Cris Shore

Toward an Anthropology of Public Policy

As the rational choice model of “policy” proliferates in “policy studies, ” the social sciences, modern governments, organizations, and everyday life, a number of anthropologists are beginning to develop a body of work in the anthropology of public policy that critiques the assumptions of “policy” as a legal-rational way of getting things done. While de-masking the framing of public policy questions, an anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results. In a rapidly changing world, anthropologists’ empirical and ethnographic methods can show how policies actively create new categories of individuals to be governed. They also suggest that the long-established frameworks of “state” and “private, ”“local” or “national” and “global, ”“macro” and “micro, ”“top down” and “bottom up, ” and “centralized” and “decentralized” not only fail to capture current dynamics in the world but actually obfuscate the understanding of many policy processes.

Whither European Citizenship? Eros and Civilization Revisited

A claim frequently made about European Citizenship is that by decoupling ‘rights’ from ‘identity’ it challenges us to rethink the classical Westphalian model of citizenship. According to some EU scholars and constitutional experts, this beckons a new form of ‘supranational’ citizenship practice based not on emotional attachments to territory and cultural affinities (‘Eros’), but to the rights and values of a civil society – or what Habermas calls ‘constitutional patriotism’. This article uses anthropological insights to critique these arguments and to analyse the EU’s own citizenship-building policies and practices. It concludes that rights cannot be meaningfully divorced from identity and that citizenship devoid of emotion is neither feasible nor desirable. Finally, it considers the idea of ‘post-national democracy’ and what this might entail in a modern European context.

Whose Accountability? Governmentality and the Auditing of Universities

One of the most interesting aspects of the transformation that has been occurring in universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere over the past decade and a half has been the extraordinary proliferation of new managerial discourses of ‘accountability’ and ‘excellence’. What we seem to be witnessing throughout the university sector, as in numerous other domains of life, are the curious effects of what anthropologists have termed ‘audit culture’, and in particular, a form of ‘coercive accountability’ that can be explicitly linked to the spread of a new form of managerialism based on neoliberal techniques of governance. The key features of this new regime of governance include, inter alia, a fixation with the measurement, quantification and ‘benchmarking’ of seemingly all aspects of university life; the invention of a plethora of new ‘performance indicators’ (not to mention the creation of a whole new vocabulary to enable the new auditor-experts to assess and rank ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’) and an explosion of new league tables to render commensurable hitherto unimaginable phenomena. Thus, we now have national league tables that rank everything from hospital deaths, police responses, academic output and benefit fraud, to court occupancy, beach cleaning, cervical cancers and primary school test results. All of these areas and more must now be scrutinized, quantified, statistically ranked and ‘rendered visible’ either to the consumer or, as in most cases, to the anonymous gaze of the State and its bureaucratic machinery.

Getting the Measure of Academia: Universities and the Politics of Accountability

Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern ‘university of excellence’ applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia. ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ —Albert Einstein, 1879–1955 Anthropology in Action, Volume 12, Issue 1 (2005): 1-10

Who "Owns" the University? Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom in an Age of Knowledge Capitalism.

The neoliberal reframing of universities as economic engines and the growing emphasis on ‘third stream’ commercial activities are global phenomena albeit with significant local variations. This article uses the concept of ‘ownership’ to examine how these processes are impacting on institutional self-understandings and academic–management relations. Drawing on ethnographic research from New Zealand, including recent disputes between academics and management, we ask, ‘who owns the modern university’? In conclusion, we show how debates over ownership provide a lens for examining wider tensions around institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

Studying ethics as policy: The naming and framing of moral problems in genetic research

This article reports on a study of an ethics policy developed by a startup genomics company at the time it gained all commercial rights to a populationbased biobank in northern Sweden. Work in the anthropology of policy has been used as inspiration to study throughto identify how the policy took shape, to follow it through to the networks in which it took on social life, and finally to probe its social implications, in particular among the people for whom and on whom it was supposed to work. It is argued that as ethics takes the form of policy work, it tends to be so preoccupied with presenting solutions that it overlooks critical understanding and assessment of problems. It is suggested that anthropology might play a complementary role to the policy work of ethics by reintroducing otherwise marginalized moral voices and positions.This article reports on a study of an ethics policy developed by a startup genomics company at the time it gained all commercial rights to a populationbased biobank in northern Sweden. Work in the anthropology of policy has been used as inspiration to study throughto identify how the policy took shape, to follow it through to the networks in which it took on social life, and finally to probe its social implications, in particular among the people for whom and on whom it was supposed to work. It is argued that as ethics takes the form of policy work, it tends to be so preoccupied with presenting solutions that it overlooks critical understanding and assessment of problems. It is suggested that anthropology might play a complementary role to the policy work of ethics by reintroducing otherwise marginalized moral voices and positions.

