bad mark’ is not only vexing.
It may also have highly detrimental effects, particularly in terms of professional reputation (Gill,
2009). Based on the following comment from one senior, it is easy to see why the evaluation
process sustains auditors’ fear of failure, given the reputational risk involved:
You get very quickly labelled in an auditing firm. […] [For example] your superior has
it in for you, his friends ask him how you’re doing, he pulls you to pieces, and little 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 getting poor assessments.
Finally, several mechanisms serve to prevent auditors from becoming too self-assured. For
example, the promotion policy dictating their career progression leads them to assume greater
responsibilities almost every year. As soon as they begin to feel comfortable with the tasks they
are used to performing, auditors find themselves confronted with new challenges that, though
exciting, may also awaken their fear of making mistakes. In the same vein, the changes in audit
methodologies regularly imposed on auditors tend to maintain them in a state of anxiety by
breaking their routine (see e.g., Barrett et al., 2005; Curtis & Turley, 2007).
Altogether, these formal devices contribute to producing 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 phenomenon elicited in the body by a given stimulus and
involving a more or less automatic, biologically determined process. Fear, like risk, is also
socially constructed. As part of this study, we were able to observe trainees and assistants
performing their ever first audit and to meet them again a few months later. At the beginning,
they rarely displayed signs of fear: having graduated from the best French universities, and
seduced by the image of rationality shown by the CAB methodology, they appeared to be
extremely self-confident. However, over time, we found that they gradually learned (1) to
interpret audit work as a risky and uncertain task in which it is normal and salutary to be afraid of
failing and (2) to subtly exhibit fear through their expressions and gestures in order to reassure
their hierarchical superiors.
Yet while acculturated auditors tend to see fear as a resource worth cultivating, they also
see it as an emotion that needs to be alleviated and transformed into comfort before the end of the
audit engagement. Although comfort is anything but comforting when it is premature, it remains
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 failing to detect material
21
misstatements may lead them to operate this ‘emotional transition’ through two very different
processes: depending on the circumstances, auditors may alleviate their fear by mobilizing their
practical intelligence or by resorting to defensive strategies.
From fear to comfort through practical intelligence
As noted earlier, auditors are confronted in the field with deep uncertainties that official audit
standards are powerless to reduce completely. ‘The audit risk model […] simply cannot tell an
auditor what to do or how to do it […] because it is […] an “empty abstraction”’ (Francis, 1994,
p. 255). In order to achieve a sense of comfort without overlooking the complexity of their work,
auditors thus need to mobilize their practical intelligence.
When certain conditions are met, their fear of failure helps them to do so, triggering a
two-stage process. At the start of an audit, public accountants know that the accounts assigned to
them may contain serious mistakes. However, they ignore if such mistakes actually exist and
where they might be located. Initially, therefore, their fear is largely caused by ignorance. It
remains very general and unfocused, providing them with only a limited guide for action. In a
first stage, they thus seek to ‘clarify’ it: they strive to operate a shift from a nebulous fear of ‘not
knowing where to look’ to an awareness of ‘where to be afraid and to what degree’; from a
relatively vague and elusive fear to a set of localized and measured concerns (described, for
example, as weak, strong or moderate), much easier to manage and ‘suppress’ by carrying out
various tests. Once these concerns have been quelled, auditors begin to feel reassured. However,
the risk that their controls will finally turn out to be inadequate still exists, and they know it. In a
second stage, they thus often go back over the work they have done to review it, becoming
comfortable enough only once this work is, in their view, of sufficient quality.
In institutional language, this process of transforming and alleviating fear is referred to as
the process of assessing risks of material misstatement and responding to them. On the evidence
of professional audit standards, such a process seems to be purely cognitive and disembodied.
However, in the field, it is primarily through their body “activated” by fear that auditors can
perceive and manage audit risks. The practical intelligence that fear stimulates and that enables
auditors to move from fear to comfort is fundamentally an intelligence of the body. Cognition is
obviously involved, but it heavily relies on “techniques of the body” (Mauss, 1973), whose
invention and use are governed by fear. The general dynamics observed are as follows. By
preparing public accountants for risks, fear heightens their motor tension and sensory attention.
Stimulated by their fear of failing to detect material misstatements, these professionals are
prompted to go into a kind of ‘body-to-body’ with the main elements of their work situation. The
more they appropriate these elements “physically”, the more able they are to feel them as part of
their own body, and thus to perceive cues that may indicate risks or absence of risks. Based on
our observations, the main risks that are thus “corporally” identified and managed by auditors
aiming to clarify and alleviate their fear are, in order, those associated with their workspace, their
work time, their work tools, and their work’s conclusions.
Managing the worrying workspace
‘What do auditors really do when they are on site with a client?’ (Pentland, 1993, p. 605). A
possible answer to this question is that among other things, driven by their fear of failure,
auditors leave the workroom that has been assigned to them several times a day and walk, stop
walking, watch, listen, touch, and walk again. At first sight, this observation may seem trivial.
22
However, such ‘techniques of the body’ (walking, stopping, watching, etc.), triggered by fear,
actually play a central role in the process of transforming and alleviating auditors’ anxiety: the
better acquainted and the more inhabited auditors become with the space of the audited firm and
what it contains (objects, documents, work processes, etc.), the better able they are to feel in their
own body ‘where to be afraid and to what degree’. The more they move, see, hear and touch to
perceive signs that might indicate audit risks, the better able they are to turn their initial fear of
failure into specific concerns prompting them to further their investigation. One senior crossing
the courtyard of her client’s factory looked up and remarked: ‘That’s funny, they’re going to do
works on the roof. You might say it’s about time too, given the state of the building. I’ll have to
take a look at the funds set aside for large-scale repairs’. One partner claimed: ‘Once you’ve done
the groundwork you need to do to get a feel for the terrain, I can assure you that ultimately you
know exactly what to verify’. Another partner commented:
You’ve got to be able to feel, almost physically, where a mistake is likely to occur, and
where, by contrast, there is almost no risk. So you can’t just get somebody to sit down
in an office and explain the procedures that are supposedly in place in the company.
