Fear and risk in the audit process

Description
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.

Fear and risk in the audit process
Henri Guénin-Paracini
a,?
, Bertrand Malsch
b
, Anne Marché Paillé
c
a
Université Laval, 2325, rue de la Terrasse, Québec, Québec G1V 0A6, Canada
b
Queen’s School of Business, 140, Union Street, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada
c
Ghent University, Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting, H. Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
a b s t r a c t
Relying on an ethnographic study conducted in the French branch of a big audit ?rm 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 ?rms cultivate this feeling
through informal and formal techniques to stimulate vigilance, encourage self-surpass-
ment, 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 ?eld, driven by fear, they manage to
?nally become comfortable either by mobilizing their ‘practical intelligence’ (an intelli-
gence 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 signi?cant
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 reg-
ulators 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.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Comfort [...] is what you feel at the end of an audit,
when you’re just about certain that you’ve done your
job properly. But you spend the rest of the time feeling
anxious. [...]. As an auditor, if you have even a modicum
of professional conscientiousness, you just can’t avoid
caring about your job. In some ways, that’s what we’re
paid to do. Our lives aren’t at risk, that’s true, but if I
may draw on my taste in movies, I’d say auditing is to
some extent the wages of fear.
1
(One senior interviewed
during the study)
As argued by Maitlis and Ozcelik (2004, p. 375), ‘we
now widely accept organizations as ‘‘emotional arenas’’
(Fineman, 1993, p. 9) and acknowledge the emotionallyhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.001
0361-3682/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
?
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 418 656 3936.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Guénin
-Paracini), [email protected] (B. Malsch), anne.marche-paille
@ugent.be (A.M. Paillé).
1
A ?lm by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
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j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
saturated nature of people’s work experience (Ashforth &
Humphrey, 1995)’. Barsade and Gibson (2007, p. 36) note
that ‘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 inte-
grates employee affect provides a perspective missing from
earlier views’.
In the ?eld 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 de-
void 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 pro-
fessionalism at work: ‘because accounting work is inter-
personal, 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 technoc-
racy’ (Gill, 2009, p. 34). On the evidence of professional
audit standards, audit work only appears to involve emo-
tionless methods of algorithmic reasoning (Francis,
1994). And academic papers devoted to investigating the
emotional dimension of public accounting remain extre-
mely rare (McPhail, 2004; Nelson & Tan, 2005), with the
exception of those examining the causes and/or conse-
quences of auditors’ (role) stress (Smith, Derrick, & Koval,
2010).
For example, in the proli?c audit judgment and deci-
sion-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 posi-
tive-mood auditors have the lowest consensus and make
the least conservative judgments when required to evalu-
ate inventories. Finally, Cianci and Bierstaker (2009) indi-
cated 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.
2
The assump-
tion is that feelings are the antithesis of rationality. How-
ever, 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 interre-
lated (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 in?uenced by our working environ-
ment (Domagalski, 1999; Fineman, 1996). From this per-
spective, 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 pleas-
ant 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 ?rst to emphasize the impor-
tance 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 suf?cient ‘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 con-
ducted to enhance our awareness of the affective dimen-
sion of the audit process.
Yet comfort constitutes only a small part of the emo-
tional experience of public accountants. This became par-
ticularly apparent to us in the course of an ethnographic
study conducted in the French branch of a big audit ?rm,
aimed at better understanding the work performed by
auditors in the ?eld. 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 rel-
atively 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-struc-
tured interviews con?rmed 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 com-
fortable, 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 speci?cally on the following questions: (1) What
exactly is it that auditors worry about? (2) How do auditors
manage fear in the ?eld? (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
2
Admittedly, a few articles examining the outcomes of auditor stress
have underlined the positive effects that a moderate level of stress can have
in auditing (see e.g., Choo, 1986; Fogarty, Singh, Rhoads, & Moore, 2000).
However, the fact remains that there tends to be far more emphasis in the
audit literature on the negative consequences of stress.
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 265
developed by Dejours (1993). In adopting a perspective at
once psychological and socio-constructionist, this theory
provides an interesting insight into the interplay of fear
and work activity. Drawing on ?eld studies conducted in
a range of industries, Dejours (1993) argues that ‘fear is
present in all kinds of professional tasks, including in
[. . .] of?ce 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, of?cial
work prescriptions and unof?cial techniques and pro-
cesses. Based on Dejours’s rich and well-documented
re?ections, the present study of fear in auditing may be
seen in some sense as a psychodynamic interpretation of
audit work. In this respect, our ?ndings are not entirely
speci?c to the audit profession. To a large extent, they re-
?ect what working involves in practice and resonate with
the ?ndings of many studies of fear conducted in other sec-
tors of activity.
3
In a sense, this reinforces the plausibility of
our results and provides ‘a reminder that ?nancial 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 ?eld study – the professional risks associ-
ated with auditing and the non-accounting consequences
of sensitive audit decisions have increased dramatically
(Malsch & Gendron, 2013). Being attentive to news, calcu-
lating, 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 ?rm 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 ?eld 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 signi?cant
driver of the managerialization of risk management is an
institutional fear and anxiety’. Yet, while generally associ-
ated with the perception of risk, the subjective experience
of fear and the role that fear plays in risk management pro-
cesses are most often overlooked in the literature. The fo-
cus 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; Hopwood,
1998; Humphrey, 2008; O’Dwyer, 2011; Power, 2003;
Skærbæk, 2009). Ultimately, it contributes to the growing
interpretive literature seeking to ‘question rationalized ac-
counts of the audit judgement process, and to explore the
complex ‘‘back stage’’ of practice in its social and organiza-
tional context’ (Power, 2003, pp. 379–380).
The remainder of the article begins by providing a de-
tailed 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 ?nally discussed.
Research methods
Data collection
The data reported and analyzed in this paper were col-
lected as part of a grounded interpretive ?eld study (Glaser
& Strauss, 1967; Van Maanen, 1979) on the work per-
formed 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 of?cial audit
prescriptions do not address.
As part of this goal, we secured the consent of the
French branch of a Big Four ?rm (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 nec-
essary 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 assis-
tants), were monitored in real time in June and July 2002
and between November 2003 and July 2004. The main cri-
teria used for their selection was one of diversity (in terms
of industry, ?rm and audit team size, geography, engage-
ment type and duration).
In May 2002, as a preamble to our ?eldwork, 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 evalua-
tion 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 obser-
vation (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 h of obser-
vation (9.1 h on average per day) and 557 pages of hand-
written 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
3
The question of the dynamics of fear in the workplace has been
examined, for example, in studies of managers (Geuser, 2006; Flam, 1993;
Jackall, 1988), nurses (Menzies-Lyth, 1960), ?re?ghters (Douesnard &
Saint-Arnaud, 2011), construction workers (Dejours, 1993), ?ghter pilots
(Dejours, 1993), funeral staff (Trompette & Caroly, 2004), lumberjacks
(Schepens, 2005), prison guards (Demaegdt, 2008), workers in the petro-
chemical industry, workers in the nuclear industry (Dejours, 1993),
warehousemen and railroaders (Moulinié, 2004), etc.
