نقش حسابرسی داخلی در مشارکت دولتی: یک تجزیه و تحلیل فوکولندی The role of internal auditing in corporate governance: a Foucauldian analysis

Introduction Internal auditing remains a neglected area of research (Gendron and Bédard, 2006; Roussy, 2014), despite its rise as an integral component of the corporate governance fabric of contemporary organizations, particularly in the wake of the spate of corporate collapses of the 1990s and 2000s (Carcello et al., 2005a; Sarens et al., 2009; Maijoor, 2000; Gramling et al., 2004). The function has increasingly been regarded as a key component of risk management (Spira and Page, 2003; Selim and McNamee, 1999; Arena et al., 2010; de Zwaan et al., 2011; Leung et al., 2003) that helps organizations fulfill corporate goals (Spira and Page, 2003; Gramling et al., 2004). The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA)[1] defines internal auditing as “an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organization’s operations.” It further elaborates that internal auditing “helps an organization accomplish its objectives by bringing a systematic, disciplined approach to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of risk management, control, and governance processes” (Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), 2004, emphasis added)[2]. The agency theory perspective ( Jensen and Meckling, 1976), which continues as the dominant theoretical view informing internal auditing research (Adams, 1994; Mihret, 2014), has contributed to the internal auditing literature grounded in the positivist research approach. Under this research tradition, the origin of the demand for internal auditing is traced to the contractual relationships between management and shareholders of firms as part of addressing the agency problem in shareholder-manager relationships (Healy and Palepu, 2001). Nevertheless, agency theory’s explanation for the demand for internal auditing rests on the theory’s underpinning positivist ontological assumption that empirical phenomena represent an objective reality unaffected by context – a view that can be challenged from interpretive research perspectives. The argument of the present paper is based on the premise that the predominant choice of a positivist approach to internal auditing research leads to conceptualizing the function as a neutral technical tool and that this results in neglecting the complex social context in which internal auditing is deployed as a technology for exercising power. Innovative theoretical approaches, increasingly advocated for accounting and auditing research (Guthrie and Parker, 2012), therefore, are needed to address such theoretical difficulties by enabling us to understand complex phenomena in their contexts (Parker, 2008). The Foucauldian framework is one possible approach that can be employed for this purpose. It has been used in major streams of accounting research to explain how systems, practices, and techniques are implicated in the exercise of power (Townley, 1993; Miller and Rose, 1990). Specifically, the literature illustrates that financial accounting makes organizational activities increasingly governable by rendering them measurable and visible (Hines, 1988; Morgan, 1988) and that management accounting provides further tools and vocabularies that enable management actions in the planning and control of organizations (Preston, 1992; Loft, 1986; Robson, 1992; Miller and O’leary, 1987). Auditors serve in this context as an added layer of governance by subjecting outputs of accounting to independent verification, investigation, and evaluation, as illustrated in Radcliffe’s (1998, 1999) analysis of public sector efficiency auditing.