FEAR AND RISK IN THE AUDIT PROCESS

Henri Guénin-Paracini, CPA, CGA, Ph.D.Université Laval

2325, rue de la TerrasseBureau 5234

Québec (Québec)Canada G1V 0A6

Email: Henri.guenin-paracini@fsa.ulaval.ca

Bertrand Malsch, MBA, Ph.D.Queen’s School of Business

140, Union StreetKingston (Ontario)Canada K7L 3N6

E-mail: bertrand.malsch@queensu.ca

Anne Marché Paillé, Ph.D.Ghent University

Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical ConsultingH. Dunantlaan 2

9000 GhentBelgium

Email: Anne.Marche-Paille@ugent.be

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.

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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.

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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.a (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 professional-seeming 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 as being mainly disruptive.b The assumption is that feelings are the antithesis of rationality. a A film by Henri-Georges Clouzot (1953).b Admittedly, a few articles examining the outcomes of auditor stress have underlined the positive effects that a

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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 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

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.

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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.c 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).

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

c 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.

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Data collectionThe 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 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

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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;d 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 analysisThe 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.

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

d 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.

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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.e

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 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 e 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).

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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 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

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idea of ‘living without foundations’ (Bauman, 1991, p. 16). However, obsessed with self-scrutiny, 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.

Fear at work: main object and sourcesWhat 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.

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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 resourceNow, 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.

From fear to comfort through practical intelligenceThe 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

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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 strategiesThat 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 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.f f 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

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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: impossibleThe 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).

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.

(e.g. Barrett, Cooper, & Jamal, 2005; Pentland, 1993; Radcliffe, 1999). The second of these options was chosen here.

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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.

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

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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:

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

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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 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 jobAs 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,

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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 ourclients. […] 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 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

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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 self-esteem 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 doneOne 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.

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.

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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 anxiousAs 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 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

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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-worryingAuditors 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 ‘alarm-photo’.‘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

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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 fearAs 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.g 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 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

g 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).

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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 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,

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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. 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

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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.

Managing the anxiogenic work timeBecause 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

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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 toolsWhen 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 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.

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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.h 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 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

h 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.

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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 concludingIn 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.

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?

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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 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

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Fear without confidenceCommenting 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 strategiesBased 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 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 in-depth 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

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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 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

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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:

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.

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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 i 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.

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

i i.e. self-confidence, confidence in work instruments and confidence in colleagues.

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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 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.

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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 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

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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.

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,

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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?

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:

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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.

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Table 1 : Observations

OBSERVATIONS

Audit observations

observation phasesInterima Finalb Total

Mandate 1In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

45750

---

45750

Mandate 2In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

---

43645

43645

Mandate 3In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

655

100

86267

14117167

Mandate 4In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

32465

---

32465

Mandate 5In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

---

56452

56452

Mandate 6In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

---

106870

106870

Mandate 7In daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

---

1089

108

1089

108

TotalIn daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

13136215

37319342

50455557

Additional observations

Training courses – new managerscIn daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

21540

Technical information meetingdIn daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

0,2525

Grand totalIn daysIn hoursNo of handwritten note pages

52,25472602

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

Audit - interviews

Partners

Managers

Seniors

Assistants

Total

Mandate 1PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

1 111

222

433

Mandate 2PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

1 1 111

211

522

Mandate 3PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

2 111

111

22

2,5

64

4,5

Mandate 4PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

2 1 2 1 600

Mandate 5PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

111

11

1,5

1 333

65

5,5

Mandate 6PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

1 111

31

1,5

877

139

9,5

Mandate 7PositionIntervieweesTime in hours

1 22

2,5

111

43

3,5

TotalPositionIntervieweesTime in hours

911

53

3,5

1167

1916

16,5

442628

Additional – interviews (in hours)

Interviews with seniors not within audits

18/07/2002 : Senior A19/07/2002 : Senior B

1,51,5

1,51,5

Executive meetingse23/09/2003 : DHRf

16/10/2003 : DHR&DATg

20/02/2004 : DAQRMh

111

111

Debriefing committee meetingsi

02/02/2004 : DHR&DAT03/02/2005 : DHR&DAT19/05/2010 : DRH

1,51,5

1

1,51,51

Grand total (in hours) 8 3,5 10 16,5 38

e Executive meetings were used to plan the research projectf Director of human resourcesg Director of audit trainingh Director of audit quality and risk managementi Debriefing committee meetings were used to discuss and validate the results of the research project

44