Wards Accounting Seminar Series. "The routine dynamics behind auditors’ approaches to novel audit tasks: Revisiting the structure versus judgement dichotomy"
Published: 9 October 2024
04 December 2024. Professor Anna Samsonova-Taddei, HEC Montréal
Professor Anna Samsonova-Taddei, HEC Montréal
"The routine dynamics behind auditors’ approaches to novel audit tasks: Revisiting the structure versus judgement dichotomy"
Wednesday, 04 December 2024. 12:00-13:30
Room 282 Hothouse, Adam Smith Business School
Abstract
While the literature often presents auditing as increasingly becoming a highly standardized technical compliance exercise, there is growing evidence that contemporary conditions for auditing are characterized by significant uncertainty and greater space for inference. In this paper, we address the question of how auditors approach novel practical situations, often seen as prompting higher degrees of reflexivity, within a highly formalized audit environment. The study draws on empirical evidence from 30 interviews with practicing auditors in the UK offices of large audit firms and the “routines dynamics” perspective from the organisation studies literature presenting work routines as encompassing both ostensive (structural) and performative elements. We find that auditors experience novel audit tasks as an ostensive rupture, finding themselves unable to relate aspects of the situation to the ostensive blueprints available from prior practice experiences. We analyse the routine dynamics behind auditors’ efforts to repair the rupture, revealing in the process different modes of engagement with the “ostensive” through which auditors draw understandings and interpretations appropriate to the novel task. We also reveal the “relationality” of routines as a key performative characteristic of the routine dynamics enabling auditors to validate their interpretations and become confident in their judgement. Taken together, our findings serve to challenge the top-down dichotomous view of the relationship between audit structure and judgement which persists in the audit literature.
Bio
Anna Samsonova-Taddei is Professor of Accounting at HEC Montréal, Canada. Her research focuses on topics such as auditing and accountability; country-specific and transnational regulatory processes and structures; governance reforms in transition economies; professional ethics and practice methodology.Anna’s work appeared in leading journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society; Organization Studies; Journal of Business Ethics; Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal; Critical Perspectives on Accounting; and Accounting and Business Research, among others.
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First published: 9 October 2024