Auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance work
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study aims to examine auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance (SA) work. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected ethnographic data over a nine-month period from two small firms offering SA services in France between 2018 and 2019. Findings Auditors’ experiences of meaningfulness are facilitated by shared sustainability values among colleagues, social acknowledgement of like-minded profiles and the feeling that working in a “small firm” provides a more fulfilling and committed-to-sustainability environment than conventional assurance work in large accounting firms. The search for meaningfulness collapses when auditors realize not only the limits of their agentic and transformative capacities but also their unintended complicity in certifying the reports of companies with poor sustainability performance. Because they struggle to reconcile the assessment of their professional practice with their value system, the participants are tempted to disengage from their work by giving up a sustainability career and/or by reframing SA work as an advisory rather than a control function. Originality/value The authors approach SA not as an organizational project of professional expansion, through which accounting firms attempt to expand their scope of practice, but as an individual and reflexive search of aligning assurance work to their value system. Auditors’ search for meaningfulness is a strong counterpoint to the financial auditing literature, which portrays auditors as professionals with a low sense of purpose at work, but also to the literature criticizing accounting firms’ discursive processes of “depoliticization” (Malsch, 2013) and “de-emotionalization” (Rodrigue et al. , 2022) of socio-environmental issues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it