You need to engage with the real world. Take for instance the case of the purchase
cycle. If you want to analyze it, you have to go to the delivery bay to observe how the
goods are unloaded [and] […] counted […]. Then you have to follow the course of the
delivery notes right up to the accounts department, to travel with them, to stop
whenever they stop, and at every stage you have to force yourself to […] stay on the
outlook for the slightest clue and to follow every lead. That’s a metaphor, but at the end
of the job, you’ve got to feel that your feet are sore and your hands are black from the
grease in the factory and the ink from the accounting documents.
As she mentioned the grease, the partner showed her left hand, symbolizing the business activity
of the audited firm. As she referred to the ink, she showed her right hand, representing
accountancy. In between, there is the rest of her body, and we understand that what she is acting
out is the way in which an auditor can become one with accounting processes, ‘to feel, almost
physically, where a mistake is likely to occur’. According to her, public accountants whose body
does not carry the marks of these processes cannot claim to have done what is needed to perceive
where audit risks are located, since they will have remained at the surface of things without
seeking to ‘engage with the real world’. In the field, engagement means moving (so that ‘your
feet are sore’) and pausing (‘at every stage’), in order to ‘stay on the outlook for the slightest
clue’ suggesting the presence of risks. According to this informant, it is all a matter of ‘following
leads’. The analogy between auditing and the activity of a tracker is indicative of the “corporal”
relationship that auditors, whose body is moved and made more sensitive by fear, can have with
their workspace – a relationship from which some of their intuitions about audit risks emerge. It
also suggests how auditors may gradually reach a conclusion, with all senses alerted by anxiety.
In short, by repeatedly leaving their workroom to scrutinize other parts of the audited
organization, public accountants, moved by their fear of failure, bodily appropriate this
organization in a way that enables them to feel where significant anomalies are likely to be found:
they transform a huge, unfamiliar and therefore vaguely worrying space (the site of the audited
entity as first encountered) into an aggregate of distinct spaces presenting specific risks and
raising specific concerns. However, the challenge for them is to complete this transformation
before the end of the audit. Accordingly, time is another element that auditors strive to
appropriate with their body in order to alleviate their fear of failing.
23
Managing the anxiogenic work time
Because auditors rarely have more than a few weeks or even days to check and validate the result
of a year’s worth of accounting, an audit task is always for them a race against time. As a result,
driven by their fear of missing a material mistake, they tend to work with their eyes riveted on
their watch or computer clock, and easily allow themselves to be inhabited by the seconds ticking
by, with which their body is not long to enter into resonance. In the 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, and use abbreviations. They do not only speak: they
speak briefly and with parsimony. What they can do promptly without impairing the quality of
their work is generally done as quickly as possible. One senior commented: ‘Auditing a
company’s financial statements is like defusing a bomb that’s ticking away: […] it’s a matter of
speed’. The analogy with the bomb defusal process shows how anxiogenic the audit mission can
be. The faster auditors work (stimulated by fear), the more auditing they can carry out, and the
more auditing they can carry out, the more reassured they become.
However, audit professionals do not merely synchronize their moves and movements with
the movement of the second hand of the clock. In order to gain a better hold on time, they also
strive to be corporally inhabited by the full duration (Bergson, 1907) of the audit they are
performing. For example, they devise instruments such as work schedule tables in order to
visualize the tasks that have already been performed and the tasks that have yet to be completed.
They know that ‘tomorrow is constructed today’ (as one senior put it), and regularly slow down
to save time later. They frequently project themselves into the year-end audit when carrying out
the interim visit, and conversely consult the interim file when designing their corroborative tests.
At every moment, their body (like the body of any worker) stores in memory the lessons of past
experiences and is guided by the future they aspire to build. As a result, they are able to sense
how to shape their actions in the present so as to mold the becoming of their anxiety.
Finally, driven once again by their fear of not detecting a material misstatement and the
desire to alleviate this feeling, 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’ that plays an important role in the
process of fear alleviation. As remarked by one senior: ‘Auditing is a never-ending job. You can
always do more, check something else, […] and because you don’t want to have any regrets,
well, that often means you work night and day. How could you get comfortable with regrets?’
In short, as a result of the corporal relationship they cultivate with it, auditors appropriate
time in a very personal and operative way. They transform their work time, which is short,
imposed from the outside, made up of a succession of abstract instants, and therefore relatively
anxiogenic, into a time of working – longer, chosen, seen as a flow of concrete mutations that
they can shape (‘tomorrow is constructed today’), and therefore more reassuring.
Managing the un-reassuring audit tools
When working conditions do not inhibit their practical intelligence, public accountants, as is now
apparent, do more than use official audit tools to transform and alleviate their initial anxiety. As
emphasized earlier, blindly relying on such technologies would even actually be, in their eyes, a
source of risk. Should we now conclude that standard tools are entirely useless to auditors
seeking to alleviate their fear of failure? Surely not. If they did not exist, public accountants
would feel very uncomfortable. As noted by one senior: ‘Having all these techniques at your
24
disposal means you don’t set out empty-handed – you don’t feel completely naked’. That said, to
produce their full ‘ataraxic effects’ otherwise than by merely existing, formal audit tools usually
need to be significantly “remolded” by their users. For example, one senior noted:
The [risks assessment] matrices the firm bombards us with are too complex. It’s often
impossible or pointless to fill them in completely, and sometimes they don’t even
enable us to deal with all the relevant information. So for every job, I re-create a matrix
that’s more adapted to the company and that I can finalize before the deadline is up.
This comment is of general application. Based on our observations, official audit tools are rarely
used as such by auditors striving to move from fear to comfort through practical intelligence: the
tools with which practitioners do not feel at ease are often simply ignored, while others are
transformed into instruments ‘more adapted’ to the working context.