266 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
tensions between what organisational members say and
do’ (p. 310).
To ensure that we did not miss any signi?cant 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 in-
tense. 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 ?eld, we were often prompted to ask our informants
for clari?cations, ‘in the heat of the action’, about their
speci?c goals, the techniques they used, the feelings they
experienced, etc.
Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with
31 auditors from the audit ?rm (4 partners, 3 managers,
8 seniors and 16 assistants). Apart from 2 seniors and 3
partners, all these auditors worked for the teams moni-
tored during the study. Overall, the total duration of the
interviews amounted to 38 h, summarized in Table 2.
Interviews were always conducted outside the audited
companies at the end of audit tasks and lasted approxi-
mately 1 h. 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 informa-
tion 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 hesi-
tate to question what they were telling us and strongly
Table 1
Observations.
Observation phases
Interim
a
Final
b
Total
OBSERVATIONS
Audit observations
Mandate 1 In days 4 – 4
In hours 57 – 57
No of handwritten note pages 50 – 50
Mandate 2 In days – 4 4
In hours – 36 36
No of handwritten note pages – 45 45
Mandate 3 In days 6 8 14
In hours 55 62 117
No of handwritten note pages 100 67 167
Mandate 4 In days 3 – 3
In hours 24 – 24
No of handwritten note pages 65 – 65
Mandate 5 In days – 5 5
In hours – 64 64
No of handwritten note pages – 52 52
Mandate 6 In days – 10 10
In hours – 68 68
No of handwritten note pages – 70 70
Mandate 7 In days – 10 10
In hours – 89 89
No of handwritten note pages – 108 108
Total In days 13 37 50
In hours 136 319 455
No of handwritten note pages 215 342 557
Additional observations
Training courses – new managers
c
In days 2
In hours 15
No of handwritten note pages 40
Technical information meeting
d
In days 0.25
In hours 2
No of handwritten note pages 5
Grand total In days 52.25
In hours 472
No of handwritten note pages 602
a
The interim audit phase is prior to the year-end of the audited ?nancial statements and is used for planning purposes as well as an initial evaluation of
internal controls.
b
The ?nal audit phase occurs after the year-end of the audited ?nancial statements and consists of various procedures performed by auditors to
corroborate their ?nal 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.
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 267
encouraged them to challenge our own analyses. In other
words, each interview was an opportunity to collect sup-
plementary data, to highlight the themes that actors con-
sidered more or less signi?cant, and to correct and enrich
our interpretation of our ?eld notes.
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 ?eld with a view to produc-
ing several research papers; that complete con?dentiality
and anonymity were guaranteed
4
; that our study would
be an opportunity for them to re?ect on their work habits;
and that they would hopefully gain a new perspective on
their practices. Ultimately, the signi?cant amount of time
we spent living with auditors enabled us to develop genuine
relationships with them (Patton, 2002). Apart from 3 indi-
viduals who remained somewhat on the defensive, all the
participants gladly cooperated in the study.
In addition, the use of multiple methods of data collec-
tion, the diversity of the audits examined and the vast ar-
ray of auditors observed and interviewed enabled us to
check our data through triangulation (Eisenhardt, 1989;
Lincoln & Guba, 1985). For example, participant observa-
tion was used as a means of questioning and contextual-
izing the comments of interviewees, while interviews
served to supplement, con?rm or refute our observations
(member checking; Werner & Schoep?e, 1987). Overall,
these precautions enabled us to collect evidence deemed
credible enough to be considered for theorizing.
Data analysis
The collected material was analyzed using qualitative
procedures (Eisenhardt, 1989; Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Table 2
Interviews.
Partners Managers Seniors Assistants Total
INTERVIEWS
Audit – interviews
Mandate 1 Position 1 1 2 4
Interviewees 1 2 3
Time in hours 1 2 3
Mandate 2 Position 1 1 1 2 5
Interviewees 1 1 2
Time in hours 1 1 2
Mandate 3 Position 2 1 1 2 6
Interviewees 1 1 2 4
Time in hours 1 1 2.5 4.5
Mandate 4 Position 2 1 2 1 6
Interviewees 0
Time in hours 0
Mandate 5 Position 1 1 1 3 6
Interviewees 1 1 3 5
Time in hours 1 1.5 3 5.5
Mandate 6 Position 1 1 3 8 13
Interviewees 1 1 7 9
Time in hours 1 1.5 7 9.5
Mandate 7 Position 1 2 1 4
Interviewees 2 1 3
Time in hours 2.5 1 3.5
Total Position 9 5 11 19 44
Interviewees 1 3 6 16 26
Time in hours 1 3.5 7 16.5 28
Additional – interviews (in hours)
Interviews with seniors not within audits 18/07/2002: Senior A 1.5 1.5
19/07/2002: Senior B 1.5 1.5
Executive meetings
a
23/09/2003: DHR
b
1 1
16/10/2003: DHR&DAT
c
1 1
20/02/2004 : DAQRM
d
1 1
Debrie?ng committee meetings
e
02/02/2004: DHR&DAT 1.5 1.5
03/02/2005: DHR&DAT 1.5 1.5
19/05/2010: DRH 1 1
Grand total (in hours) 8 3.5 10 16.5 38
a
Executive meetings were used to plan the research project.
b
Director of human resources.
c
Director of audit training.
d
Director of audit quality and risk management.
e
Debrie?ng committee meetings were used to discuss and validate the results of the research project.
4
To ful?l 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.
268 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
Following the suggestions of many researchers (Hammers-
ley & Atkinson, 1983; Oswald, Schoep?e, & 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 [. . .] de-
velop 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 unof?-
cial 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 ?rst observations and interviews highlighted the prev-
alence 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 manage-
ment’ were incorporated into the coding scheme. In the
?eld, 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 ?eld 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 com-
pany audits. We reasonably assumed that such a modi?ca-
tion of the regulatory environment, by pointing out
auditors’ failures and putting pressure on audit ?rms’
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 of?cial accounts suggesting auditors’ negligence and
lack of skepticism.
5
This prompted us to explore the literature on emotions
at work in search of a model that might enlighten us (e.g.
Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995; Barsade & Gibson, 2007;
Domagalski, 1999; Fineman, 1993; Hochschild, 1983;
Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004). Along the way, we looked at
how risk theorists (e.g. Bauman, 1991; Beck, 1992; Doug-
las, 1992) had integrated the treatment of fear, the ‘emo-
tion 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 orga-
nizations’ or to put it another way, how ‘our deepest exis-
tential fears are camou?aged 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 ?rst-order ?ndings
(Van Maanen, 1979). In the end, the interpretations we
made on this basis were validated through member check-
ing in the course of many interviews. In saying this, we do
not contend that Dejours’ (1993) model was the only valu-
able 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 analyz-
ing emotions presents signi?cant epistemological dif?cul-
ties. The ?rst involves conceptualizing emotions in ways
that can guide empirical research. ‘What is an emotion?’
rarely generates the same answer from different individu-
als, academics or laymen. In this paper, we use the term
emotion in the standard de?nition of a conscious mental
reaction subjectively experienced as feeling and accompa-
nied 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 re?exivity to
manage and act on them. The second epistemological chal-
lenge arises from the conceptual proximity and overlap
that can exist between different affective states (Goodwin,
Jasper, & Polletta, 2001). Concepts like fear, vigilance, con-
?dence, 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 nat-
ure and as to whether they are attributed by the authors
as external observers or self-reported by auditors as some
kind of inner experience (in which case self-deception is
possible).
