At a recent international conference, an American professor of business ethics expressed scathing condemnation for the relatively new management tool called social or ethics audits. She placed her comments within the context of three successive periods of management's progressive subjugation of workers.

Stage one, in the early twentieth century, saw management attempting to control workers muscular power through scientific studies of every step of production that ushered in the assembly line. Later, in stage two, we had a profusion of corporate experiments with live-work family benefits, corporate-sponsored daycare and charitable giving campaigns, and social impact studies where management attempted to control the social dimensions of workers' lives. Today, she argues, we are in the stage three period that includes visioning exercises, popular books on ethics, and social audits: these she describes as corporate attempts to control workers' souls. From controlling the muscles, through controlling the mind, to control of the soul.

The criticism is sobering, but as unhelpful as it is wrong-headed. When applied appropriately, social audits can be an effective way to assess an organization's strengths and weaknesses using values-based criteria as well as diverse stakeholders' perceptions. Ethics auditing can be an empowering tool that links job security to personal decisions about right behaviour by all workers, from the most junior clerk to the CEO.

Approaches to auditing differ somewhat internationally. In North America, in the publicly-known audits, the focus is on evaluation and compliance, where the audit can represent an external, independent expert's view of an organizations's structure and operations. In Europe, the process emphasizes process standards and verification. In this approach, continuous improvement standards and a financial audit model are key.

A state-of-the-art social or ethics audit has six key components, each of which is described here. Taken together, they represent a significant enhancement upon either an employee attitudinal or opinion ("climate survey") study, or an organizational review. These components apply to business, government, and non-governmental organizations.