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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
From risk society to audit society
Author(s)
Olivier de Lagarde
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DOI:10.17265/1548-6583/2010.04.006
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ABSTRACT
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, the 2008 banking crisis occurred in an ultra-regulated environment. Legislative and regulatory financial-security regimes have in fact multiplied in recent years. The economic crisis is accelerating the transition of the risk society towards the audit society. But the G20 (Group of Twenty) declarations in Washington and London also reveal a managerial utopia: the march towards a society of confidence or harmony that would make controls superfluous. In this context, the article seeks to call upon philosophical, sociological and managerial references to risk, from Foucault to Power by way of Beck, Giddens & Ewald, to shed light on the official declarations of the leaders of the world’s main economies. The documentary corpus examined includes all the G20 works published between November 8, 2008 (preparation for the Washington Summit) and April 2, 2009 (conclusions of the London Summit). The political philosophy underlying the G20’s works remains fundamentally liberal, even though saving the worldwide market economy involves established security systems as well as self-control and control of others. In the end, the leaders do not decide between reinforcing the existing tools and inventing new systems. The updating of security technologies is meant to serve the preservation of the capitalist managerial utopia. This gives rise to a new variant of Beck’s risk-society paradigm, too often confined to environmental threats alone, in three phases: (1) The crisis is a consequence of financial modernity and in particular of the inefficiency of regulation in the face of growing sophistication in techniques; (2) To restore confidence, the states and international institutions want, paradoxically, both to reinforce regulation and promote flexibility; (3) Thereupon, flexi-security controlled by worldwide economic governance characterizes the second financial modernity.
KEYWORDS
auditability; regulation; risk society; G20, financial crisis; flexi-security; audit society
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