social audit

is a survey which aims to analyze not financial values and flows but the values of society.

Marilyn Strathern's study of the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, formed to make policy recommendations to the Canadian Government. Strathern's account begins from a problematic situation involving the manipulation of human life: the invention of new technologies poses questions concerning the regulation of human reproduction. Notably, it is the state, and specifically this Royal Commission, that is identified as the appropriate agent to respond. The Commission employs a distinctive form of reasoning that rests on the 'liberal' principle that it should act on behalf of the values 'of Canadian society as a whole' (Strathern, 2005). This principle, in turn, presents a technical challenge: how to make 'society' register its opinion' How, as Strathern puts it, to 'set in motion social processes which would yield information attributable to this society'' The Commission's answer is the appropriation and deployment of an ethical technology a survey that aims to capture the diversity of opinion of Canadian society. This procedure constitutes what she calls a social audit, whose purpose is to analyze not financial values and flows but the values of society. These values are supposed to form the basis of policy, allowing the Canadian Government to claim that its action reflects and is accountable to the 'will' of the Canadian people. (collier and lakoff 2004) an audit / poll / survey / whose purpose is to analyze not financial values and flows but the values of society. These values are supposed to form the basis of policy,

social audit, n.Definitions

social audit