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A total of 25 years of research on the audit society has provided rich and engaging accounts of the ways in which rituals of verification have conditioned organizations and individuals to think and act. In contrast, this paper aims to explore the possibility of conditions through which things and spaces are enacted to be non-auditable.

Using the concept of proliferation and rarefaction (Callon and Law, 2005), the paper adopts a case-comparison design to explore two empirical sites. The first investigates a vast excess of audit structures against the case of the biggest corporate fraud in German accounting history, the Wirecard scandal. The second discusses the configuration of Tinder, the most popular provider of mobile dating and the absence of visible verification mechanisms.

The paper argues that things can become non-auditable through two mechanisms. Based on the two empirical sites, non-auditability can happen through an overload of auditable resources or, through the withdrawal of required resources. The paper discusses the consequences of this finding and suggests avenues for future research on non-auditability.

While accounting scholars have extensively addressed the audit explosion and traced how audit practices have journeyed into ever more novel terrains, this paper discusses forms of escape from the value-subverting and reductive accounts incorporated in the audit society. It thereby points to conditions under which accounting ends.

What counts as evidence of good performance, behaviour or character? While quantitative metrics have long been used to measure performance and productivity in schools, factories and workplaces, what is striking today is the extent to which these calculative methods and rationalities are being extended into new areas of life through the global spread of performance indicators (PIs) and performance management systems. What began as part of the neoliberalising projects of the 1980s with a few strategically chosen PIs to give greater state control over the public sector through contract management and mobilising ‘users’ has now proliferated to include almost every aspect of professional work. The use of metrics has also expanded from managing professionals to controlling entire populations. This chapter focuses on the rise of these new forms of audit and their effects in two areas: first, the alliance being formed between state-collected data and that collected by commercial companies on their customers through, for example loyalty cards and credit checks. Second, China’s new social credit system, which allocates individual scores to each citizen and uses rewards of better or privileged service to entice people to volunteer information about themselves, publish their ‘ratings’ and compete with friends for status points. This is a new development in the use of audit simultaneously to discipline whole populations and responsibilise individuals to perform according to new state and commercial norms about the reliable/conforming ‘good’ citizen.

Under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) is the single regulator of firms in the UK financial services industry. The Act grants extensive powers to the FSA such that it can impose by rules and regulations additional corporate governance requirements on firms in the financial services industry. The legislative and regulatory requirements also extend to individuals under the FSA approved persons' regime. The purpose of the paper is to examine this individualization of corporate governance.

The paper first explores the rise to significance of internal control and risk management in corporate governance and regulation, and links this to Beck's risk society and individualization theses. The extent of the individualization of corporate governance by the approved persons' regime is explored by examining three sources of evidence: the FSA's documents setting out the approved persons' regime; the initial perceptions about the implementation of the approved persons' regime from interviews with high‐level individuals in the financial services industry; and the outcomes of illustrative FSA enforcement actions against individuals.

The findings are that the FSA has developed a comprehensive and formidable apparatus for the individualization of corporate governance in the UK's financial services industry. It is argued that a discourse based on the interpretive evaluations of internal control and risk management may be replacing a discourse based on the quantitative techniques of management accounting, which may be characterised as the demise of the “calculating self” and the rise of the “auditable self”.

The FSA's approved persons' regime could be developed as a model for other areas of the private and public sectors, where for regulatory purposes it may be desirable to identify approved or official roles.

The ability of regulators to “make” corporate governance by rules and regulations is relatively unexplored. Also, the focus of corporate governance is on firms rather than individuals. The paper considers the extension of corporate governance from the firm to the individual that may be achieved by regulation.

Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, the demise of total quality has been much exaggerated. Periodic changes of direction and drivers have given it new life and impetus during the time it has been popularized by western organizations. Each renewal brings with it a new set of measures to define and manage quality, each of which adds to a cumulative embedding of total quality in the way a business operates.

With the worldwide growth of open telecommunication networks and in particular the Internet, the privacy and security concerns of people using these networks have increased. On the one hand, users are concerned about their privacy, and desire to anonymously access the network. On the other hand, some organizations are concerned about how this anonymous access might be abused. This paper intends to bridge these conflicting interests, and proposes a solution for revocable anonymous access to the Internet. Moreover, the paper presents some legal background and motivation for such a solution. However, the paper also indicates some difficulties and disadvantages of the proposed solution, and suggests the need for further debate on the issue of online anonymity.

This paper aims to assess the actual contribution to organisational change of management and leadership development (MLD) activity for middle managers (MMs) in public service organisations (PSOs).

Using the case study approach, the paper compares the content and outcomes of management and leadership training interventions for MMs in two large PSOs. The organisations, a fire brigade and a train operating company, are leaders in their sectors with respect to management development and “modernisation” of their services.

The paper demonstrates how, in one case, MM development was largely an exercise in regulatory compliance, with little effect on individual MMs' performance or organisational outcomes. The second case demonstrates how MMs were effectively trained to enforce specific human resource policies which contributed to the successful implementation of top‐down strategy yet paid little attention to the potential leadership role of MMs.

The paper highlights the need for further contextualised research at organisational level into the outcomes of MLD, especially in terms of different public service contexts.

The paper demonstrates the dangers of designing and implementing development programmes without sufficient regard to professional practice and the realities of managerial discretion in PSOs.