To operate this transformation, public accountants largely rely, once again, on their body
stimulated by fear. To begin with, they draw extensively on the gut feelings that they have gained
in the field and which they seek to formalize. For example, none of the informants started out
from questionnaires to identify areas of risk. Rather, they used questionnaires (as well as other
forms) retrospectively, as a means of formalizing, validating and justifying their intuitive
conclusions achieved by walking, pausing, observing, touching, etc. Similarly, when statistical
tables were used (which was rare), public accountants utilized them to rationalize (and sometimes
refine) the number of elements that they considered intuitively reasonable to check. 8 Both of
these examples are representative. In practice, official audit tools usually constitute artifacts that
auditors transform and use to clarify, account for and develop their feelings of where to be afraid
and how to manage risks. They are generally not used as a guide for action and decision-making,
but provide a kind of “grammar” and “lexicon” that audit professionals subjectively appropriate
in order to set down in writing their preliminary intuitions.
Formalizing intuitions through the use of transformed audit tools is a critical stage of the
audit process. As long as this has not been done, auditors’ gut feelings remain relatively vague,
potentially misleading and illegitimate; they do not enable public accountants to feel comfortable.
Now, precisely because gut feelings are elusive, their formalization is all but an easy, logical and
straightforward endeavor. In the field, it requires groping in the dark, and results from a series of
handlings that gradually lead to the desired outcome. The instruments that auditors fashion on the
basis of official technologies to formalize their intuitions and alleviate their fear of failing are
thus not cognitively designed first to then be mechanically utilized. Rather, they are progressively
manufactured in the course of the audit task, through a process of trial and error involving several
manual treatments.
The way in which risk assessment matrices and corroborative tests are re-created on the
basis of standard devices provides a good example of this process. Based on our observations, as
soon as they have gained sufficient insights by visiting all parts of the audited company, public
accountants return to the workroom, settle down at their desk, and lay out around them (i.e.
around their body) the accounts that need to be audited, the documents obtained here and there,
and the written notes taken in the field. Gathered in this way, the various elements are easier to
apprehend at a glance and can thus be literally better ‘com-prehended’. Some of the data they
8
In other words, in audit teams as at the institutional level (see e.g., Carpenter & Dirsmith, 1993; Power, 1992),
sampling primarily serves to legitimize auditors’ decisions.
25
contain are then selected and manually transferred onto a work paper. At the outset, the work
paper is usually structured and presented according to the model found in the previous year’s
audit file. However, this initial arrangement often subsequently evolves: lines or columns are
added, inverted or suppressed, particular records are highlighted, new calculations are inserted,
etc., and the “handcrafted assemblage” that is thus produced – sometimes re-worked several
times before reaching its final form – is what ultimately constitutes the intended instrument.
In brief, by walking, pausing, watching, listening, speeding, inhabiting the full duration of
the audit, staying at work for long hours, and manually re-shaping official audit tools to formalize
their intuitions about audit risks, auditors whose practical intelligence is not inhibited gradually
turn their initial and elusive fear of failure into a set of specific concerns, which they then quell
through various tests adjusted to this goal. Within the temporal limits of the audit engagement, by
means of various techniques of the body triggered and regulated by fear, they transform the space
of the audited entity – huge, singular, initially unknown, sometimes dirty, ugly, disordered, and
therefore somewhat worrisome – into the space of their audit file – familiar, standard, clean,
rather aesthetic, ordered, and thus relatively reassuring. As a result, they begin to experience a
sense of relief or pre-comfort. At this stage, they are not, however, entirely liberated from their
fear of missing a material mistake: the risk (called ‘detection risk’ in ISA 200) of failing to find
an anomaly because of insufficient audit procedures still exists. Driven by what is left of their
initial anxiety, auditors then often go back over the work that they have done to pass judgment on
it. They only move from pre-comfort to comfort when this judgment is positive. As we will now
see, such a judgment is, once again, 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 completed work in order to assess it. The following comment by one senior illustrates the
common practice that involves going back 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 building if I had remembered to lock my door. That was my
particular fear. So I had to go back up the stairs to make sure the door was bolted, and
the exertion wasn’t always pointless. Now, it’s the same thing with my work. I check it
twice rather than once, just in case.
‘Is the work that I have performed good enough to support my opinion?’ Most auditors striving to
calm their fear of failure appear to be inhabited by this question. How do they answer it? How do
they come to the conclusion that their work is ready for submission, i.e. that they do not need to
be afraid anymore? Based on our observations, the main criteria they use to judge that it is
acceptable for them to stop working are twofold, and both are of a physical nature.
The first is the degree of fatigue. Reaching a point of saturation indicates to auditors that
they have done their very best and that they can do no more. In the field, it is often fatigue that
leads public accountants to loosen their grip. One assistant noted:
I decide to submit my sections for review […] when I get sick of them, when I’ve gone
back a hundred times over my work and everything seems to be OK. […] It’s a bit like
when you write a cover letter. You read it over and over again to make sure you haven’t
made a spelling mistake, but at some point […] you feel tired, and that’s when you
finally decide to send it off. You tell yourself that you’ve worked on it for long enough,
that it must be good as it is.
26
In the same vein, one senior remarked: ‘When I’m fed up, provided I didn’t spare any effort, this
tells me two things: first, that my work is acceptable as it stands, and second, that it is acceptable
for me to feel tired and to move on’.
However, weariness is not enough. Auditors, like all workers, may also judge the quality
of their work in terms of the pleasure it gives them when they look back at it. The following
excerpt from an interview with another senior is particularly 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’s a general feeling. What I do
is to look at my sections, and […] there will come a time when not a single detail will
bother me anymore. All the pieces of the puzzle finally seem to fit together, everything
seems to flow […]. So it’s a kind of ‘wow’ feeling! […] It’s a feeling of relief, and also
a feeling of satisfaction. I say to myself: ‘that’s it, it’s good as it stands, all is beautiful’.
Us: ‘All is beautiful’? Hum, that’s interesting. Would you say that the aesthetic
dimension of your work papers is important to you? Is it important in the process that
makes you feel comfortable?
