Audit Cultures

Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy

Marilyn Strathern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134569694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Do audit cultures deliver greater responsibility, or do they stifle creative thought?
We are all increasingly subjected to auditing, and alongside that, subject to accountability for our behaviour and actions. Audit cultures pervade in the workplace, our governmental and public institutions as well as academia. However, audit practices themselves have consequences, beneficial and detrimental, that often go unexamined.
This book examines how pervasive practices of accountability are, the political and cultural conditions under which accountability flourishes and the consequences of their application. Twelve social anthropologists look at this influential and controversial phenomenon, and map out the effects around Europe and the Commonwealth, as well as in contexts such as the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and Academic institutions. The result provides an excellent insight into auditing and its dependence on precepts of economic efficiency and ethical practice. This point of convergence between these moral and financial priorities provides an excellent opening for debate on the culture of management and accountability.

Part I

Chapter 1
The social organization of the IMF’s mission work
An examination of international auditing

Richard Harper

Auditing is increasingly showing its face to professional ethnographers whether they be working within the traditional domains of their trade, anthropology and sociology, or in those new domains in which ethnographers find themselves, as in my own case, within the corporate research world. Auditing may be used, albeit indirectly, to assess the ‘productivity’ of ethnographers, the ‘value’ of their findings and the allocation of resources for ethnographic projects. As a response to this new way of looking at their work, ethnographers have been revisiting the organizational history of their trade—the institutional processes for training, dissemination of results and so forth. This is enabling them to determine just how auditing may categorize and cut up the ethnographic enterprise.

Ethnographers have also been looking outside their own practices to those who undertake audits. Here the scope of enquiries is enormous. There are both the practices of those academics who find themselves auditing their colleagues—anthropologists on anthropologists as it were—and also those trades traditionally associated with auditing and whose institutional practices have been bound up with it. Chartered accountancy is perhaps the most obvious, and over the past fifteen years or so a substantial body of ethnographic research has begun to show itself in journals such as Accounting, Organisations and Society. In addition, there are those institutions which have been practising enormously influential forms of auditing without the title. These have been the focus of much less attention.

The International Monetary Fund (‘the Fund’) provides a case in point. Though this organization is of great consequence, and though its work can be conceived of as a kind of auditing of national economies, it has remained beyond the scope of ethnographic enquiry.

This is all the more surprising given how the IMF is often invoked in anthropological ethnographies of underdeveloped communities as the single organization that has caused more strife than any other. Such accusations (irrespective of whether they are right or wrong) are made with little knowledge of how the Fund does its business. As Gardner and Lewis (1996) remark, macroeconomics—the stuff of the IMF’s work—has remained uninvestigated territory for anthropology.

One may ask why this is. It may be that the view anthropological ethnographers have of the Fund has been so negative that any entreaty they may have made for access has been unacceptable to the Fund itself. I certainly heard numerous stories to that effect when undertaking my study. (It needs to be remembered that I do not present myself as an anthropologist.) Another reason may be that anthropologists have wanted to examine both the Fund and one of the governments it works with. Doing so would enable the anthropologist to examine what one might call, following Power, the ‘audit loop’. Such requests are likely to be spurned for the simple fact that they would require agreement from too many people.

In any event, my own view is that ethnographic research should commence with step-by-step investigations, rather than with encompassing activities. As I observe in my account of the Fund (Harper 1998), even confining myself to the processes of the one institution streched my capacites and I had a team to help me.

An ethnography of the IMF

It is in this context that I present my own study of the inner workings of the IMF as illustrative of a particular empirical tradition of ethnographic organizational research. My focus inevitably feeds into and is in turn fed by the already mentioned spurt of interest into the role of auditing in society in general (Power 1997; Harper 1987, 1988, 1989). For the Fund’s business involves a kind of auditing: large scale, dealing with numbers that are vast and representing activities at an incredibly gross level, but nonetheless auditing.

Specifically, I focus on one of the main activities of the Fund, namely the point when it gathers its auditing data. This primarily occurs during what are called Fund missions. A description of one of these forms the centrepiece of this chapter. I describe how this mission, and by example all missions (at least the common sort, known as an article IV), consist of a division of labour which supports an iterative process whereby a mixture of arithmetical, econometric and meeting skills are used to create data that are reconciled and measured against the data collected by others within the mission. This process results in an overall picture—an audit— of an economy. This is then used as a basis for discussion with the local (or member) authorities, and ultimately is used to create various documents, the most important of which is called a staff report. These documents, or textual devices to given them a fashionable sociological name, are the vehicles through which the Fund presents and justifies its auditing work.

This chapter does not so much focus on the way in which these devices are used by the Fund itself (i.e. after a mission) as on their production during missions, and in particular, on certain aspects of missions which, it is suggested, are fundamental to the social organization of international auditing, at least of the kind the Fund undertakes. What I have in mind are those phenomena which Fund staff themselves call the facts of life. It is these they have to contend with, orient toward and work around. These ‘facts of life’ are interesting ethnographically because they consist of the matters of practical relevance constitutive of the rationalities deployed by Fund staff. Following Anderson et al. (1989), Harper et al. (2000), Lynch et al. (1983) and Lynch (1985), I view these ‘local rationalities’ as the bedrock of socially organized behaviour. A concern with them will ensure that the analysis remains empirical.

