Connecting worlds: The translation of international auditing standards into post-Soviet audit practice

This paper analyses the use and circulation of international auditing standards within a large post-Soviet Russian audit firm, as it faces up to the challenges of international harmonisation. It describes this process as one of “connecting worlds” and translation. In a detailed field study based investigation, it traces various attempts to articulate and link Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, old and new imagined audit worlds. The paper underscores the fragile and precarious nature of international standardisation projects. It shows how ideals of audit universalism and international comparability become enmeshed in, and challenged by, global divisions of audit labour, problems and practices of power and exclusion, and struggles for intra-professional distinction, which in turn undermine as well as promote the connecting of worlds through standards.