Michael Power

Michael Power is a British sociologist and accountant whose work has reshaped how scholars understand the institutional and cultural dynamics of auditing, accountability, and risk management. He is best known for his 1997 book The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, which argued that the explosive growth of auditing in late twentieth-century Britain was not a response to specific scandals but a structural transformation in governance — a shift from direct supervision to indirect control through systems of visibility and checking.

Power's central insight is that auditing is not merely a technical procedure but a cultural logic that colonizes new domains. The demand for accountability produces audit technologies; the audit technologies produce findings that generate demands for more auditing. The system is self-sustaining not because it works but because its failures are always interpreted as evidence that auditing was insufficiently rigorous — never as evidence that auditing itself might be the wrong approach.

This framework has been enormously influential in organizational studies, governance research, and the sociology of expertise. Power's work connects the micro-practices of auditing to macro-level transformations in the relationship between states, markets, and professions. His analysis of audit explosion — the proliferation of audit-like practices beyond their financial origins — anticipates contemporary debates about algorithmic accountability, transparency, and the quantification of social life.