Neutralizing Deviance at State‐owned Enterprises: The Case of South African Airways

This article investigates how boards of directors and auditors retrospectively reflect on and justify their role in the breakdown of governance systems. We focus on state capture in South Africa where major corruption scandals have crippled the public sector. These scandals have been investigated by a special commission of inquiry, the ‘Zondo Commission', which offers a rich set of data for uncovering how individuals attempt to justify their ‘deviant’ behaviour. Our focus is on the crisis at South African Airways (SAA), where the Zondo Commission concluded that the airline had repeatedly disregarded relevant laws and experienced a steep governance decline. Despite this malpractice, SAA's former auditors, PwC and joint audit partner Nkonki Incorporated, consistently gave SAA unqualified audit opinions. Only after intervention by the South African Auditor General were deficiencies exposed in SAA's financial and governance structures. Our analysis identifies various neutralization techniques used by implicated individuals to cast doubt on responsibility for wrongdoing and garner sympathy where deflection was not feasible. The method involves documentary analysis, focusing on witness transcripts and other evidence published by the Zondo Commission, SAA's integrated reports, and select media articles. In addition to dealing with a novel set of data, this paper adds to the limited body of work dealing with governance in state‐owned enterprises, particularly in developing economies. The research also provides an account of how deviance theory is operationalized in the context of governance and audit, something which has not yet been explored in detail.