The only way out of these dif?culties is, as far as possi-
ble, clarity. In this respect, when we started incorporating
themes related to fear in our coding scheme, we sought to
adopt a de?nition 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 distinguish-
ing, from the beginning, between fear and anguish, which
are commonly confused by individuals experiencing them
(see below). By triangulating our data, we ‘‘con?rmed’’ 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 rela-
tively unde?ned character of affects constitutes an inher-
ent 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
5
A 2010 discussion paper of the Financial Reporting Council - entitled
auditor skepticism: raising the bar - stated for instance: ‘[The issue of
skepticism] is particularly timely as, in the wake of the banking crisis,
regulators have challenged audit ?rms on whether suf?cient skepticisms
was demonstrated and the need for audit ?rms to exercise greater
professional skepticism was a key message in the Audit Inspection Unit’
(p. 3).
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 269
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 clo-
sely related phenomena (Hollway & Jefferson, 1997).
In his most famous book, Beck (1992) argues that mod-
ern 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 man-
agement 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 consider-
ation. ‘[T]o knowledge, therefore, drawn from experience
and science, there now also has to be added imagination,
suspicion, ?ction, [and] fear’ (p. 497). In other words, be-
cause we have no means of knowing for sure where risk
and safety lie, nothing can be trusted and fear thus poten-
tially ?nds 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 imper-
sonal and emotionless administrative regulation, based
on scienti?c and neutral principles. Blaming, which at all
places and all times has been a key component of risk man-
agement systems, is not banished by the modern dis-
course. Rather, it now tends to be expressed in the claim
that ‘real blaming’ is possible – a claim rooted in the polit-
ical 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 ?ight from the ambiva-
lence at the heart of order’s opposite, namely, chaos. We
have to get used to the idea of ‘living without foundations’
(Bauman, 1991, p. 16). However, obsessed with self-scru-
tiny, man does not admit contingency and ‘ambivalence
is transformed into the nagging fear of own inadequacy’.
Like ‘real blaming’, denying ambivalence functions as a de-
fense 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 experi-
ence 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, de-
fense against uncertainty and denial of ambivalence),
cohering around feelings of fear, would bene?t 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 envi-
ronment, and how, in return, they experience and manage
risks under the in?uence of this emotion. Dejours’ psychody-
namic 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, ter-
ror, 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 signi?cantly. An-
guish emerges from an intrapsychic con?ict, i.e. from a
con?ict between two drives, two desires, two psychoana-
lytic 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 prede-
?ned object (i.e. it may attach itself to absolutely any-
thing), 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 physi-
cal 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 sources
What ?rst emerges from studies on the psychodynam-
ics 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 ?ndings of French ergon-
omists (e.g. Wisner, 1995) and a theory of the subject in-
spired from Freud (1920). According to the ?rst theory,
of?cial prescriptions are rarely suf?cient to perform a task
successfully. Working fundamentally implies coping with
unforeseen events and con?icting requirements and there-
fore inventing compromises whose relevance is not guaran-
teed in advance. Here lies, argues Dejours (1993, 2005), the
270 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
?rst reason why individuals at work are often afraid to fail:
they know that their effectiveness is doomed to be uncer-
tain, or, to put it another way, that failure is always
possible.
Yet the uncertainty and the risks surrounding their ef?-
cacy would not be a concern for workers if they were com-
pletely indifferent to success. However, people tend to
attach great importance to achieving their goals. Most ac-
tors leave childhood with an un?nished identity, are in
quest of self-accomplishment, and can blossom in two dif-
ferent 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 bene?t from the recogni-
tion of their work by others (peers, superiors, clients, etc.).
If they succeed and are praised for their achievements,
their self-esteem tends to increase; if they fail or are
blamed for not being good enough, their self-esteem tends
to decline. In other words, avoiding failure is usually, in
their eyes, a matter of identity. This is the second reason
why they often are afraid of failure.
Fear at work: a cultivated resource
Now, the fear of failure inhabiting workers does not
only impact their inner life experience. It also in?uences
their choices, behaviors and attitudes, thereby interacting
with organizational processes in many ways.
The fear of failing, argues Dejours (1993) is often a req-
uisite for a job well done: when they are unafraid and over-
con?dent, 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 environ-
ment 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 com-
pass – ‘notoriously cranky instruments’.
Consequently, a range of methods are used in the work-
place 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 ?eld, workers them-
selves sometimes use informal strategies to remain suf?-
ciently 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 of?cial safety measures never provide per-
fect protection.
From fear to comfort through practical intelligence
The fear of failure, insists Dejours (2005), is one of the
main sources of intelligence at work. Ideally, the positive
dynamics triggered by fear is a dynamics of ‘body-propria-
tion’ (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 appropri-
ate them in a very personal way. The greater the ‘symbio-
sis’ with these elements, the more able people are to ‘feel’
them as part of their own body, and thus to perceive the
smallest cues that might indicate risks. As soon as one of
these cues is noticed (an abnormal sound, smell, visual sig-
nal 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 of?cial guid-
ance to con?rm, revise and legitimize their intuition. When
they eventually start to feel reassured, they are able to con-
template the fruits of their work, from which they may de-
rive different kinds of pleasure.
However, they cannot be certain that they have handled
the situation in a fully ef?cient 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 prac-
tices 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 bet-
ter; the community of practice grows; the unwritten ‘rules
of the job’ are enriched; and with suf?ciently ?exible man-
agement, of?cial directives improve through experience
feedback.
From fear to comfort through defensive strategies
That said, the outcome may not always be so positive.
Although fear plays a central role in the development of
intelligence at work, a speci?c condition must be met in or-
der for fear to produce this positive effect: con?dence. An
actor who is afraid of failing would be reluctant to confront
dif?cult situations if she had no con?dence 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 inse-
cure about their willingness to judge her work fairly. If
they are overcon?dent and unworried, workers tend, as
noted above, to act imprudently. However, without any
con?dence 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 be-
comes 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 ?eld, an actor may, for example, hole
up in her of?ce or not delve deeper in her analyses. How-
ever, in order to achieve their full effectiveness, defensive
strategies need to be implemented collectively (Dejours,
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 271
1993). Not thinking about obvious risks is dif?cult and re-
quires 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 organiza-
tional members from the fear that something could go
wrong, while also increasing that very probability.
In the remainder of the paper, we mobilize this psycho-
dynamic perspective on work to organize and present our
interpretations of the interplay of fear and risk in the audit
process.