Senior: Yes, definitely! Because in the end, it’s an overall impression that leads you to
conclude that your work is OK. So the visual dimension, the ‘aesthetic’ dimension, as
you call it, is essential. When your work papers are well presented, well written – in
short when you find their 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 comfortable when you feel proud of your
work. You look at what you’ve done and it shows you what you’ve been able to do. It’s
a feeling of self-fulfillment. So it’s a whole range of sensations, I mean pleasant
sensations, that leads you to conclude that your work is over.
Thus, ultimately, for public accountants whose practical intelligence has not been impeded by
unfavorable working conditions, pleasure generates comfort – a pleasure that results from a
feeling of accomplishment. Yet according to most of our informants, pleasure usually remains
incomplete as long as the work has not been validated by a peer, who will often be more
experienced. Until this happens, auditors cannot be entirely certain that they have carried out
their tasks efficiently and to a satisfactory standard. Accordingly, driven by what is left of their
initial anxiety, they often look forward to the result of the review process. While the perspective
of the latter, as noted earlier, first cultivates their fear of failure, its outcome is needed to
definitively alleviate this feeling, and is a crucial part of an audit. Pentland (1993) argues that
audit team members draw their own comfort from the comfort of their subordinates. Based on our
observations, we maintain that the opposite is also true. When the review is performed
constructively and leaves room for dialogue, public accountants see the utility and beauty of their
work recognized and thus increase their feeling of accomplishment. They learn from their
superiors what they should do in the future to better alleviate their fear of failure. Last but not
least, they are no longer the only person to take the risk and responsibility for their conclusions.
Unfortunately, things may not always go as smoothly as this. While fear plays a central
role in the development and mobilization of auditors’ practical intelligence (intelligence of the
body), a specific condition needs to be met in order for this feeling to produce such a positive
27
effect: confidence. If they are overconfident and unworried, public accountants may be inclined
to act imprudently, but without any confidence in themselves, in the resources put at their
disposal, and in the willingness of their superiors to judge their work fairly, they will usually
experience a paralyzing fear of failure that can be very harmful. When this occurs, detecting
significant anomalies is no longer a priority for them: the enemy that they seek to dominate
becomes fear itself, and they then develop various defensive strategies to suppress this feeling.
From fear to comfort through defensive strategies
Fear without confidence
Commenting on the risk factors that may make auditors feel highly anxious, one senior noted:
[As a senior, your anxiety increases dramatically] when you anticipate that you won’t
be able to carry out the entire program by the deadline [...]. When I worked as an
assistant, it was more like: am I going to be able to understand and treat all the
information? [...] I dreamt I was drowning under a sea of documents […].I actually had
nightmares about it! […] Remaining at the level of uncertainties is never a good thing.
When that’s the case, people often assume you haven’t done your job properly. […] So
yes, [when there still remains a degree of uncertainty], you have to find a way to turn it
into a certainty. 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’re
able to conclude or you’re not. […] But yes, [sometimes you feel you can’t conclude
and yet you still conclude all the same], by wrapping everything up in fancy words and
using stylistic formulas. And I think that’s the main cause of anxiety.
This quote illustrates the kind of fear experienced by auditors when they have little confidence in
their own ability to succeed (‘am I going to be able to…’), in the resources 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 properly’). In such circumstances, their main apprehension is
no longer simply a fear of missing material misstatements. Rather, it turns into an oppressive
anxiety (potentially causing ‘nightmares’) of not being capable of alleviating their initial fear.
The more time passes, the more auditors foresee the moment where they will be forced to express
an opinion without feeling comfortable (i.e. the moment where they will have to commit
precisely what they are supposed to combat, namely a distortion of the truth using ‘stylistic
formulas’), and this usually causes ethical suffering (‘that’s where I reckon things become
unacceptable […] and I think that’s the main cause of anxiety’). However, when faced with such
a risk, public accountants do not remain inactive. Instead, they seek to devise strategies to protect
their mental health.
Auditors’ defensive strategies
Based on our observations, auditors’ defensive strategies can be classified into two categories.
First, public accountants who are unable to alleviate their fear of failure through practical
intelligence usually ensure to ignore the elements of risks that worry them too much. For
managers and partners, this is not difficult: they only have to hole up in their office, i.e. not visit
the teams they are supposed to supervise, and to rely on audit files to form their audit opinions.
As a matter of fact, we saw these actors only very rarely when we were in audited organizations.
For assistants and senior (who are in the front line), forgetting the risky nature of the field is more
28
challenging, but various techniques enable them to do it. The following comment by 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 hours a day,
including weekends. As far as I’m concerned, I’m comfortable with what I saw […].
I’m able to tell myself that what we did we did properly, but... [...]. Conducting an indepth analysis involves getting your hands dirty, and there are two things that may
make us reluctant to do that. The first is: will I be able to understand everything I’m
going to be told? And the second is: will I get anything out of it? You can never know
in advance, and when in doubt, you’re better off not committing yourself. So the first
priority has got to be this: get the basic checks done, and only do what you feel most
comfortable with. [...] In any case, the fewer problems we uncover, the better people
feel. No problems, no issues, everything’s OK, everything’s just dandy!
Several of the defensive strategies observed in the course of this study are illustrated in this
quote. To avoid thinking about the risks that are likely to make them feel too anxious, auditors
tend to drastically reduce the scope of their investigation (‘all we did was to audit the high-risk
sections quickly’) and to apply standardized procedures both mechanically (‘get the basic checks
done’) and relentlessly (‘15 hours a day, including weekends’). As argued by Power (2009, p.
