‘Professionals who understand’: Expertise, public interest and societal risk governance

O’Regan, Philip and Sheila Killian

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2014, vol. 39, issue 8, 615-631

Abstract: This paper applies ideas from Beck, Power and Collins & Evans to investigate why crises triggered by societal risks heighten tension between self-regulated experts and the state, and why this increased tension threatens professional self-regulation. Using an Irish case of the regulation of professional auditors, we find that Beck helps us to understand the accounting bodies’ view of their own position as experts and their role in mitigating risk. Beck’s idea of a closed organizational roof, Collins and Evans (2002) work on waves of risk and expertise, and Power’s insights on the significance of public perception of risk are deployed as a framework to explore why these bodies lost power to a non-expert state which more clearly grasped the importance of lay power in a time of crisis. We propose the idea of professional regulation as a form of societal risk governance; this provides a frame to investigate why the state was able to harness a growing public disquiet to assert more control in their relationship with the professional bodies, and underscores the precedence of public interest over expertise in the self-regulatory debate. An analysis of the perspectives of government, profession and civil society illustrates inherent vulnerabilities in the authority of a self-regulated professional body excessively reliant on its own expertise.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368214000695
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:39:y:2014:i:8:p:615-631

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2014.07.004

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().