Purpose

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) intends to promote responsible forestry through its certification scheme. The primary engine that drives this promotion is auditing. Audits serve a dual purpose: they make forest managers accountable for their claim of meeting the FSC standard, and they make the actions of auditors and auditee account-able, or able to be put into an account. The latter of these is rarely investigated, despite it being crucial to understanding how FSC audits are done.

Design/methodology/approach

This article examines FSC forest certification audits as practices where the FSC standards gain meaning. In-depth analysis of these practices enables insight into how different values related to forest certification and auditing are articulated and negotiated in practice, characterizing particular modes of auditing. In this paper, the authors examine the practices of FSC forest management auditors in multi-day audits in Africa and in Spain. Their materials were analyzed and coded using Goffman’s elements of dramaturgy.

Findings

The authors’ findings show that auditing practices entail a series of nested performances in which the auditors and auditees interact together and in which front stage and back stage performances constantly alternate as auditors and auditees perform for each other and simultaneously for an absent audience.

Originality/value

The authors’ analysis demonstrates how in these performances, professional values related to following auditing rules and ensuring that audits are rendered account-able in a particular way take a prominent position. This risks overshadowing the accountability of the FSC system which is ultimately grounded in its ambition to improve forest conservation and management.

中文翻译：

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执行 FSC 审核

目的

森林管理委员会 (FSC) 打算通过其认证计划促进负责任的林业。推动此促销活动的主要引擎是审计。审核有双重目的：它们使森林经营者对其符合 FSC 标准的声明负责，并使审核员和被审核方的行为负责，或能够被记入账目。尽管后者对于了解 FSC 审核的方式至关重要，但很少被调查。

设计/方法/方法

本文将 FSC 森林认证审核视为 FSC 标准获得意义的实践。对这些实践进行深入分析，可以深入了解与森林认证和审核相关的不同价值观在实践中是如何表达和协商的，体现了特定审核模式的特点。在本文中，作者研究了 FSC 森林管理审核员在非洲和西班牙的多日审核中的做法。他们的材料使用戈夫曼的戏剧元素进行分析和编码。

发现

作者的研究结果表明，审计实践需要一系列嵌套的表演，在这些表演中，审计师和被审计者一起互动，当审计师和被审计者互相表演时，前台和后台表演不断交替，同时为缺席的观众表演。

原创性/价值

作者的分析表明，在这些绩效中，与遵守审计规则和确保审计以特定方式问责相关的专业价值观如何占据突出地位。这可能会使 FSC 系统的责任蒙上阴影，该系统最终建立在其改善森林保护和管理的雄心上。