852): ‘Rule-based compliance […] can be theorized as a defence against anxiety and enables […]
agents to feel that their work conforms to legitimised principle’ (see also, McGivern & Ferlie,
2007). For public accountants, remaining in a state of intense activity and adopting a routine
behavior is an effective strategy against cogitating. It gives them an effective way of performing
numerous and seemingly legitimate tests while actually carrying out superficial analyses. When
the deadlines are too tight, ‘digging’ deeper means running the risk of not having the time or the
ability (‘will I be able to understand’) to deal with the issues identified, i.e. the risk of not
resolving uncertainties. Under these conditions, it is preferable for audit team members to ‘do
only what they feel most comfortable with’. In this way, they can maintain the impression that
‘everything’s OK’, and thus reach and convey an easily-earned sense of comfort (‘the fewer
problems we uncover, the better people feel’).
When they go back over their work and seek to convince themselves that they were right
not to pursue their analyses further, auditors are not short on arguments. For instance, it is always
possible for them to think that what they have neglected to do would not have been productive,
simply because the reverse is just as uncertain (‘when in doubt, you’re better off not committing
yourself’). In the same way, giving their trust to some audited companies or some accounts may
enable them to rationalize their decision not to audit a given accounting operation. More
generally, because the quality of their work is doomed to remain unobservable, including by
themselves (Fischer, 1996), auditors always have the possibility of assuming that they worked
well when it suits them to do so and of invoking the audit methodology in an incantatory way to
abolish any doubts they might have on the subject. For example, some public accountants we
questioned about the elements they chose not to verify answered laconically: ‘Auditing is based
on polls!’ or ‘that’s what the risk approach is all about!’ In order to justify their belief that they
had achieved a high standard of auditing, others said: ‘We have applied the official method in its
broad outline’. In our view, the tendency to reduce the audit task to the application of formal
procedures arguably functions as a defensive gesture. When auditors cannot mobilize their
practical intelligence to achieve a sense of comfort, the surest way for them to alleviate their
anxiety is to deny the role that this intelligence may play in the field. Acting and regarding
29
oneself as an ‘audit machine’ (Pentland, 1993, p. 614) is a dehumanizing experience, but it is also
a good way of not feeling worried. Robots do not think, they do not have any emotion, and the
absence of emotions constitutes a form of ‘comfort’.
In the long run, however, one of the most effective defenses against mental suffering at
work involves lowering one’s conception of a job well done and anaesthetizing one’s moral sense
(see e.g., Flam, 1993). This is the second category of defensive strategies used by some public
accountants in order to alleviate their excessive fear of failure. When their desire to do a good job
makes them excessively afraid of failing, they gradually abandon it and find other motivations to
wake up in the morning and go to work. In his study, Gill (2009, p. 13) notes that ‘the vast
majority of interviewees […] said that their motivation to do accounting work was instrumental,
enabling them to gain a qualification, money, status, and so on’. Our observations confirm it:
seeking to get the biggest bonus possible or striving to satisfy auditees rather than shareholders
are goals that often come to occupy a prominent place 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. I don’t know his name or what he
looks like (laughs). Apart from the people on my team, the two people I see here all day
long are Mr. [...] [X] [the head accountant] and Mrs. [...] [Y] [in charge of customer and
supplier accounts]. Strictly speaking, by law, they’re perhaps not the people I work for,
but in practice they’re the people I do my job with. So my ambition, what I want, is that
they get something out of me being there, something that’s useful to them.
Now, to gain their full effectiveness, the defensive strategies used by public accountants need to
be collectively adopted. Not thinking about obvious risks is a difficult task and requires the
complicity of everyone in the group. As a result, auditors who fail to conform to the defenses in
force in their team and firm usually find themselves sanctioned by their superiors, in one way or
another. When such defenses prevail, audit teams and audit firms come to look like mini-societies
in which creativity is near zero, and as Fineman (1993, p. 28) puts it: ‘The extreme is a form of
[…] madness, where people are motivated to ignore warning signs that something is going
wrong’. For his part, Dejours talks of ‘cultural alienation’. The idea is the same. When a group of
auditors invests all its efforts into numbing its perception of reality, it sinks into a kind of
‘foolishness’, which ‘shelter[s] […] [its] members from the anxiety that something terrible could
go wrong, while also increasing that very probability’ (Fineman, 1993, p. 29). For now many
years, numerous researchers have denounced the mechanization and commercialization of the
accounting profession and their negative effects on auditors’ competence and independence (see
e.g., Hopwood, 1998). However, the deep causes of these two phenomena (especially the roots of
commercialization) are still somewhat under-researched. On the basis of our study, one could
interpret both tendencies as partly resulting from the massive adoption, by public accountants, of
defenses against anxiety.
Discussion
By focusing on fear, our paper suggests that we need to reconsider the notion of risk in the audit
process from an emotional perspective. While a number of authors, including Francis (1994),
have denounced the pseudo-scientific nature of the following mathematical formula, this formula
takes on a different meaning if the term risk is replaced by the term fear:
30
AR = IR x CR x DR
According to the algebraic language used in the equation, localizing and measuring fear translates
as determining, for every significant account, and statement by statement, the level of inherent
risk (IR) and control risk (CR). Yet from a subjective point of view, what is involved is fear. In
audit records, assessing the combined risk (IR x CR) formalized for a given item is simply
another way of referring to the auditor’s fears about this item. For example, it is the fact of
strongly fearing that there might be an anomaly in the stock valuation that leads the auditor to
describe the corresponding risk as high.
In some sense, fear can be regarded as the practical, subjective, non-programmable and
non-codifiable corollary of the notion of risk. From this perspective, research on the risk society
(Beck, 1992) and the explosion of risk management systems implies that we need to consider the
emergence of a society of fear and to examine the proliferation of fear management systems. As
noted by Power (2007a, p. 129): ‘Reputation has come to be seen as both at risk and at the limits
of conventional management control. It has become a governing risk object of large organizations
and is infused with both fear and opportunity’. In light of our analysis, the exacerbated concern
with reputational risk (a secondary risk) in organizations appears to be symptomatic of a
defensive state of mind reminiscent of the ostrich policy practiced by auditors. In an attempt to
respond to the increasing social demands for corporate social responsibility, a growing number of
organizations (among which big audit firms) exorcise their fear of seeing their reputation
tarnished by adopting hyper-standardized (but also hyper deresponsibilizing) systems for
assessing their socio-environmental performance or by redefining the moral criteria related to the
pursuit of their socially responsible agenda to further their own interests (Malsch, 2013).
