Playing the corporate shell game: The forensic accounting and investigation industry, law, and the management of organizational appearances

Abstract

This dissertation critically examines the emergence, growth, and subsequent evolution of the forensic accounting and investigation (FAI) industry as a unique professional field within which relationships between law and economic activity are strategically managed in the interests of large, corporate clients. Drawing upon analyses of both archival data and fifty semi-structured interviews conducted over a seven month period, research findings highlight the creative manipulation of law on the part of industry practitioners as well as their ability to reconcile partisan legal judgments with claims to professionalism, independence, and specialized expertise. The result is the production of customized legal products which play a critical role in the support and maintenance of positions of relative advantage within the wider economic sphere. The theoretical implications of this legal entrepreneurialism and its underlying contradictions are articulated through the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his political sociology of culture. Here the insights of Bourdieu are applied in re-framing the substantive analyses of law, accounting, and business at the root of the FAI industry in terms of more general theoretical questions involving the cultural mediation of law and the economy. It is at this point that the links between the FAI industry and dynamics of legitimation and social reproduction at stake in the neo-liberal political economy are finally revealed.