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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
Auditors are required to communicate significant risks and audit strategy to the audit committee. However, the effect on perceived auditor liability of auditor disclosures to the audit committee has been ignored for the most part in the accounting literature. In an experiment, I examine how the auditor’s choice to disclose a significant risk to the audit committee affects jurors’ negligence assessments of the auditor. Secondarily, I examine whether assessments of auditor negligence vary with the auditor’s use of a specialist. I find that disclosing a risk to the audit committee reduces jurors’ negligence verdicts against the auditor. However, auditor efforts to improve audit quality through use of a specialist do not differentially affect negligence assessments, individually or interactively with disclosure choices. My results further reveal that there is no reduction of negligence assessments by disclosing risks to the audit committee if jurors do not have a pre-existing favorable view of the auditing profession and do not understand the limitations of an audit. Through mediation analysis, I show that these findings are consistent with expectations derived from psychology research examining responsibility attributions in settings with multiple causative agents, where jurors’ diffuse responsibility away from the auditor and toward the audit committee. My results contribute to practice, addressing one cost/benefit consideration related to disclosures to audit committees and the use of specialists, and to accounting research examining the legal ramifications of disclosing identified audit risks.
ContributorsChambers, Valerie A. (Author) / Reckers, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Lowe, David J. (Committee member) / Maksymov, Eldar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This work explores the dynamics in emergence, deployment, and execution of modern technoscientific initiatives in the U.S. government. I focus on the federal initiative that developed vaccine and other responses to the Covid-19 crisis. This included federal policy mechanisms used during crisis, political and financial risk in federal technoscientific solutions, and conditions for technoscientific solutions success. The focus on these dynamics during crisis response is an approach to understanding overarching governance of technoscientific initiatives in non-crisis times. The process of exploration includes a series of interviews with senior officials engaged in technoscientific initiative development. Two studies governed by the tenets of the Delphi approach were completed, one in 2020 with senior government officials engaged in Operation Warp Speed, and another in 2021 with former senior government officials involved in government-funded technoscientific initiatives including the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the National Manufacturing Initiative, and the Precision Medicine Initiative. These results were coded and then the data were triangulated and corroborated through the use of public media, follow up interviews, and fact-checking in the local Washington, D.C. policy network. This work reveals a series of theoretical, policy, and practical results. The theoretical contributions include that high profile technoscientific initiatives are undertheorized in Innovation Policy and Science and Technology Studies. This work also establishes an early typology of U.S. government technoscientific initiatives. In addition, this work suggests policy and practical contributions regarding federal responses to emerging crises, as well as lessons from crisis-intervention policies that might be useful without crises.
ContributorsArnold, Amanda J (Author) / Ross, Heather (Thesis advisor) / Cook-Deegan, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / Hurlbut, J. Ben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Over the last half century, global healthcare practices have increasingly relied on technological interventions for the detection, prevention, and treatment of disability and disease. As these technologies become routinized and normalized into medicine, the social and political dimensions require substantial consideration. Such consideration is particularly critical in the context of ableism, in which bodily and cognitive differences such as disabilities are perceived as deviance and demand intervention. Further, neoliberalism, with its overwhelming tendency to privatize and individualize, creates conditions under which social systems abdicate responsibility for social issues such as ableism, shifting accountability onto individuals to prevent or mitigate difference through individualized means.
It is in this context that this dissertation, informed by critical disability studies and feminist science and technology studies, examines the understanding and enactment of disability and responsibility in relation to biomedical technologies. I draw from qualitative empirical data from three distinct case studies, each focused on a different biomedical technology: prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis, deep brain stimulation, and do-it-yourself artificial pancreas systems. Analyzing semi-structured interviews and primary documents through an inductive framework that takes up elements of Grounded Theory and hermeneutic phenomenology, this research demonstrates a series of tensions. As disability becomes increasingly associated with discrete biological characteristics and medical professionals claim a growing authority over disabled bodyminds, users of these technologies are caught in a double bind of personal responsibility and epistemic invalidation. Technologies, however, do not occupy either exclusively oppressive or liberatory roles. Rather, they are used with full acknowledgement of their role in perpetuating medical authority and neoliberal paradigms as well as their individual benefit. Experiential and embodied knowledge, particular when in tension with clinical knowledge, is invalidated as a transgression of expert authority. To reject these invalidations, communities cohering around subaltern knowledges emerge in resistance to the mismatched priorities and expectations of medical authority, creating space for alternative disabled imaginaries.
It is in this context that this dissertation, informed by critical disability studies and feminist science and technology studies, examines the understanding and enactment of disability and responsibility in relation to biomedical technologies. I draw from qualitative empirical data from three distinct case studies, each focused on a different biomedical technology: prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis, deep brain stimulation, and do-it-yourself artificial pancreas systems. Analyzing semi-structured interviews and primary documents through an inductive framework that takes up elements of Grounded Theory and hermeneutic phenomenology, this research demonstrates a series of tensions. As disability becomes increasingly associated with discrete biological characteristics and medical professionals claim a growing authority over disabled bodyminds, users of these technologies are caught in a double bind of personal responsibility and epistemic invalidation. Technologies, however, do not occupy either exclusively oppressive or liberatory roles. Rather, they are used with full acknowledgement of their role in perpetuating medical authority and neoliberal paradigms as well as their individual benefit. Experiential and embodied knowledge, particular when in tension with clinical knowledge, is invalidated as a transgression of expert authority. To reject these invalidations, communities cohering around subaltern knowledges emerge in resistance to the mismatched priorities and expectations of medical authority, creating space for alternative disabled imaginaries.
ContributorsMonteleone, Rebecca (Author) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Thesis advisor) / Ross, Heather (Committee member) / Frow, Emma (Committee member) / Michael, Katina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020