Our analysis of fear helps reconfigure the relationship between comfort, confidence and
fear in the audit process from the perspective of risk. On one hand, it suggests that confidence 9
without fear is a risky cocktail for auditors, who will perhaps not be sufficiently vigilant in
carrying out their mission. On the other hand, it shows that fear without confidence is also a
dangerous mix, which may induce auditors to maintain at a distance (and thus ignore) the
inherent risks of their responsibilities. Ultimately, a sense of fear curbed by confidence and a
sense of confidence tempered by fear is what enables public accountants to develop their
practical intelligence, and thus to become comfortable without overlooking the risks of their job.
These different configurations and their effects highlight the complexity of the ‘emotional
labor’ required of audit team members. ‘Emotional labor’ refers to the ‘management of feeling to
create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and
therefore has exchange value’ (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7). From this point of view, auditors need to
‘sell’ two conflicting emotional strategies. They cannot allow themselves to exhibit excessive
self-confidence for fear of alarming their superiors and colleagues. Yet neither can they exhibit
excessive anxiety, for they might then convey a sense of panic to their clients and colleagues.
‘Auditing is to some extent the wages of fear’, said the senior quoted in the paper’s epigraph: in
exchange for their ‘wages of fear’, auditors are required to perform a subtle but complex work,
having to strike a right balance between contained confidence and contained fear.
9
i.e. self-confidence, confidence in work instruments and confidence in colleagues.
31
Although it can be difficult, in practice, to distinguish between emotional and cognitive
activities, the experience of fear among auditors is a hybrid process. On the one hand, fear is an
essentially emotional experience when auditors are filled with apprehension in foreseeing the
‘impossible’ and ‘obscure’ nature of their task. On the other hand, fear becomes an essentially
cognitive experience when they use it as a resource enabling them to remain vigilant.
The cognitive component implies that auditors’ fear is, to a certain extent, manageable.
Accordingly, our findings may help redirect the discussion surrounding the risk associated with
auditors’ lack of skepticism towards a different perspective. Regulatory debates about this issue
are often articulated around two questions: Is skepticism an innate or acquired condition? Can
more be done to promote it? These two questions are obviously related. If professional skepticism
is innate, then much less can be done than if it is an acquired trait of character. Unsurprisingly,
the angle adopted by the accounting industry to address the problem is rather technical and
normative. For instance, the Financial Reporting Council claimed in 2010 that the auditing
standards had been revised to make them more rigorous and ‘impose requirements on all auditors
to perform certain procedures which, while normally undertaken by a skeptical auditor, were not
always performed in practice’ (FRC, 2010, p. 14).
The present study suggests that this normative approach may not be relevant. Since most
auditors in the field experience fear, most should also be ‘naturally’ driven to maintain a
relatively high level of professional skepticism. Accordingly, the puzzling question should be:
why is it not the case? Our study suggests that when they feel too afraid, auditors tend to adopt a
number of defensive strategies enabling them not to think about the audit risks that have to be
managed. Therefore, one part of the solution may lie in encouraging these actors to develop their
‘practical intelligence’, helping them handle that which, in their mission, cannot be obtained
through the strict execution of ‘predefined scripts’. No normative approach will increase
significantly auditors’ level of skepticism. ‘Accountants can only deal with so much prescriptive
complexity, and the more of it there is the more pragmatically they must approach the rules in
order to get anything done’ (Gill, 2009, p. 147). What may be required from regulators, audit
firms, and maybe the entire society, is a cultural revolution: the recognition that the audit mission
is an ‘impossible’ one, that norms may have anxiogenic effects, and that ‘audit machines’
(Pentland, 1993) are naïve auditors. This normative conclusion against normativity does not
mean that risk management is useless and that nothing can be done. Psychodynamics is a clinical
body of knowledge. It does not simply help diagnose professional suffering, but also offers
“techniques” to relieve and heal. We do not have enough space to explain the latter in more
detail, but they certainly constitute a promising avenue to stimulate alternative thinking on audit
risk management.
Risks and fear can find a location in any area of organizations’ life (Power, 2007a).
Auditors are far from being the only individuals to experience fear at work when they feel ‘beset
by risks’. The psychodynamic mechanisms between fear and risk also apply to their clients. From
that perspective, our study offers challenging implications for auditors’ involvement in client risk
management. As observed by Knechel (2007, p. 399), an important aspect of a business risk
approach is the need to interview and interact with a wide range of actors within a client’s
organization and ‘to reach conclusions about the competence and forthrightness of specific
people. Most auditors are usually more comfortable judging documents than people. Being
human, auditors are susceptible to smooth, honest-sounding answers in spite of their technical
training and professional mandate for skepticism’. In his study, Gill (2009, p. 25) notes:
‘Surrounded by performers, my interviewees were sometimes unsure what to believe, and left
32
feeling considerable anxiety because they had no way of knowing whether appearances were
meaningful’. As the volume of audit evidence derived from ‘client inquiry’ has expanded in a
business risk audit, the ability to judge people has become more critical. According to Knechel
(2007), this ability develops ‘with experience, maturity and repeated interactions among
stakeholders’. If one agrees that fear is the emotional marker of risks, then auditors should
perhaps be better trained to exert their capacity to assess both cognitive and affective aspects of
their interactions with auditees. In other words, maybe they should learn to detect and interpret
signs of fear. Here again, another ‘revolution’ is needed to ‘emotionalize’ the approach to
knowledge encouraged in universities, accounting firms and professional bodies. To paraphrase
Power (1991, pp. 339-340), ‘learning [business risk auditing] is described to students as similar to
learning to ride a bike, i.e. not an intellectual process’, and even less an emotional experience.
Conclusion
The purpose of our paper was to contribute to the study of the emotional dimension of auditing.
