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Professor Michael Power

Professor Michael Power

Professor of Accounting

Department of Accounting

Telephone
+44 (0)20 7955 7228
Email
m.k.power@lse.ac.uk
Room No
MAR 3.43
Office Hours
By appointment, please email m.k.power@lse.ac.uk
orcid
0000000181483953
Languages
English
Key Expertise
Accounting, Risk Management, Valuation Processes in Organizations, Auditing

About me

Teaching

About

About

Fellow of the British Academy and former governor of the LSE, where he has worked since 1987. Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and at Girton College Cambridge, he is also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Risk Management.   He served on the board of St James’s Place plc from 2005-2013 where he chaired audit and risk committees; was chairman of St. James's Place International plc, based in Dublin, until 2023; and was a non-executive Director of RIT Capital Partners plc until 2023.  He has also been a member of the advisory board of the Financial Reporting Council Financial Reporting Lab, and was Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at LSE until April 2014.  He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (1995-6) and holds honorary doctorates from: the Universities of St Gallen, Switzerland; Uppsala, Sweden; and Turku, Finland.  His research and teaching focus on regulation, accounting, auditing, internal control, risk management and organisation theory.  Major works include: The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford 1997); Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management (Oxford 2007) and Riskwork: Essays on the Organizational Life of Risk Management (Oxford 2016).

Research interests

  • Values and valuation processes in organizations
  • The causes and social consequences of auditability, transparency and accountability
  • The role of external and internal auditing in corporate governance
  • Internal control systems, operational risk management, errors and risk reporting
  • Financial regulation and financial reporting
  • Organizations, regulation and standardization 
  • Full CV

Editorships
  • Associate Editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society

Editorial Boards

  • Journal of Cultural Economy
  • British Accounting Review

Publications

Selected books

  • Riskwork: Essays on the Organizational Life of Risk Management (Oxford University Press, 2016)
  • (With Tommaso Palermo, Simon Ashby).Risk Culture in Financial Organizations: a Research Report. London: Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network/CARR, 2013.pp.103
  • Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management (Oxford University Press, 2007). Translated into Japanese in 2010. Click here for more details.
  • (with B.Hutter) Organizational Encounters with Risk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Click here for more details.
  • The Risk Management of Everything (London: Demos, 2004)
  • The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; second paperback edition 1999). Translated into Italian (2002), Japanese (2003) and French (2005).

Recent articles

  • (with T.Palermo and S. Ashby)  'Navigating institutional complexity: the production of risk culture in the financial sector’ Journal of Management Studies (accepted for publication). Read here.
  • 'How accounting begins: object formation and the accretion of infrastructure’.Accounting, Organizations and Society (2015) 47:43-55. Read here.
  • (with Yves Gendron) Qualitative research in auditing: a methodological roadmap.  Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory (2015) 34(2): 147-165. Read here.
  • (with Andrea Mennicken) Accounting and the plasticity of valuation. In M.Hutter & D. Stark (Eds.) Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015) pp.208-228. Read here.
  • (with Simon Ashby and Tommaso Palermo). Risk Culture: Definitions, Change Practices and Challenges for Chief Risk Officers).  In P.Jackson (Ed.) Risk Culture and Effective Risk Governance. London: Risk Books, 2014) pp.25-46. Further information here.
  • ‘Risk, social theories and organizations’. In Paul Adler, Paul du Gay Glenn Morgan and Mike Reed (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents.  Oxford: Oxford University Press (2014), pp.370-92. Further information here.
  • ‘The apparatus of fraud risk' Accounting, Organizations and Society (2013) 38:525-543. Read here.
  • (with Peter Miller). Accounting, organizations and economization: connecting accounting research and organization theory The Academy of Management Annals(2013) 7(1):555-603. Read here.
  • 'Foucault and sociology' Annual Review of Sociology (2011) 37: 33-54. Read here.
  • 'Smart and dumb questions to ask about risk management' RiskWatch (2011) May, pp.2-5. Toronto: Conference Board of Canada. Read here.
  • 'Fair value, financial economics and the transformation of accounting reliability' Accounting and Business Research (2010) 40(3):197-210. Read here.
  • 'The risk management of nothing.' Accounting, Organizations and Society (2009) 34(6/7): 849-55. Read here.
  • Theorising the economy of traces: from audit society to surveillance capitalism’ Organization Theory (2022) 3(3). Read here. (Winner 2024 James G. March Prize for best paper in Organization Theory)  
  • (with A.Mikes) 'How culture displaced structural reform: problem definition, marketization, and neoliberal myths in bank regulation' Journal of Business Ethics (2023) Read here.

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