6
First, we specify the main object and sources of
auditors’ fear. We then show that fear tends to be viewed
by auditors as a requisite for a job well done (a kind of ‘episte-
mic resource’) and that such a viewis at the root of many for-
mal 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 is-
sue, 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’, de?ned in ISA
200 (International Standards on Auditing) as the risk of
inappropriately certifying ?nancial statements with signif-
icant anomalies. On the basis of our analyses, this de?ni-
tion, couched in institutional language, provides an
accurate representation of the fear experienced by public
accountants, i.e. the fear of overlooking a material mis-
statement (a fear of failing or of being mistaken).
Doing your job properly means ?nding 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
?nancial 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 ?rst time and
it’s a bit complicated, you do your best, but you still have a
doubt. You ask yourself: am I missing something really
important here? It’s worrying. (One assistant)
In the rest of this section, we argue that auditors’ fear of
‘getting it wrong’ – subjective corollary of the ‘audit risk’ –
is the product of two factors, both underlined by the
psychodynamics of work: the ‘impossible’ nature of the
audit mission, and auditors’ desire to do a good job.
The audit mission: impossible
The fear of failing to detect signi?cant anomalies results
?rst fromthe ‘impossible’ nature of the mission assigned to
auditors, and more precisely from auditors’ awareness of
having to perform an ‘impossible’ task: although audit pro-
fessionals can never be entirely sure that they have not
missed a material misstatement, they are required to ex-
press relatively categorical conclusions (Gill, 2009).
In the ?eld, public accountants are confronted with a
high degree of uncertainty. To begin with, as noted by a se-
nior comparing his occupation to the job of a police of?cer:
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 com-
mitted [...]. In auditing, we’re also required to carry out
an investigation, but we don’t actually know if there
was a crime in the ?rst place. So unlike a police detec-
tive, we don’t set out with any de?nite certainties.
Thus, the ?rst uncertainty faced by public accountants
is this: do the audited accounts contain signi?cant anoma-
lies? When they begin a job, auditors cannot possibly know
the answer to this question. But that is not all. One assis-
tant 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 ?nger on a
mistake deemed to be signi?cant in what is essentially a
gigantic hotchpotch. [. . .] It’s a bit like looking for a nee-
dle 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 assis-
tant 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 con?nes of their audit ?rm. The ?nancial state-
ments that have to be certi?ed, the records that these state-
ments 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 ele-
ments that may suggest the presence of accountancy er-
rors? In order to ?nd them, which factories, warehouses
and of?ces need to be visited? Which pieces of furniture
need to be searched? Which ?les 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 newassignment, auditors do not have the answers
to these questions. They have no ‘map’ for ?nding their way
around the audited organization, and it is sometimes
6
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 ?rst- and
second-order ?ndings in accordance with Van Maanen’s (1979) suggestion
(e.g. Fischer, 1996; Dirsmith, Heian, & Covalevski, 1997), while others
prefer a thematic exposition of their results structured according to their
analytical framework (e.g. Barrett, Cooper, & Jamal, 2005; Pentland, 1993;
Radcliffe, 1999). The second of these options was chosen here.
272 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
possible to see in their eyes, and in their hesitant move-
ments, their fear of failing to ?nd the way to the relevant
data.
Yet the questions ‘Where’s the mistake?’ and ‘Where
are the elements necessary to ?nd it?’ would not be partic-
ularly 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 ?eld. As emphasized by many of our informants,
blindly relying on of?cial 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 pre-
scribed tools were too ‘unwieldy’ to be applied as such. For
example, one senior, commenting on the prede?ned risk
assessment matrices, noted: ‘Filling in these templates en-
tirely? 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 for-
ward by a number of interviewees, mechanically resorting
to formal audit tools would prevent auditors to correctly
feel the ?eld and would thus be counterproductive. One se-
nior noted:
The time you spend ?lling 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 ergon-
omists: when standard technologies come between an
individual and her environment, the former may become
unable to perceive the latter correctly, and if her task in-
volves 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 se-
nior 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 pro-
duce a suf?cient 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 suf?ciently at ease to express an opin-
ion is often in itself to attempt the impossible. But pro-
ducing 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 anxio-
genic 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 no. 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 psycho-
logically’. Similarly, auditors experience fear in part be-
cause 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 ?nd in the ?rst place. Likewise, just
because we found a serious mistake doesn’t mean there
wasn’t another, bigger mistake to ?nd. 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 ?eld. For example,
Fischer (1996, p. 224) argues that ‘truly objective measures
of audit quality do not exist’, while Power (1999, p. 28) re-
marks that ‘[there is a] deep epistemological obscurity of
auditing [. . .], [i.e.] no way of specifying the assurance pro-
duction function independently of a practitioner’s own
qualitative opinion process’. Finally, as noted by Pentland
(2000, p. 311): ‘No wonder that audits are epistemologi-
cally obscure – auditors have adopted the rhetoric of scien-
ti?c methodology without really being able to adopt much
of the substance’. In short, the opinions expressed by pub-
lic 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 rel-
atively categorical conclusions.
The audit mission is a mission of certi?cation. The word
is strong: to certify means ‘to guarantee as certain’ (Oxford
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 273
English Dictionary); it suggests certainty more than skepti-
cism. Admittedly, ISA 200 insists that the assurance to be
provided by an audit is not absolute but reasonable. How-
ever, notwithstanding this quali?cation, a reasonable
assurance is still an assurance, i.e. ‘a promise or engage-
ment making a thing certain’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
In practical terms, auditors, whatever their level of experi-
ence, 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 re-
port 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 certi?cation.
[. . .] 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 signi?cant mis-
take 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 ‘certi?cation 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 ‘unad-
mitted 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 se-
nior quoted at the beginning of this section, ‘the conse-
quences [of an audit failure] can be truly disastrous’. One
partner observed: ‘For the few amnesiacs out there, the re-
cent 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 unachiev-
able, yet she knows that she cannot allow herself to fail
since her failure could have disastrous repercussions. Un-
der 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 job
As argued by Dejours (1993, p. 225), ‘most healthy sub-
jects’ want to provide a high-quality service at work. Under
this angle, the majority of public accountants can be said to
be ‘healthy’. Based on our analyses, some of them attach
great importance to being good at what they do, partly be-
cause the audit mission resonates with their own biogra-
phy. 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 ser-
vice 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 try-
ing to improve the situation.
One striking feature of this account is how the subject
appropriates the quest for truth assigned to statutory audi-
tors; how she conceives this quest as a re?ection of her
education, principles, beliefs, and so on, and how she iden-
ti?es with this mission. When she is engaged in an audit
task, she feels that she is ‘in tune’ with herself. In the same
vein, one manager observed:
Shareholders, suppliers, customers, banks, anyone who
reads accounts: they’re our clients. [. . .] I tell myself
that [. . .] we all know them [...]. For example, [. . .] I’ve
got a friend who works in a private business bank and
he spends his time reading ?nancial statements. My
father-in-law is a small-time speculator: he’s a share-
holder. 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 speci?c 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 ob-
served in this study, the reader of the accounts was too ab-
stract, remote and disembodied a ?gure to give rise to
suf?cient 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 recog-
nized as good at their job or to avoid hurtful criticisms
(Anderson-Gough, Grey, & Robson, 2001; Gill, 2009; Korn-
berger, Justesen, & Mouritsen, 2011).
