The social organization of the IMF’s mission work : An examination of international auditing

Harper, Richard (2003) The social organization of the IMF’s mission work : An examination of international auditing. In: Audit Cultures : Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. Taylor and Francis Group, pp. 21-53. ISBN 0415233267

Abstract

Auditing is increasingly showing its face to professional ethnographers whether they be working within the traditional domains of their trade, anthropology and sociology, or in those new domains in which ethnographers find themselves, as in my own case, within the corporate research world. Auditing may be used, albeit indirectly, to assess the ‘productivity’ of ethnographers, the ‘value’ of their findings and the allocation of resources for ethnographic projects. As a response to this new way of looking at their work, ethnographers have been revisiting the organizational history of their trade-the institutional processes for training, dissemination of results and so forth. This is enabling them to determine just how auditing may categorize and cut up the ethnographic enterprise.