Relying on an ethnographic enquiry conducted in the French branch of a Big Four firm and using
the psychodynamics of work theory to interpret the data, we highlighted the key influence of fear
in the audit process.
1) What exactly is it that auditors worry about? Confronted with technical knowledge and
methodological standards’ limitations, auditors are nevertheless asked to certify the unknowable
(i.e. to turn uncertainties into quasi certitudes), while being often reminded by the media that a
failure on their part can have serious consequences. This ‘impossible mission’ creates fear within
them. They are afraid of not detecting significant anomalies (a risk always present in auditing),
and feel especially anxious about the judgments that they and others may pose over their possible
mistakes. Interestingly, their image of public accountants as all-powerful professionals, which is
constructed and projected by big audit firms and professional orders, contrasts with auditors’ own
perception of their work.
2) How do auditors manage fear in the field? Although fear is not experienced by these
actors all day long and varies in intensity depending on circumstances, auditors have to deal with
this emotion and manage it in two different ways. On the one hand, they cultivate fear through
informal and formal techniques to stimulate vigilance, encourage self-surpassment, mitigate the
anesthetizing effect of habit and maintain reputation. On the other hand, they strive to alleviate
their fear before the end of each audit engagement, in order to form and convey their conclusions
with a certain degree of comfort. In the field, they finally become comfortable (i.e. quell their
fear) either by mobilizing their ‘practical intelligence’ (which helps them handle that which, in
their mission, cannot be obtained through the strict execution of standardized procedures) or by
adopting defensive strategies (such as distancing themselves from work-related problems,
mechanically applying audit methodologies, or relaxing their conception of a job well done).
3) How does fear shape, and how is it shaped by, auditors’ work activity? Cultivating
fear, mobilizing practical intelligence or adopting defensive strategies deeply impacts auditors’
work. It molds auditors’ conception of standards, interactions with clients, relationships with
colleagues, and many other aspects of the audit process, for better or for worse. Unfortunately,
public accountants seem to be currently prisoner of a recursive relation between fear and risk. In
audit firms, attempts to improve audit risks management practices today often result in the
multiplication of formal procedures tending to increase rather than decrease auditors’ anxiety and
disillusionment. In that sense, auditors’ fear can function as a vicious circle, which, if pushed to
its extreme, may turn into a kind of collective and dangerous blindness. Yet, once again, fear is
33
not a bad emotion per se. Fear is as important for firemen as it is for auditors. To be sure, our
intention is neither to denigrate fear nor to discredit audit, but to show how the emotion of fear
(and not abstract technique) is a condition of operability for auditors in the field. In sum, the main
implication which falls out of our study is the necessity to distinguish between good, functional
fear (nurturing practical intelligence) and pathogenic anxiety (triggering defensive strategies).
It is now generally accepted that audit is not simply a neutral technology designed to
verify financial information. We know that it is also, and perhaps above all, a socially constructed
process aimed essentially at legitimation (Power, 2003). In the early 1990s, Humphrey and
Moizer (1990, p. 235) expressed what was at the time a radical view: ‘Above all, audit judgment
research needs to start from the premise that professional expertise is not 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 it through a whole range of control and surveillance mechanisms exercised around
them and described in this article.
That said, our psychodynamic approach adds a further dimension to social constructivism.
As noted by Fineman (1993, p. 13):
The social construction of organizations […] is intensely subjective and personal. We
are informed that work organizations, as well as producing goods and services, are also
sites where individuals make meaning for themselves, and have their meanings shaped.
The profound emotional basis for this is only hinted at. […] Social constructionism
does not ask much about what is ‘beneath’ the actor’s actions. […] [P]sychodynamic
theorists […] have more to contribute here.
The fear experienced by auditors is not only the product of a socially constructed system, external
to the individual. It also finds its source in the deep and autonomous structures of subjectivity,
and is itself a powerful source of actions informing public accountants’ practices. Resulting from
the audit process (socially constructed), it deeply influences 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 and shapes auditors’ practices, our
paper also brings to the fore the 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 by fear, that they are able to perceive and manage the risks associated with their
workspace, their work time, their work tools, and the controls that they have performed. In the
field, the practical intelligence that fear sometimes triggers 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 activities, an instrument in its own right, on a par with questionnaires,
matrices, computers, and so on. Even when they adopt defensive strategies, it is often by
maintaining their body at a distance from the risks that worry them to much that auditors manage
not to think about these risks. In the study of the social world, attention to the body has been
characterized as ‘an absent presence’ (Shilling, 1993, p. 19). ‘Studies of “society” or
“institutions” assume but rarely examine how social practices are embodied and, in this sense,
rely upon human embodiment for their enactment’ (Hassard, Holliday, & Willmott, 2000, p. 4).
This paper is an invitation to bring the body back into research on auditors, not as an instrument
of physical labor, but by considering how it operates as a medium of organizing practices.
34
Notwithstanding their prevailing image as pure minds, auditors are not cold, disembodied
machines. The subjective relationship that they maintain with the main elements of their working
situations and their institutional environment (Suddaby, 2010) operates through the medium of
their emotions, feelings, and corporal sensations. Whether it be managing the ambiguity of their
mission, the worrying character of their workspaces, the pressure of time (Andersen-Gough,
Grey, & Robson, 2005), their career progression (Kornberger et al., 2011), professional failure
(Gendron & Spira, 2010), the adaptation to new management methods (Covaleski et al., 1998), or
the relationship with auditees, auditors are constantly struggling with their fears, their
frustrations, their disappointments, their anger, their joys, and many other kinds of emotions and
perceptions. Where work is characterized as ‘mental’, as is typically the case with auditors, ‘the
study of organizational behavior tends to represent human beings as cognitive processors
comprising perceptions and motivations who design structures and manage meanings. […] Such
understandings pay scant attention 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 the embodied and emotional quality
of auditing in a way that counteracts the tendency to represent public accountants ‘as bloodless
designers or executors of organizational functions’ (Hassard et al., 2000, p. 12).
In empirical terms, the research program that we wish to initiate includes four main areas.