‘To hear my senior say I’ve done a good job is a real
boost to my morale!’ The comment of this assistant illus-
trates the process governing her approach to auditing: con-
gratulated 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 ful?ll 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 se-
nior 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 part-
ner – 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.
274 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
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 part-
ner] again!’ In his study on ‘Accountant’s truth’, Gill (2009,
p. 25) makes similar observations: ‘When I asked Simon
when he had had to behave cautiously at work, he told
me about a time when he realized he had forgotten to
put a value added tax return in with its covering letter to
a client. Simon was afraid: ‘those few moments were terri-
ble’. Although Simon wanted to conceal his mistake, he
needed reassurance from someone else that he was behav-
ing 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 se-
nior: ‘When I say goodbye to a client and he says some-
thing 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
grati?cation, desire to do well’. However, it is also fre-
quently out of a fear of being criticized by their interlocu-
tors and in order to protect their self-esteem that auditors
are so keen to perform at their best. One assistant com-
mented: ‘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 ?nding 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 signi?cant 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 at-
tempts 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 im-
pact their inner life experience. It also signi?cantly in?u-
ences 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 engage-
ment, which is necessary for them to form and convey
their conclusions.
Auditors’ fear: a cultivated resource
Fear seen as a requisite for a job well done
One senior made the following comment:
We all experience fear [. . .] to a greater or lesser degree,
and it’s probably what keeps us on our toes. If you don’t
take the job seriously, you’re bound to miss something
that’s really serious. It can be right there in front of you.
Worrying about getting something wrong is what max-
imizes your chances of being effective.
Many of our informants emphasized the connection be-
tween effectiveness and the fear of failure. In their eyes,
fear enables them to remain vigilant. Accordingly, an audi-
tor 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 atti-
tude whatever the circumstances. I know her well and I
know it’s the impression she wants to give. Still, I’d pre-
fer it if she looked a tad more worried from time to time
– so I could stop having to worry myself.
Focusing on comfort, Pentland (1993) argues that this
feeling is communicated from the bottom to the top of
the audit hierarchy as a basic product. By Pentland’s ac-
count, 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. How-
ever, 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 suf?ciently anxious.
The risk and fear of not being suf?ciently anxious
As Dejours (1993, pp. 138–139), remarks, even in the
most anxiogenic situations, habit produces ataraxic effects:
‘In one of the factories we studied [. . .], which had been im-
planted 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 identi?ed 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 ?ve
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 com-
petence and is synonymous with experience. However,
experience is not altogether positive, particularly if it gives
rise to excessive self-con?dence. 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
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 275
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 moun-
tain-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, audi-
tors with substantial experience, blinded by their own
competence, run the risk of falling from a lack of humility.
As for novices, they must beware of another kind of risk:
boredom. Auditing has the reputation of being on occasion
a boring occupation (Power, 1999). It is particularly true for
assistants, who may be given repetitive tasks during large-
scale jobs. In such cases, their fear of failure may be
numbed. When asked about this issue, one assistant said:
Last year, we were auditing the accounts of a group that
included lots of companies. My task was to control the
bank reconciliations of all the companies. [...] Checking
bank reconciliations is really important: [. . .] you have
to be very careful. [. . .] But when you’ve done I don’t
know how many reconciliations in a single day, and
everything always seems to be OK, you soon get bored.
You’re bound to start operating mechanically, and even
to stop focusing at all on what you’re doing, and that’s
what’s dangerous. [...] [So] you’ve got to ?nd 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
‘?nd a way of staying focused’ and to keep her fear of fail-
ing alive. The techniques devised by public accountants to
achieve this represent what we call their ‘know-how-to-
keep-worrying’.
Auditors’ know-how-to-keep-worrying
Auditors can develop ingenious informal techniques to
remain suf?ciently anxious in case of habit or boredom.
Here are a few examples, based on our observations. After
explaining that auditing the same ?rm chronically for sev-
eral 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 speci?c 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 para-
doxically turns it into a counter-truth. The proverb func-
tions as a prophecy that is not self-ful?lling 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 con-
densed 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 vig-
ilant. Lastly, the assistant who claimed to experience bore-
dom when performing highly repetitive tasks explained:
‘When I get landed with a chain ticking job, my trick is
to avoid using the usual tick mark. [. . .] I prefer to use a
more convoluted one, which [. . .] will require a little bit
more effort, a little bit more time, and that will force my
mind to stay glued to my paperwork instead of going
into automatic pilot’.
Interestingly, while using a ‘‘tick mark’’ often symbol-
izes all that is monotonous and repetitive about audit prac-
tice, 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 signi?cant role in this respect.
Formal audit procedures in the service of fear
As argued by Dejours (1980), Dejours (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
276 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
is always possible. In most ?rms, surveillance systems,
evaluation rituals and punitive practices constantly main-
tain employees’ personal career at risk. Promotion policies
and work process reengineering often awaken their anxi-
ety by disrupting their habits. Auditing is no exception.
For example, the frequency of use of the term ‘risk’ in
of?cial audit instructions arguably plays the same role as
warning posters in certain factories: by constantly expos-
ing 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 pub-
lic accountants’ fear of failure by causing every audit team
member to feel personally responsible for their work and
potential mistakes.
7
One manager made the following com-
ment 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 sin-
gle 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
dif?cult 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 ?rms is another mechanism serv-
ing 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 under-
stand the level of anxiety generated by this practice: the
reviewer frowns and the auditor’s identity wavers; the re-
viewer 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 ef-
fects, 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 ?rm. [. . .]
[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 promo-
tion 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 ?nd themselves con-
fronted with new challenges that, though exciting, may
also awaken their fear of making mistakes. In the same
vein, the changes in audit methodologies regularly im-
posed on auditors tend to maintain them in a state of anx-
iety by breaking their routine (see e.g., Barrett et al., 2005;
Curtis & Turley, 2007).
Altogether, these formal devices contribute to produc-
ing and reproducing what might be called a ‘culture of fear’
within audit ?rms (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 per-
forming their ever ?rst 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-con?-
dent. 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 fail-
ing 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 re-
source 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 re-
mains 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 oper-
ate this ‘emotional transition’ through two very different
processes: depending on the circumstances, auditors may
alleviate their fear by mobilizing their practical intelli-
gence or by resorting to defensive strategies.
From fear to comfort through practical intelligence
As noted earlier, auditors are confronted in the ?eld
with deep uncertainties that of?cial 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’’’ (Fran-
cis, 1994, p. 255). In order to achieve a sense of comfort
7
Many psychological studies have shown that there is a strong
correlation between the feeling of personal responsibility and the emotion
of fear (see e.g., Startup & Davey, 2003). As noted by André (2009), workers’
anxiety is all the more important today since modern organizations and
societies tend to promote individualistic values, with success and failure
being ascribed to the individual and not to the collective (see also Douglas,
1992; Guénin-Paracini & Gendron, 2010; Malsch, Tremblay, & Gendron,
2012).
