Taking inspiration from studies of performance measurement systems and an understanding of the materiality of inscription devices, we examine how a loose network of funding agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assemble a performance and management system out of accountability requirements. As part of the funding process, international development agencies provide NGOs with a series of planning and project reporting requirements such as budgets, operational plans, and strategic plans. Our study focusses on how these requirements' visual features enable users to perform the calculative properties of the performance system, as a whole. Specifically, we learn how a planning and performance measurement device such as the logical framework accumulates financial, chronological, and strategic modes of ordering through a patchwork of interventions to address perceived and unexpected shortcomings. We find that it is not just a matter of adding patches to improve, but also about fostering engagement with the changing assemblage of devices and development concerns. Our study is based on field research in Guatemala and El Salvador and contributes to our understanding of how governing bodies intervene in the constitution of a calculative workspace. By analysing an accounting system's relation with other devices and their modes of ordering and calculating, we learn how a workspace for providing accounts is assembled and engaged with for actors to perform a mode of governing.

From in-depth interviews with public accounting personnel, Dirsmith & Covaleski [Accounting, Organizations and Society (1985) pp. 149–169] concluded that mentoring exists in large public accounting firms and benefits the mentor, protégé and the firm. Based on a national survey of public accounting employees, the current study uses quantitative data analysis to identify public accounting mentoring functions, their effect on employee turnover intentions, and their association with specific organizational variables (protégé organizational level, protégé gender, mentor's position, and audit firm structure). The study found that public accounting mentoring consists of three separate functions: social support, career development, and role modeling. Path analysis indicated that employees with lower turnover intentions received more career development support from their mentor and had a partner as a mentor. The level of social support provided by partner mentors tended to be less than that provided by manager mentors. Female protégés, who tended to have managers as mentors, received more social support when their mentor was also female. The role modeling function did not differ across organizational variables. The results of the study indicate that while social support is a key factor in defining the mentoring process for public accounting employees, the career development function is associated with lower protégé turnover intentions.

As the audit environment becomes more demanding and complex, so does the set of analytical tools available to an auditor. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of two complex audit technologies commonly used by auditors, benchmarking of performance measures and strategic analysis, on the risk judgments of auditors carrying out the initial planning of an audit. We conduct an experiment that utilizes a Balanced Scorecard for organizing and evaluating analytical evidence about the performance of business units within a large client. Our first principal finding is that external benchmarking can cause an auditor to focus on performance measures that are unique to a business unit and disregard performance measures that are common to multiple business units but not benchmarked. However, our second finding is that an in-depth strategic analysis completed prior to assessing a client's business risk or risk of material misstatement allows an auditor to incorporate more information from performance measures in risk assessments regardless of whether the performance measures are benchmarked. Strategic analysis facilitates a more balanced and accurate assessment of the risks across the business units being evaluated. We also provide evidence that the latter result occurs because in-depth strategic analysis allows auditors to develop a more complete mental model of a client, which has been a long time belief of advocates of business risk audit methodologies and consistent with current and emerging auditing standards on risk assessment.

Audit academics and policymakers express ongoing concerns about limited knowledge transfer between audit research and policymaking. We use theory-based knowledge transfer norms to evaluate eight practices used by audit academics to transfer research knowledge to policymakers. The discontinued PCAOB-AAA Auditing Section “Research Synthesis Project” came closest to enacting these theory-based knowledge transfer norms. Hence, we examine why those involved in that project did not follow these norms. Interviews with project authors reveal that their review creation approach anchored on the traditional academic literature review, and insufficiently adjusted it to meet the goal of communicating audit research evidence to policymakers. However, interviews with PCAOB project liaisons indicate that policymakers were engaged with and found value in the review creation process. Thus, we analyze PCAOB rulemaking documents for evidence that policymakers valued and used the project’s reviews in their policymaking. Over the project’s duration, we find increasing citations of research to the reviews themselves and to a broader set of academic research. Our findings of knowledge transfer occurrence in this project warrant further research on the efficacy of mobilizing audit research via research syntheses. We also show how several current audit domain knowledge transfer practices can be combined with the research syntheses approach leading to systematic effective knowledge transfer to policymakers.