This exploratory study investigates the manifold conceptions of the internal auditing of risk culture prevalent among four influential actors of the financial sector—regulators, normalizers, consultants, and implementers. By inductive analysis of 20 interviews and 295 documents, we illustrate a two-step interpretive scheme utilized by the four actors in their IA approaches of risk culture: defining broad goals and designing visibility schemes. The visibility schemes were tied to the demarcation, measurement, as well as the IA data collection techniques of risk culture. (...) Our results indicate two dichotomous interpretations among the four actors concerning the IA of risk culture. The first interpretation, prevalent among regulators and implementers, promotes the control of risk culture primarily through verification. The second interpretation, adopted by consultants and normalizers, promotes the control of risk culture by IA along with the empowerment of employees through training programs. Our results not only contribute to understanding IA expansions, specifically to non-tangible domains such as risk culture but also enrich the literature exploring the mechanisms different stakeholders utilize to shape weakly professionalized IA practices. (shrink)

This article analyzes the significance of the Rāmāyaṇa, a serial telecast on state-controlled television in 1987-88, to the neo-liberal shift and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. Analyzing the inter-subjective structure of the TV serial and the audience it created, the article teases out the complex play of commodity fetishism and mythopoeic investment in the experience of the audience, and how the political right capitalized on these processes. It argues that the human compulsion to repetition and a jouissance consequent (...) to a pre-existing collective unconscious were harnessed as able allies in this transformative process. The Rāmāyaṇa serial metonymically represents the ideological appropriation of the hysteric’s scream for god at the traumatic moment of neo-liberal arrival, both as a flood of commodities and as discursive hegemony. The religious discourse, I argue, was necessary to this transitional structure –the new economic order could only be ushered in the name of God. God was the necessary supplement of a culture apropos the new economy. (shrink)

This collection brings together a diverse range of interpretivist perspectives to find fresh takes on the meanings of religion. Cutting across paradigms and traditions, experts from the UK, US, and India apply different approaches to engagement with beliefs and themes, including identity, ritual, and emotion.