Charron Jacques-Olivier, 2006, « Transparency in the audit world : an exploratory study of an ideology », American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San José, 16 novembre 2006.

Few notions are so widely praised as transparency, and few are so vague. It may not be a paradox : an individual can easily approve something he feels free to interpret. In the world of global audit firms, it is a paradox. In the post-Enron era, transparency has become so high on their agenda that it was difficult to think it would not be operationalized, or at least unambiguously understood. We tried, then, to investigate what transparency specifically meant for the audit community.

At first, queries on databases allowed us to review the notion’s diffusion but also to point out its unescapable ambiguity. Management and accounting research prefers the use of terms like “accountability” and “disclosure”; and when transparency is conceptualized, at least two very different meanings can be identified. In the media, an “Enron effect” appears in the way the audit world is dealt with, but a more detailed account was needed.
We then thought financial media read by auditors would be a more relevant ground for research, being the place where the conventional wisdom of managers and market participants is expressed. We scrutinized a sample of 80 articles extracted from press reviews made for the French division of an international audit firm. It led us to distinguish a procedural transparency from a substantial one. Moreover, our notion of ideology as a both normative and performative discourse made us understand transparency as an ideology favouring and strengthening the control of firms by financial markets, and making it more exclusive.