The first area involves refining our analysis. The experience of fear at work varies according to
the nature of the risks involved: an electrician specialized in high tension lines is afraid of being
electrocuted, a surgeon is fearful of not performing a successful operation, and an office clerk
may worry about being unable to reach the deadline for submitting a report required by her
superior. It also varies according to temper, ability, and the level of knowledge that an actor has
of her environment (Douglas, 1992; Freud, 1920). Last but not least, size could also be an
important variable for fear, with auditors of large clients – “too big to audit” - being perhaps
more fearful than others. In sum, the intensity of auditors’ fear may vary according to their
responsibilities, the organizational environment in which they perform their task, and their level
of knowledge. In this respect, further research is required to provide a more detailed description
and understanding of the experience of fear among auditors based on client’s features or on
characteristics such as auditors’ professional rank, gender, personality type, etc.
The second area involves extending the study of public accountants’ fear to closely related
emotions such as guilt and shame that also play an important role in work practices. Like fear,
guilt and shame are located at the intersection of the psychological and the social. On the one
hand, they are caused by a collapse of self-esteem. On the other hand, they are related to a social
situation in which a negative image of the self is given by another person. As such, they are
among the mechanisms that generate a consciousness of alterity, while triggering at the same
time an awareness of the self through fear and confrontation with the disapproval of others
(Goffman, 1990; Nussbaum, 2010). In this sense, guilt and shame are not only a manifestation of
the logic of social differentiation, but also a powerful manifestation of the power and domination
issues governing social relationships in work settings (Bourdieu, 1977). Social violence and
humiliation are common in workplaces (Czarniawska, 2008; Hershcovis, 2011; Neuman &
Baron, 1998). What role do guilt and shame play in audit firms? How are these key affective
mechanisms of self-control and social regulation constructed in the work environment of public
accountants? To what extent do accounting systems contribute to stigmatizing certain social
categories, thus causing humiliation?
35
The third area involves examining the relationship between the institutional structures of
firms and control systems on the one hand and the experience of fear on the other hand. As we
showed, fear is not only an emotion: it is also a culture (Tudor, 2003). Institutionalized belief and
value systems represent an important source of difference, not only between cultures, but also
between organizations (Douglas, 1992; Power, 2007b). The attribution of blame and failure –
something which has not spared the accounting 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 of control
systems lead to what types of fear? Do certain accounting systems promote a culture of fear more
than others? How do the experience of fear and its effects vary from one system to another?
The last area implies a more general consideration of the political role of accounting and
control systems in the production and management of fear. In discussing the seminal paper by
Burchell et al. (1980), Richard Mason (1980, p. 29) made the following comment:
In social systems, uncertainty breeds anxiety. Accounting information serves the
social purpose of abating and objectifying anxiety in a manner similar to the process
of institutionalization, rationalization and the establishment of symbolic order. In
sum, the role of the accounting profession in society is to absorb uncertainty and to
abate social anxiety.
Emotions are not politically neutral. Some emotions weigh heavily on the organization
and health of our democratic environment: ‘When we meet in society, if we have not learned […]
imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail,
because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the
[emotional ability] to see other people as equal human beings’ (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 6). Fear is an
extremely powerful emotional resource from a political perspective (Goodwin et al., 2001). It is
by exploiting or playing on fear and defeatism that dangerous ideologies are able to gain
legitimacy and to achieve a degree of normality. It is also by conquering their fear that some
actors find the courage to stand up to oppression. If, as suggested by Mason (1980), accounting
and control systems are systems designed to alleviate fear, it follows that the accounting
profession has a responsibility to ensure that these systems can be used emotionally, not only as
instruments of domination, but also as levers of democratic action.
36
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Table 1 : Observations
OBSERVATIONS
Audit observations
Mandate 1
Mandate 2
Mandate 3
Mandate 4
Mandate 5
Mandate 6
Mandate 7
Total
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
Interima
4
57
50
6
55
100
3
24
65
-
observation phases
Finalb
4
36
45
8
62
67
5
64
52
10
68
70
10
89
108
Total
4
57
50
4
36
45
14
117
167
3
24
65
5
64
52
10
68
70
10
89
108
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
13
136
215
37
319
342
50
455
557
Additional observations
Training courses – new
managersc
Technical information meetingd
Grand total
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
In days
In hours
No of handwritten note pages
a
2
15
40
0,25
2
5
52,25
472
602
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 of internal controls.
b
The final audit phase occurs after the year-end of the audited financial statements and consists of various procedures performed
by auditors to corroborate 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
43
Table 2 : Interviews
INTERVIEWS
Mandate 1
Mandate 2
Mandate 3
Mandate 4
Mandate 5
Mandate 6
Mandate 7
Total
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
1
Position
Interviewees
Time in hours
9
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1,5
1
1
1
1
5
3
3,5
Total
Assistants
Seniors
Managers
Partners
Audit - interviews
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
2
2
2,5
1
1
3
1
1,5
2
2
2,5
3
3
3
8
7
7
1
1
1
4
3
3
5
2
2
6
4
4,5
6
0
0
6
5
5,5
13
9
9,5
4
3
3,5
11
6
7
19
16
16,5
44
26
28
Additional – interviews (in hours)
Interviews with seniors not
within audits
18/07/2002 : Senior A
19/07/2002 : Senior B
Executive meetingse
23/09/2003 : DHRf
16/10/2003 : DHR&DATg
20/02/2004 : DAQRMh
Debriefing committee
meetingsi
Grand total (in hours)
02/02/2004 : DHR&DAT
03/02/2005 : DHR&DAT
19/05/2010 : DRH
1,5
1,5
1,5
1,5
1
1
1
1
1
1
1,5
1,5
1
1,5
1,5
1
8
e
3,5
10
Executive meetings were used to plan the research project
Director of human resources
g
Director of audit training
h
Director of audit quality and risk management
i
Debriefing committee meetings were used to discuss and validate the results of the research project
f
44
16,5
38
45