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 277
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 ac-
counts 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 ?rst stage, they thus seek to ‘clarify’ it: they
strive to operate a shift from a nebulous fear of ‘not know-
ing 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 ?nally
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 suf?cient quality.
In institutional language, this process of transforming
and alleviating fear is referred to as the process of assess-
ing risks of material misstatement and responding to
them. On the evidence of professional audit standards,
such a process seems to be purely cognitive and disem-
bodied. However, in the ?eld, 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 ob-
served 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 ele-
ments 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’’
identi?ed 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 as-
signed to them several times a day and walk, stop walking,
watch, listen, touch, and walk again. At ?rst 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 ?rm 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 per-
ceive signs that might indicate audit risks, the better able
they are to turn their initial fear of failure into speci?c con-
cerns prompting them to further their investigation. One
senior crossing the courtyard of her client’s factory looked
up and remarked: ‘That’s funny, they’re going to do works
on the roof. You might say it’s about time too, given the
state of the building. I’ll have to take a look at the funds
set aside for large-scale repairs’. One partner claimed:
‘Once you’ve done the groundwork you need to do to get
a feel for the terrain, I can assure you that ultimately you
know exactly what to verify’. Another partner commented:
You’ve got to be able to feel, almost physically, where a
mistake is likely to occur, and where, by contrast, there
is almost no risk. So you can’t just get somebody to sit
down in an of?ce 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 fol-
low 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 slight-
est 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
?rm. 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 accoun-
tants whose body does not carry the marks of these pro-
cesses 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 ‘en-
gage with the real world’. In the ?eld, 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.
278 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
In short, by repeatedly leaving their workroom to scru-
tinize other parts of the audited organization, public
accountants, moved by their fear of failure, bodily appro-
priate this organization in a way that enables them to feel
where signi?cant anomalies are likely to be found: they
transform a huge, unfamiliar and therefore vaguely worry-
ing space (the site of the audited entity as ?rst encoun-
tered) into an aggregate of distinct spaces presenting
speci?c risks and raising speci?c concerns. However, the
challenge for them is to complete this transformation be-
fore the end of the audit. Accordingly, time is another ele-
ment that auditors strive to appropriate with their body in
order to alleviate their fear of failing.
Managing the anxiogenic work time
Because auditors rarely have more than a few weeks or
even days to check and validate the result of a year’s worth
of accounting, an audit task is always for them a race
against time. As a result, driven by their fear of missing a
material mistake, they tend to work with their eyes riveted
on their watch or computer clock, and easily allow them-
selves to be inhabited by the seconds ticking by, with
which their body is not long to enter into resonance. In
the ?eld, under the in?uence of fear, they do not only walk:
they walk rapidly, and sometimes run or take shortcuts.
They do not only write: they write swiftly, concisely, and
use abbreviations. They do not only speak: they speak
brie?y 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 ?nancial 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 anxio-
genic 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 synchro-
nize 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 perform-
ing. For example, they devise instruments such as work
schedule tables in order to visualize the tasks that have al-
ready been performed and the tasks that have yet to be
completed. They know that ‘tomorrow is constructed to-
day’ (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 ?le 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 feel-
ing, 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 cul-
tivate 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 ?ow of
concrete mutations that they can shape (‘tomorrow is con-
structed today’), and therefore more reassuring.
Managing the un-reassuring audit tools
When working conditions do not inhibit their practical
intelligence, public accountants, as is now apparent, do
more than use of?cial 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 signi?cantly ‘‘remolded’’ by their
users. For example, one senior noted:
The [risks assessment] matrices the ?rm bombards us
with are too complex. It’s often impossible or pointless
to ?ll 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 ?nalize before the dead-
line is up.
This comment is of general application. Based on our
observations, of?cial 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 lar-
gely 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 ?eld and which they seek to for-
malize. For example, none of the informants started out
from questionnaires to identify areas of risk. Rather, they
used questionnaires (as well as other forms) retrospec-
tively, 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 re?ne) the number
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 279
of elements that they considered intuitively reasonable to
check.
8
Both of these examples are representative. In prac-
tice, of?cial audit tools usually constitute artifacts that audi-
tors 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 deci-
sion-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 rel-
atively vague, potentially misleading and illegitimate; they
do not enable public accountants to feel comfortable. Now,
precisely because gut feelings are elusive, their formaliza-
tion is all but an easy, logical and straightforward endea-
vor. In the ?eld, it requires groping in the dark, and
results from a series of handlings that gradually lead to
the desired outcome. The instruments that auditors fash-
ion on the basis of of?cial technologies to formalize their
intuitions and alleviate their fear of failing are thus not
cognitively designed ?rst 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 corrob-
orative 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 suf?cient in-
sights 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 ob-
tained here and there, and the written notes taken in the
?eld. 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 pre-
sented according to the model found in the previous year’s
audit ?le. However, this initial arrangement often subse-
quently evolves: lines or columns are added, inverted or
suppressed, particular records are highlighted, new calcu-
lations are inserted, etc., and the ‘‘handcrafted assemblage’’
that is thus produced – sometimes re-worked several
times before reaching its ?nal form – is what ultimately
constitutes the intended instrument.
In brief, by walking, pausing, watching, listening, speed-
ing, inhabiting the full duration of the audit, staying at
work for long hours, and manually re-shaping of?cial audit
tools to formalize their intuitions about audit risks, audi-
tors whose practical intelligence is not inhibited gradually
turn their initial and elusive fear of failure into a set of spe-
ci?c 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 un-
known, sometimes dirty, ugly, disordered, and therefore
somewhat worrisome – into the space of their audit ?le –
familiar, standard, clean, rather aesthetic, ordered, and
thus relatively reassuring. As a result, they begin to experi-
ence 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 ?nd an anomaly because of insuf?cient
audit procedures still exists. Driven by what is left of their
initial anxiety, auditors then often go back over the work
that they have done to pass judgment on it. They only
move from pre-comfort to comfort when this judgment is
positive. As we will now see, such a judgment is, once
again, largely informed by physical sensations.
Managing the fear of concluding
In the ?eld, once they get to the end of an audit task,
auditors tend to return, however brie?y, 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 build-
ing 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 sup-
port 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 ?rst is the degree of fatigue. Reaching a point of sat-
uration indicates to auditors that they have done their very
best and that they can do no more. In the ?eld, 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 spell-
ing mistake, but at some point [. . .] you feel tired, and
that’s when you ?nally 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: ?rst, that my work is acceptable as it stands, and
second, that it is acceptable for me to feel tired and to
move on’.
8
In other words, in audit teams as at the institutional level (see e.g.,
Carpenter & Dirsmith, 1993; Power, 1992), sampling primarily serves to
legitimize auditors’ decisions.
280 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
However, weariness is not enough. Auditors, like all
workers, may also judge the quality of their work in terms
of the pleasure it gives them when they look back at it. The
following excerpt from an interview with another senior is
particularly informative in this respect:
Us: How do you know that the work you’ve done is OK?