Amongst the facts of life I will consider is how data work on missions is a deeply social process and not just one that involves economic analysis. For, although data may be found in a variety of different places (namely, different offices within the various institutions of the member authority government agencies), only certain persons within those offices have the rank to sanction the relevant interpretations and associated numbers. These people provide the stamp of approval. A Fund mission must seek these out. On the mission described here, one individual had a particularly important role in this. For though this individual was not able to give official sanction to every single number, his data, his views on that data, his explanations and accounts of policy were treated as absolutely essential and vital to the mission’s ability to comprehend the situation. Trust in this individual was crucial to the mission’s work. The mission was not unusual in having a close relationship with one person in the member authorities. This is the norm in mission work (though it does not occur in every case).

Rituals too are part of the facts of life on missions—though Fund staff would not use the term themselves to describe the events I have in mind. One important aspect of ritual has to do with getting numbers and associated interpretations ‘signed off’ by the right person (usually senior officials). Another has to do with the process of agreeing a basis for policy concerns in discussions between the mission and the authorities. Here a mission chief will make fairly ritualized orations to the local authorities; these commence and sometimes terminate the discussion of policy. I will not suggest that these orations are merely showpieces, or that they have no analytic value. Rather, I want to show that it is partly through ritual that the symbolic importance of the events are demonstrated and achieved. Further, it is through these same rituals that the symbolic status of the participants is also affirmed. Without ritual, the essential characteristics of the events—in this case policy discussions—would be changed. This character ensures that the outcome of these meetings is treated as consequential; or, put another way, ensures that these are meetings that count.

Of course in this setting, the word ‘count’ has at least two relevant meanings, the first implying the significance of the meetings, the second pointing towards the fact that these events are in crucial respects about counting numbers. I will show that such countings are not simply arithmetical (although they do involve a large amount of that), but are also the final stage of a social process which transforms ‘speechless numbers’ into ones having a ‘voice’. This voice is communicating something very specific: it enables a mission to make warranted determinations of the present. In this sense, the Fund’s business is essentially auditing; but I will go on to argue that this in turn enables determination of the future. For Fund missions are also very interested in divining what the future may be, and how to achieve that future through certain policies, through better understanding of the entrails of the present. Such grasping toward the future is not a kind of magic. It is undertaken on the basis of materials which can be demonstrated to be ‘reasonable’, ‘warranted’, ‘accurate’ and ‘objective’: in a phrase, that have been audited. This is not to say that the Fund missions always predict the future precisely. It is to say that missions get themselves into a position where making predictions is a reasonable thing to do. In this sense, the mission’s predictions consist of a kind of auditing science. This is a practical, ‘real world’, hands-on skill. This is the heart of the matter. This is what Fund’s auditing work is all about.

A sketch of the International Monetary Fund

The Fund, based in Washington DC, is a financial ‘club’ whose members consist of most of the countries of the world. Member countries contribute to a pool of resources which can then be used to provide low interest, multi-currency loans should a member find itself facing balance of payments problems. The Fund has some 3,000 staff, of whom 900 are professional economists. These economists analyse economic policies and developments— especially in the macroeconomic arena. They have particular interest in the circumstances surrounding the emergence of financial imbalances (including those that lead to a balance of payments crisis), the policies to overcome such imbalances, and the corrective policy criteria for making loans. This involves going on missions to the country in question.

The Fund is divided into a number of departments. The most important are ‘area’ departments responsible for particular member countries divided up into contiguous geographic blocks (Western Hemisphere, Middle Eastern). The area departments are divided into divisions, each with responsibility for certain countries. The divisions are populated by desk officers and chiefs. Desk officers are economists who develop and maintain expertise on any particular country. A chief will manage several countries and desk officers, and hence will be responsible for the information the Fund has about any particular set of member countries.

A case study of a fund mission

I confine my exposition to the main process of Fund missions and supplement this with three vignettes of particular events. The first, the team’s first meeting, provides the opportunity to begin explaining how mission work is in large part a social process. It will also provide an opportunity to explain how members of a mission team assume that the materials they gather as part of this process have what one might call ‘understandable’ problems: numbers get added up incorrectly, miscategorization occurs, and spreadsheet tables get lost. These are part of the ‘facts of life’ in mission work and these are the things with which the team must deal, come what may. I will then characterize in general terms the data-gathering activities undertaken by this particular mission before providing a second vignette, this time of one of the meetings undertaken by two members of the mission with a key official in the authorities. Here I point towards how a mission needs to get a perspective that can enable it to distinguish between usable and unusable numbers. Some numbers are good for certain tasks, but not for others. I then discuss how the chosen numbers have to be ‘socially validated’. In this case, the senior official could only sanction some and not all of the numbers of interest. Finally, in a third vignette, I will describe one of the policy meetings that occurred at the end of the mission. Here I draw attention to the ritualizing effects of these meetings (desired but not always achieved), important not only in giving those meetings the status they have but in transforming the numbers presented in those meetings into ones that count.

