Boundary work at the margins of politics and auditing: rationalising advertising probity in Ontario
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 4 March 2022
Issue publication date: 25 October 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The authors examine how political players attempt to rationalise arguments for and against the expansion of auditing into governmental affairs, and how state audit authorities respond to politically motivated boundary work. This study is motivated by growing evidence of political involvement in attempts to both expand and undermine state audit oversight of government affairs.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors present an interpreted history (covering relevant events from 1995 to 2016) of political rationales and associated boundary work that led to the expansion of the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario's (OAGO) mandate to audit government advertising campaigns for partisanship as well as attempts to modify this new audit remit over time.
Findings
The authors reveal substantive, formal and practical ways in which political players sought to rationalise/counter-rationalise expanding the OAGO's authority to the unfamiliar territory of advertising probity. The authors show how such justification claims ebb and flow in accordance with changeable political interests, and how state auditors react to the fraught nature of politically motivated boundary work.
Originality/value
The authors conceptualise important forms of rationalising rhetoric (which cannot be reduced to expressions of neoliberal government) that can be mobilised to deem state auditor authority legitimate in overseeing otherwise novel, unfamiliar and controversial government affairs. The authors also reveal a hitherto unrecognised resolve in state auditor responses to political intervention and shed further light on generalised forms of rationale that can underpin boundary work at the margins of accounting.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank participants at the AAA Government and Nonprofit conference (Houston TX, 2020), the AAA Public Interest Spark virtual conference (2020), Alliance Manchester Business School seminar series (University of Manchester, 2019) and the European Accounting Association (Cyprus, 2019) for their insightful comments. This study was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also granted by the CPA-Ivey Centre for Accounting and the Public Interest.
Funding: The study is funded by Insight Grants, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the award number is 435-2018-0107
Citation
Andon, P., Free, C., Radcliffe, V. and Stein, M. (2022), "Boundary work at the margins of politics and auditing: rationalising advertising probity in Ontario", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 35 No. 8, pp. 1830-1861. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-06-2020-4641
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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