Senior: Well, that’s a very dif?cult 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
?nally seem to ?t together, everything seems to ?ow
[. . .]. 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, de?nitely! 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 ?nd
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-ful?llment. 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 hap-
pens, auditors cannot be entirely certain that they have
carried out their tasks ef?ciently and to a satisfactory stan-
dard. Accordingly, driven by what is left of their initial anx-
iety, they often look forward to the result of the review
process. While the perspective of the latter, as noted earlier,
?rst cultivates their fear of failure, its outcome is needed to
de?nitively 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 subordi-
nates. Based on our observations, we maintain that the
opposite is also true. When the review is performed con-
structively and leaves room for dialogue, public accoun-
tants 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 fu-
ture 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 speci?c condition needs to be met in order
for this feeling to produce such a positive effect: con?-
dence. If they are overcon?dent and unworried, public
accountants may be inclined to act imprudently, but with-
out any con?dence 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 signi?cant anomalies is no longer a
priority for them: the enemy that they seek to dominate
becomes fear itself, and they then develop various defen-
sive strategies to suppress this feeling.
From fear to comfort through defensive strategies
Fear without con?dence
Commenting on the risk factors that may make auditors
feel highly anxious, one senior noted:
[As a senior, your anxiety increases dramatically] when
you anticipate that you won’t be able to carry out the
entire program by the deadline [...]. When I worked as
an assistant, it was more like: am I going to be able to
understand and treat all the information? [...] I dreamt
I was drowning under a sea of documents [. . .].I actually
had nightmares about it! [. . .] Remaining at the level of
uncertainties is never a good thing. When that’s the
case, people often assume you haven’t done your job
properly. [. . .] So yes, [when there still remains a degree
of uncertainty], you have to ?nd 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 con?dence in their own
ability to succeed (‘am I going to be able to. . .’), in the re-
sources 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 prop-
erly’). 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 suffer-
ing (‘that’s where I reckon things become unacceptable
[. . .] and I think that’s the main cause of anxiety’). How-
ever, when faced with such a risk, public accountants do
not remain inactive. Instead, they seek to devise strategies
to protect their mental health.
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 281
Auditors’ defensive strategies
Based on our observations, auditors’ defensive strate-
gies can be classi?ed 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 dif?cult: they only have to hole up
in their of?ce, i.e. not visit the teams they are supposed to
supervise, and to rely on audit ?les to form their audit
opinions. As a matter of fact, we saw these actors only very
rarely when we were in audited organizations. For assis-
tants and senior (who are in the front line), forgetting the
risky nature of the ?eld 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 h a day,
including weekends. As far as I’m concerned, I’m com-
fortable with what I saw [. . .]. I’mable 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 ?rst is: will I be able to understand
everything I’m going to be told? And the second is: will
I get anything out of it? You can never know in advance,
and when in doubt, you’re better off not committing
yourself. So the ?rst priority has got to be this: get the
basic checks done, and only do what you feel most com-
fortable 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 relent-
lessly (‘15 h 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 prin-
ciple’ (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 super?cial 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 under-
stand’) to deal with the issues identi?ed, 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 prob-
lems 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 themto think that what they have ne-
glected to do would not have been productive, simply be-
cause 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, be-
cause the quality of their work is doomed to remain unob-
servable, 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 approachis all about!’ Inorder
to justify their belief that they had achieved a high standard
of auditing, others said: ‘We have applied the of?cial meth-
od in its broad outline’. In our view, the tendency to reduce
the audit task to the application of formal procedures argu-
ably 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 ?eld.
Acting and regarding oneself as an ‘audit machine’ (Pent-
land, 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 de-
fenses 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 fail-
ure. When their desire to do a good job makes them exces-
sively afraid of failing, they gradually abandon it and ?nd
other motivations to wake up in the morning and go to
work. In his study, Gill (2009, p. 13) notes that ‘the vast
majority of interviewees [. . .] said that their motivation
to do accounting work was instrumental, enabling them
to gain a quali?cation, money, status, and so on’. Our
observations con?rm it: seeking to get the biggest bonus
possible or striving to satisfy auditees rather than share-
holders 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 accoun-
tant] and Mrs. [...] [Y] [in charge of customer and sup-
plier 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.
282 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
Now, to gain their full effectiveness, the defensive strat-
egies used by public accountants need to be collectively
adopted. Not thinking about obvious risks is a dif?cult 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 ?rm usually ?nd themselves sanctioned
by their superiors, in one way or another. When such de-
fenses prevail, audit teams and audit ?rms 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 warn-
ing signs that something is going wrong’. For his part, Dej-
ours talks of ‘cultural alienation’. The idea is the same.
When a group of auditors invests all its efforts into numb-
ing its perception of reality, it sinks into a kind of ‘foolish-
ness’, which ‘shelter [. . .] [its] members from the anxiety
that something terrible could go wrong, while also increas-
ing 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’ compe-
tence and independence (see e.g., Hopwood, 1998).
However, the deep causes of these two phenomena (espe-
cially 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 mas-
sive 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, includ-
ing Francis (1994), have denounced the pseudo-scienti?c
nature of the following mathematical formula, this formula
takes on a different meaning if the term risk is replaced by
the term fear:
AR ¼ IR ÂCR ÂDR
According to the algebraic language used in the equa-
tion, localizing and measuring fear translates as determin-
ing, for every signi?cant 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 Â CR) formalized for a given item is simply another
way of referring to the auditor’s fears about this item. For
example, it is the fact of strongly fearing that there might
be an anomaly in the stock valuation that leads the auditor
to describe the corresponding risk as high.
In some sense, fear can be regarded as the practical,
subjective, non-programmable and non-codi?able corol-
lary 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 pro-
liferation 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 so-
cial responsibility, a growing number of organizations
(among which big audit ?rms) 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 rede?ning
the moral criteria related to the pursuit of their socially
responsible agenda to further their own interests (Malsch,
2013).
Our analysis of fear helps recon?gure the relationship
between comfort, con?dence and fear in the audit process
from the perspective of risk. On one hand, it suggests that
con?dence
9
without fear is a risky cocktail for auditors, who
will perhaps not be suf?ciently vigilant in carrying out their
mission. On the other hand, it shows that fear without con-
?dence 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
con?dence and a sense of con?dence tempered by fear is
what enables public accountants to develop their practical
intelligence, and thus to become comfortable without over-
looking the risks of their job.
These different con?gurations and their effects high-
light the complexity of the ‘emotional labor’ required of
audit team members. ‘Emotional labor’ refers to the ‘man-
agement 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 con-
?icting emotional strategies. They cannot allow them-
selves to exhibit excessive self-con?dence 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
con?dence and contained fear.
Although it can be dif?cult, 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 ?lled 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 ?ndings
may help redirect the discussion surrounding the risk
9
i.e. Self-con?dence, con?dence in work instruments and con?dence in
colleagues.
