Knowing eciency: the enactment of eciency in eciency auditing Vaughan S. Radclie * Department of Accountancy, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA Abstract This paper reports an ethnographic study of the activities of auditors in the ®eld as they work to ful®l an eciency auditing mandate; it analyses how auditors report on eciency in practice. Miller and Rose's work on governmentality (Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic Life. Economy and Society, 1±31; Rose, N., & Miller, P. (1992). Political power beyond the state: problematics of government. British Journal of Sociology, 173±205) is developed as it applies to the technologies that Miller and Rose identify as providing the means to realise programmes such as e- ciency auditing. The study explores the operationalisation of eciency auditing through analysis of three audits as they were conducted in the ®eld. It is argued that in the absence of detailed rules or standards practitioners themselves developed an agreed upon knowledge and sensibility that allowed them to make eciency auditing tractable. The paper explicates these normative guides and discusses the consequences of an apparently socially constructed form of e- ciency in guiding auditing practice. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Auditing; Eciency; Practice; Governmentality; Ethnography; Canada 1. Introduction Eciency auditing is a remarkably heroic enterprise. Auditors charged with its execution are called to investigate a wide array of government practice, develop classi®cation schemes that allow the categorisation of activities as ecient or inef- ®cient, and then publicly report their ®ndings. These projects would be easier if eciency were a more tangible concept, but as Hopwood notes, this is not the case. Just what is eciency? At best it is a concept that can be subject to a wide variety of inter- pretations. Although it is possible to change the world in the name of eciency, there are very real problems in relating the generality of the concept to the speci®c organizational procedures, let alone the speci®c con- sequences in organizations, that can ¯ow from its articulation and use. Of course that is a very positive factor in political discourse (Hopwood, 1988a, p. 6). Eciency's very ambiguity clearly has been help- ful in its insertion into public aairs. While con- sensus might not emerge around a more precisely Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 333±362 0361-3682/99/$ - see front matter # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0361-3682(98)00067-1 * Tel.:+1-216-468-9842; fax:+1-216-368-4776; e-mail: vsr3@po.cwru.edu