The paper provides an in‐depth and contextualised insight into the conditions for success and failure in management development interventions in PSOs.

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are internet-native self-governing enterprises where individual groups, communities, agencies, consumers and providers work together using blockchain-led smart contracts (SCs). This study aims to examine the role of DAO marketplaces in technology-led autonomous organisation design for enterprise technology sourcing industries, with algorithmic trust and governance.

The authors examined the importance of an enterprise marketplace governance platform for technology sourcing using DAO as a decentralised/democratised business model. A total of 98 DAO products/services are evaluated across 11 industries that envisage DAO as a strategic choice for the governance of decentralised marketplace platforms.

The research findings validate how a DAO-led enterprise marketplace governance platform can create a cohesive collaboration between consumers (enterprises) and providers (solution vendors) in a disintermediated way. The proposed novel layered solution for an autonomous governance-led enterprise marketplace promises algorithmic trust-led, self-governed tactical alternatives to a strategic plan.

The research targets multiple industry outlooks to understand decentralised autonomous marketplace governance and develop the theoretical foundation for research and extensive corporate suitability.

The research underpinnings boost the entrepreneurs’ ability to realise the practical potential of DAO between multiple parties using SCs and tokenise the entire product and service offerings over immutable ledger technologies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is unique and the first of its kind to study the multi-industry role of algorithmic trust and governance in enterprise technology sourcing marketplaces driven by 98 decentralised and consensus-based DAO products across 11 industries.

There is a need to provide secure and safe information security systems through the use of firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, encryption, authentication, and other hardware and software solutions. The purpose of this paper is therefore to propose a framework which includes safe, secure, trusted, and auditable services, as well as forensic mechanisms to provide audit trails for digital evidence of transactions and protection against malicious and illegal activities.

The paper reviews the literature as the foundation and knowledge base for the proposed framework and system of secure and trustworthy mobile agent (MA)‐based e‐marketplaces. It consists of the current state of the art taxonomy for the classified MA‐based frameworks for e‐marketplace trading, underlying supporting systems, e‐payment systems, and the essential issues related to auditable and digital forensic services.

The current knowledge shows that there is a serious lack of auditable and digital forensic services to make secure and trustworthy MA‐based e‐marketplaces systems. The paper draws conclusions and highlights further research work which is ongoing and new work that needs to be performed.

The paper perceives the needs to define the requirements for secure and trustworthy MA‐based e‐marketplaces and proposes a framework to design effective systems using the latest techniques and technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to address the subjectivity inherent in existing methods of human capital value measurement (HCVM) by proposing a 360‐degree peer review as a method of validating self‐reporting in HCVM surveys.

The case study is based on a survey of a section of the Royal Australian Navy. The sample was 118 respondents, who were mainly engineering and technical workers, and included both civilian and uniform.

The research may be summarised in three main findings. First, it confirms previous research demonstrating that correlations between self‐ and other‐ratings tend to be low. However, while previous research has found that self‐rating tends to be higher than other‐rating, it was found to be the opposite: other‐rating was higher than self‐rating. Second, personality is discounted as an influencing variable in self‐rating of knowledge. Third, there are patterns in the size of the discrepancy by knowledge dimension (i.e. employee capability, employee sustainability) that allow generalisation about the adjustment necessary to find an accurate self‐other rating of knowledge.

The findings are based on a single case study and are therefore an exercise in theory development rather than theory testing.

The 360‐degree peer review rating of knowledge has considerable application. First, use the outcomes in the way 360‐degree feedback has been traditionally used; i.e. identifying training needs assessment, job analysis, performance appraisal, or managerial and leadership development. Second, use it for performance appraisal – given the method's capacity to identify issues at a very finite level: e.g. are you building effective relationships with customers? Third, identify knowledge gaps, at a strategic level, for recruitment and development targets. Finally, in terms of financial decisions investors might be able to compare knowledge scores by organization.

Traditionally, researchers and practitioners have used other‐ratings as a tool for identifying training and development needs. In this paper, other‐ratings have been introduced as a method for validating self‐rating in the measurement of knowledge. The objective was to address one of the weaknesses in existing methods – subjectivity. The solution to this problem was to use three data points – self‐reporting, 360‐degree peer review, and personality ratings – to validate the measurement of individuals’ human capital. This triangulation method aims to introduce objectivity to survey methods, making it a value measurement rather than value assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications that Power’s book had to the author’s research in public sector auditing.

In this paper, the author reflects and debates the inspiration that Michael Power’s book The Audit Society had on the author’s own research.

The author finds that this book had a significant influence on how he succeeded theorizing his studies on auditing, and how he could contribute to the audit literature. It is stunning how the book succeeded in synthesizing audit research, encouraging scholars to understand auditing as a social practice, i.e. how auditing can be theorized using various social science theories and how the book also appealed to broader social science.

This paper is a reflection that covers around a 20-year period with potential mis-representations of how exactly sequences of actions and thoughts were.

This paper helps to clarify how it is that audit operates and influences everyday life of persons involved with auditing.

This paper casts doubts as to what actions are carried out in the name of audit and that audit is not just a value free activity but involved with political agendas.

The originality of this paper is that it fleshes out how a seminal book can have significant implications on how research is carried out.