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 283
associated with auditors’ lack of skepticism towards a dif-
ferent perspective. Regulatory debates about this issue are
often articulated around two questions: Is skepticism an
innate or acquired condition? Can more be done to pro-
mote it? These two questions are obviously related. If pro-
fessional skepticism is innate, then much less can be done
than if it is an acquired trait of character. Unsurprisingly,
the angle adopted by the accounting industry to address
the problem is rather technical and normative. For in-
stance, 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 under-
taken by a skeptical auditor, were not always performed
in practice’ (FRC, 2010, p. 14).
The present study suggests that this normative ap-
proach may not be relevant. Since most auditors in the
?eld experience fear, most should also be ‘naturally’ driven
to maintain a relatively high level of professional skepti-
cism. 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 solu-
tion 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 ‘prede?ned scripts’. No normative approach
will increase signi?cantly auditors’ level of skepticism.
‘Accountants can only deal with so much prescriptive com-
plexity, 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 reg-
ulators, audit ?rms, and maybe the entire society, is a cul-
tural revolution: the recognition that the audit mission is
an ‘impossible’ one, that norms may have anxiogenic ef-
fects, 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 profes-
sional suffering, but also offers ‘‘techniques’’ to relieve
and heal. We do not have enough space to explain the lat-
ter in more detail, but they certainly constitute a promising
avenue to stimulate alternative thinking on audit risk
management.
Risks and fear can ?nd a location in any area of organi-
zations’ 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 perspec-
tive, 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 forthright-
ness of speci?c people. Most auditors are usually more
comfortable judging documents than people. Being human,
auditors are susceptible to smooth, honest-sounding an-
swers 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 consid-
erable 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 per-
haps 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 ?rms
and professional bodies. To paraphrase Power (1991, pp.
339-340), ‘learning [business risk auditing] is described
to students as similar to learning to ride a bike, i.e. not
an intellectual process’, and even less an emotional
experience.
Conclusion
The purpose of our paper was to contribute to the study
of the emotional dimension of auditing. Relying on an eth-
nographic enquiry conducted in the French branch of a Big
Four ?rm and using the psychodynamics of work theory to
interpret the data, we highlighted the key in?uence of fear
in the audit process.
(1) What exactly is it that auditors worry about? Con-
fronted with technical knowledge and methodologi-
cal standards’ limitations, auditors are nevertheless
asked to certify the unknowable (i.e. to turn uncer-
tainties 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 signi?cant 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 profes-
sionals, which is constructed and projected by big
audit ?rms and professional orders, contrasts with
auditors’ own perception of their work.
(2) How do auditors manage fear in the ?eld? 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 cul-
tivate fear through informal and formal techniques
to stimulate vigilance, encourage self-surpassment,
mitigate the anesthetizing effect of habit and main-
tain 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 con-
clusions with a certain degree of comfort. In the
?eld, they ?nally become comfortable (i.e. quell
284 H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288
their fear) either by mobilizing their ‘practical intel-
ligence’ (which helps them handle that which, in
their mission, cannot be obtained through the strict
execution of standardized procedures) or by adopt-
ing defensive strategies (such as distancing them-
selves from work-related problems, mechanically
applying audit methodologies, or relaxing their con-
ception 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’ concep-
tion of standards, interactions with clients, relation-
ships 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
?rms, 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 ?remen 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 ?eld. In sum, the main
implication which falls out of our study is the neces-
sity 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 ?nancial informa-
tion. We know that it is also, and perhaps above all, a
socially constructed process aimed essentially at legitima-
tion (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 con?rm this view. Fear,
like any emotion, is not ‘naturally’ imposed on individuals.
It is learned. Auditors learn to be afraid, and they learn it
through a whole range of control and surveillance
mechanisms exercised around them and described in this
article.
That said, our psychodynamic approach adds a further
dimension to social constructivism. As noted by Fineman
(1993, p. 13):
The social construction of organizations [. . .] is inten-
sely subjective and personal. We are informed that
work organizations, as well as producing goods and ser-
vices, are also sites where individuals make meaning for
themselves, and have their meanings shaped. The pro-
found 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 ?nds its source in the deep and autonomous struc-
tures of subjectivity, and is itself a powerful source of ac-
tions informing public accountants’ practices. Resulting
from the audit process (socially constructed), it deeply
in?uences 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 ?eld, 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 activi-
ties, an instrument in its own right, on a par with question-
naires, 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 enact-
ment’ (Hassard, Holliday, & Willmott, 2000, p. 4). This pa-
per 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 subjec-
tive relationship that they maintain with the main ele-
ments of their working situations and their institutional
environment (Suddaby, 2010) operates through the med-
ium 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 ca-
reer progression (Kornberger et al., 2011), professional fail-
ure (Gendron & Spira, 2010), the adaptation to new
management methods (Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Sam-
uel, 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 audi-
tors, ‘the study of organizational behavior tends to repre-
sent 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
H. Guénin-Paracini et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 264–288 285
are dissociated from each other’ (Hassard et al., 2000, p. 4).
It is our hope that this study will promote discussion of the
embodied and emotional quality of auditing in a way that
counteracts the tendency to represent public accountants
‘as bloodless designers or executors of organizational func-
tions’ (Hassard et al., 2000, p. 12).
In empirical terms, the research program that we wish
to initiate includes four main areas. The ?rst area involves
re?ning 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 electro-
cuted, a surgeon is fearful of not performing a successful
operation, and an of?ce clerk may worry about being un-
able 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 envi-
ronment (Douglas, 1992; Freud, 1920). Last but not least,
size could also be an important variable for fear, with audi-
tors 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 orga-
nizational environment in which they perform their task,
and their level of knowledge. In this respect, further re-
search is required to provide a more detailed description
and understanding of the experience of fear among audi-
tors 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 prac-
tices. Like fear, guilt and shame are located at the intersec-
tion 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 neg-
ative image of the self is given by another person. As such,
they are among the mechanisms that generate a conscious-
ness 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 mani-
festation of the logic of social differentiation, but also a
powerful manifestation of the power and domination is-
sues governing social relationships in work settings (Bour-
dieu, 1977). Social violence and humiliation are common in
workplaces (Czarniawska, 2008; Hershcovis, 2011; Neu-
man & Baron, 1998). What role do guilt and shame play
in audit ?rms? 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 be-
tween the institutional structures of ?rms and control sys-
tems 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 differ-
ence, not only between cultures, but also between organi-
zations (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 ?rm 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, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, and
Nahapiet (1980), Richard Mason (1980, p. 29) made the fol-
lowing comment:
In social systems, uncertainty breeds anxiety. Account-
ing information serves the social purpose of abating and
objectifying anxiety in a manner similar to the process
of institutionalization, rationalization and the establish-
ment of symbolic order. In sum, the role of the account-
ing 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 dem-
ocratic 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 peo-
ple 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 nor-
mality. It is also by conquering their fear that some actors
?nd the courage to stand up to oppression. If, as suggested
by Mason (1980), accounting and control systems are sys-
tems designed to alleviate fear, it follows that the account-
ing 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.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the practitioners who participated in
this study. We bene?ted from the constant support and
encouragements provided by Yves Gendron and Joni
Young. We also feel deeply indebted to reviewers’ insight-
ful comments. We thank participants at the IPA 2009
Emerging Scholars Colloquium for their challenging
remarks.
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