For over two decades, the literature has characterized contemporary Western societies as audit societies. These societies are characterized by an approach to governance that is shaped by the idea and practice of auditing. This paper shows that with regard to public governance, the audit society has started to give way to a program of government innovation, or what we theorize to be the emergence of a new form of society: the innovation society. The paper builds this theorization on a longitudinal case study of the past 40 years of Danish central government administrative policy developments with a focus on internal auditing. The paper shows that internal auditing has transitioned from being a macro actor of public governance to becoming a micro actor and ultimately terminated. The paper further shows that this dissociation process was instigated not by elected politicians but by highly positioned civil servants who managed to remove what they identified as an obstacle to the stability of the innovation program.

中文翻译：

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中央政府内部审计的终结与创新社会的出现

二十多年来，文献将当代西方社会描述为审计协会。这些社会的特点是由审计理念和实践塑造的治理方法。本文表明，在公共治理方面，审计社会已经开始让位于政府创新计划，或者我们认为出现了一种新的社会形式：创新社会。本文基于过去 40 年丹麦中央政府行政政策发展的纵向案例研究建立了这一理论，重点是内部审计。该论文表明，内部审计已经从公共治理的宏观行为者转变为微观行为者并最终终止。