Professor Michael Power

Professor of Accounting

Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR)| at LSE. Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford; Girton College Cambridge; and LSE. Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and an Associate member of the UK Chartered Institute of Taxation. Honorary fellow of the Institute for Risk Management (IRM) and has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin and at All Souls College, Oxford. Honorary doctorate in Economics (University of St Gallen, Switzerland) awarded in 2009.

Research interests

The causes and 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

Publications

Recent books

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).
(with J. Downer) Close Calls, a special issue of Risk & Regulation (2010)
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/CARR/pdf/RiskRegulationCloseCalls.pdf

Recent articles

'The managerialization of security'. In Bergström, M, Svedburg Helgesson, K. and Mörth, U. (eds) Securitization, Accountability and Risk Management: Transforming the Public Domain. (Routledge, 2012).
'Accounting and finance' in Knorr-Cetina and Preda (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012).
'Foucault and sociology' Annual Review of Sociology (2011) 37: 33-54. Read article.
'Smart and dumb questions to ask about risk management' RiskWatch (2011) May, pp.2-5. Toronto: Conference Board of Canada. Read article.
'Preparing for financial surprise' Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management (2011) 19 (1):28-31. Read article.
'Fair value, financial economics and the transformation of accounting reliability' Accounting and Business Research (2010) 40(3):197-210. Read article.
'The risk management of nothing.' Accounting, Organizations and Society (2009) 34(6/7): 849-55. Read article.
(with T.Scheytt, K.Soin and K.Sahlin) 'Reputational risk as a logic of organizing in late modernity' Organization Studies (2009) 30(2/3):165-188. Read article.
'Financial accounting without a state' in Chapman, Cooper and Miller (eds.) Accounting, Organizations and Institutions: Essays in honour of Anthony Hopwood. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.324-340.
'The invention of operational risk' Review of International Political Economy (2005) 12(4): 577-599.
'Organizational responses to risk: the rise of the Chief Risk Officer' in B.Hutter and M.Power (eds.) Organizational Encounters with Risk. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp.132-148.