Before I start my exposition, two remarks need to be made. First, the mission team I describe consisted of a chief and his deputy, an administrative assistant, the desk officer responsible for the country in question, a fiscal economist, and a junior economist called an ‘EP’ (basically on trial through the Economists’ Program). Second, for the sake of confidentiality, I call the country in question ‘Arcadia’.

The first day: vignette one

The team left Washington together except for the chief and the administrative assistant who were to follow later. The departing team consisted of four economists, including the deputy chief, and myself. The first view we had of Arcadia came with a parting of clouds as we approached the airport: a blue sea, smooth coastline and ochre landscape pockmarked with little confusions of grey and white villages. In the distance, slowly emerging in the haze, was the great swathe of the capital city of Arcadia itself, a muddled warren of creamy white buildings at its heart, wide sweeping roads and modernist blocks in the suburbs, dusty olive green mountains behind.

On arrival, the team were the first to depart the plane. They were greeted with swoops and bows by a smiling official and a coterie of uniformed customs officers. The official directed customs officers to remove the team’s luggage and lead them to passport control. There, he shooed the passport officials away, explaining to them that the team had diplomatic status and therefore didn’t need visas. The desk officer pointed towards me. After some confusion, it was decided that I be given a tourist visa. Meanwhile, another smiling official arrived and presented the desk officer with a huge stack of documents. We were then introduced to two more individuals who would be our chauffeurs. Whilst negotiations were undertaken about how to load us and our luggage into the cars, the desk officer started to browse the papers he had been given. His head began to drop as he looked more closely, and he glanced at the rest of the team with an expression of glee and concern. ‘Look’, he said, ‘Here are two copies of the budget, some other tables. I don’t know what they are, but there are also four sets of the national accounts, all with the same bottom line. But look: they have different numbers. What is this?’

The rest of the team looked at each other and the deputy said: ‘Don’t worry just yet! We haven’t even got to our hotel. Let’s start work later!’

We were then driven down a broad avenue towards the centre of the city. There was a strong smell of eucalyptus and spice, mixed with the occasional waft of kerosene from the airport. After about 15 minutes, the drivers swerved off the road into a small lane leading up to a towering cement hotel set in its own formal gardens; a fountain trickled in front of the main entrance. This was to be the mission’s home for the next two weeks. During check-in, the deputy announced that the team would be given half an hour to unpack before the first team meeting.

By the time I had arrived for the meeting, the deputy chief was already discussing with the desk officer the papers that he had been given at the airport. These had been spread out over the bed. The desk officer pointed towards them and was saying: ‘Well these are what we want. I have sorted them out. I assume that they must have included some early drafts. It is not a problem. It is the bottom line that matters at this point. Besides, I can see from the way they have been working which is the most recent so I will use that. I can clarify things with officials later on. Still, here are some materials that each of you can use to help build up your tables.’ At which point he started sorting out the tables and giving them to the rest of the team, explaining as he did so: ‘These won’t be completely right but you can use them to set up the spreadsheets. You can start entering them straight away. Here, use these numbers and these.’

The deputy then took over the meeting: ‘Okay let’s not worry about that at the moment. Let’s try and plan out what we have to do.’ She then outlined what meetings had been arranged, and a list was handed out. She pointed out who amongst the team would be meeting with which official and when. She turned to ask each economist: ‘Do you know what you can get out of this person? What information will you still need after this meeting? Do you know who you will need to meet afterwards? Can I have those meetings arranged for you now?’ She took particular pains to explain what the EP would be doing, listing the officials he would be seeing and explaining why he would see them: The first person you meet tomorrow at the central bank will give you the latest figures on (the EP’s concern) but you should get a lot from her because she knows more or less everyone you will need to deal with. She will give you a lot of advice on what you need to find out. She is easy to get on with so don’t worry, you will be all right.’

Meanwhile the desk officer kept interrupting with a kind of bubbly enthusiasm. He knew both the lady in question and most of the other officials that the EP would meet in the next few days: ‘Yeah, don’t worry, don’t worry! They will tell you all you need to know. I’ll help you also.’

The deputy then made a little speech. She explained that, in her opinion, the ‘shift in credit towards the government’ would be the crux of the staff report (by this she meant the question of how the government was financing itself, the mechanisms for this and the resulting influence on investment in the economy at large, including exports of manufactures). She wanted to reiterate that it was therefore going to be the main focus of the mission. She concluded by saying that she was expecting the Arcadians to supply most of the relevant facts in the next few days and that they would enable the team to get most of the materials ‘into a fit condition for the chief’s arrival’.

Once the meeting was over, the team met downstairs in the hotel restaurant. They knew that their rooms would be their main workplace for the next two weeks or so. They knew also that the work would incre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction New accountabilities Anthropological studies in audit, ethics and the academy
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV