Abstract
This paper examines how examination failure policies in professional service firms function as technologies of organizational power. Whilst prior research has examined how audit firms socialize trainees into professional identities, it has not addressed how the same disciplinary apparatus systematically produces and manages the elimination of those it does not retain. Drawing on a netnographic study of 705 posts from an online community of trainee accountants at UK audit firms, the paper integrates Foucauldian discipline, Weberian social closure, and James C. Scott’s infrapolitics framework. The findings reveal significant firm-level variation in policy implementation, hidden transcripts through which trainees challenge the meritocratic legitimation of failure, and tactical resistance strategies that exploit gaps in the disciplinary apparatus. We developed an integrated theoretical framework that brings together managed attrition, secondary closure, and digital counter-governmentality to explain how professional failure is strategically produced as an organizational output rather than experienced as an individual shortcoming.