Becoming and Being an Auditor in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This thesis examines how auditors in Saudi Arabia become professional subjects within the significant transformation happening in the country, driven by its Vision 2030. Drawing on a Foucauldian lens, it asks: (1) How are discourses within Saudi Vision 2030 embodied in the policies and practices of the Saudi accountancy profession? (2) How do former and long-serving Saudi auditors reflect on the discourses and practices that shaped their professional lives and subjectivities in relation to the transformation driven by Vision 2030? (3) How do Saudi auditors within a Big Four accounting firm experience the national and professional transformations under Vision 2030, and how do these practices influence the formation of their professional subjectivities? A triangulated methodology combines discourse analysis, oral history and an ethnographically informed case study. Discourse analysis, informed by Bacchi’s focus on problem representations, traces how Vision 2030 is mobilised in regulatory texts and professional initiatives, framing auditing as a career tied to the national ambitions. Oral histories with former and long-serving auditors show how, before Vision 2030, auditor subjectivities were formed within an earlier professional order characterised by limited opportunities, exclusionary practices and traditional social and gender norms. They also reveal everyday acts of perseverance, self-discipline and subtle resistance through which auditors sought recognition and room to manoeuvre. These narratives provide an essential historical baseline for the Big Four case study, examining how Vision 2030 discourses are enacted in the everyday audit practices and how that reshaped the subjectivities of auditors. Across these sites and temporalities, the thesis argues that Vision 2030 operates as a governmentality project that reconfigures the Saudi accountancy profession through discursive and regulatory restructuring, marking an epistemic shift with the earlier conditions. Reform initiatives rework long-standing power relations between expatriate and Saudi auditors: expatriates, once dominant, are increasingly positioned as professional experts and mentors tasked with ii iii transferring knowledge to growing cohorts of Saudi auditors, whose presence is central to localisation strategies. New programmes cultivate the “good” Saudi auditor who internalises norms of self-discipline, accountability, leadership readiness and national contribution, while expatriate auditors become key agents of professional socialisation. Gender inclusion initiatives make women auditors more visible in mixed-gender workspaces and client-facing roles, yet also confront them with persistent expectations around availability, mobility and comportment, so their subjectivities are negotiated at the intersection of reformist promises of empowerment and enduring organisational and socio-cultural constraints. Intensified surveillance, digitalisation and compressed timelines generate emotional labour, ambivalence and strain; auditors respond not only with compliance and enthusiasm but also through coping strategies, micro-resistance and occasional disengagement, showing that subject formation remains negotiated and contested. The thesis makes three main contributions. Theoretically, it extends Foucauldian accounting research by conceptualising Vision 2030 as a governmentality project that produces hybrid professional subjectivities combining national pride, entrepreneurial self-responsibility, reconfigured gendered positions and diverse forms of resistance. Empirically, it offers the first in-depth qualitative account of how auditors in Saudi Arabia, particularly women and Saudi and expatriate auditors in Big Four firms, live through rapid state-led reform and reshaped power relations in an emerging economy. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of integrating discourse analysis, oral history and ethnographic case study to trace the making and remaking of professional subjectivities across historical periods and organisational sites.