Dynamics and Limits of Regulatory Privatization: Reorganizing audit oversight in Russia
Accounting and auditing are often cited as key sites where business regulation has been privatized, globalized and neoliberalized. Yet, these sites have also undergone a legitimacy crisis in recent years, marked by a shift from self-regulation to increased public oversight. This paper investigates these developments by reference to the evolution of a public/private audit oversight regime (audit of the auditors) in Russia. We show how, in the early stages of post-Soviet reforms, old state-administered forms of financial oversight were replaced with market-oriented arrangements (peer reviews) offered by newly founded private professional accountancy associations as a service to their members.…
Economising failure and assembling a failure regime
Sociologists have largely neglected the topic of failure, and particularly the economising of failure, notwithstanding notable exceptions. This is puzzling, given the many adjacent literatures that have addressed the practices and processes of economising. Four features define our approach. First, it is argued that failure has none of the objectivity or inevitability often attributed to it. Second, it is suggested that failure be viewed as a variable ontology object. Third, attention is directed to the calculative infrastructures that operationalise the ideas of failing and failure, and enable them to be acted upon. Fourth, emphasis is placed on the importance of distinguishing between fail…