Virgin Births and Sterile Debates: Anthropology and the New Reproductive Technologies

Embryo research in Britain has been controversial and the 1984 Warnock report on human fertilization and embryology has been in the center of the battle over the legality of embryo research. Research is permitted under Parliamentary decision as of April 23 1990. The issue arouses feelings and thoughts about the nature of motherhood paternity biological inheritance the integrity of the family and the naturalness of birth and adds to the already difficulty struggles over sexuality reproduction gender relations and the family. Reproductive technologies raise questions 1) about the ethics and practicality of embryo experimentation 2) that challenge the structure of parenthood 3) about the feminist perspective on female reproductive capacity and male-dominated medical professions and 4) about anthropological concerns with marriage parenthood childbirth kinship and cultural patterns. Studies are cited which reflect an anthropological perspective on the impact of reproductive technologies on kinship and family structure. In vitro fertilization began in 1978 with the birth of Louise Brown. In 1984 the Warnock committee made recommendations that human embryo research 1) must be considered ethically acceptable and subject to stringent controls 2) subject to licensing up to the 14th day after fertilization 3) be monitored by a new independent statutory body 4) surrogacy be subject to criminal penalties when provided through surrogacy services by agencies or individual health professionals. Proposals for legislation based on 2 white papers were developed. The proposed Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill of 1990 established a statutory licensing body and either a ban on embryo research or authorization for limited research up to 14 days. Only the 2nd part of the Bill was approved. Embryo research is supported by medical and scientific establishments and justified as providing potential health benefits. Opposition to the bill included fear of criminal prosecution and religious belief about the protection of human life from conception. Scientific objections referred to violations of medical ethics and the Hippocratic oath. Feminists objected to the loss of identity to women. Artificial insemination raised issues about social parenthood and biological procreation and surrogacy raised ones about family integrity and social order. The legal issue of freezing embryos was dealt with in the Commission report. Many institutions in society have a vested interest in controlling reproduction and the repercussions of the new reproductive technologies challenge basic ideas.

Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropology

My immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak’s book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006). In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all. The United Kingdom has had a tempestuous relationship with the European Economic Community (EEC) and then the European Union (EU), ever since it joined in 1973. The discussions against this huge European border experiment (one of the most radical border experiments I can think of) have been unceasing, and came from left and right (and of course from anarchists), from the centre and the peripheries, from populists and internationalists. Those in favour of whatever ‘Europe’ might mean were always much less newsworthy. Anthropologists were among many who lined up to critique everything about the politics, economics, ideology, structure and especially the bureaucracy of the EU (and some of them have contributed to this Forum). Yet once the referendum result was published, I realised that there is also much material in my field notes that shows that people did not really mean that the EU should cease to exist. Like the constant complaints against the habits of one’s closest kin, roiling against the EU is serious, but it does not really mean disavowal or divorce. Until, apparently, it does. This Forum represents the immediate reactions of 24 colleagues in anthropology about ‘Brexit’. The commentaries were all written within five days of the news coming out. Apart from having to trim the texts for space reasons, they have been left as they are, documents of immediate, often raw, reactions. In that sense, these texts are as much witness statements as they are observations; as much an echo chamber of all the endless discussion that came in the aftermath of the result as it is considered observation; as much an emotional reaction as it is analysis. I did ask all contributors to think about how to engage their knowledge of anthropology in addressing this issue. As their responses describe, there are many hugely serious and frankly alarming political, economic and ideological challenges facing both Europe and the world at the moment that have become entangled with Brexit. So this is not the time to sit back and say nothing. Others have been speaking out too, of course, including Felix Stein’s

The Crown as Proxy for the State? Opening up the Black Box of Constitutional Monarchy

ABSTRACT Despite its centrality to the constitutions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the Crown remains enigmatic, misunderstood and difficult to define. Is it the government, the state, the Queen, a ‘corporation sole’, an illusory construct and mask for executive power, or a shapeshifting entity that combines all these features? Legal scholars and social scientists have written extensively on the problems of theorising the state yet these literatures tend to work in isolation. This article brings together different disciplinary and empirical perspectives to analyse the Crown as an embodied form of statehood. While the Crown is typically seen as a metonym for the state, I argue that these concepts do not map the same semantic terrain. Moving beyond the ontological question of ‘what is the Crown’, I suggest we focus instead on what the Crown does, and what the Crown idea makes possible politically and constitutionally. Borrowing from Mitchell (1999), I call these ‘Crown effects’. If the state is the ‘greatest of artificial persons’, as Maitland famously argued, what can be said for the Crown? Using examples from New Zealand, I illustrate why personifying the state in the figure of a monarch is both problematic yet expedient.

From unbundling to market making: reimagining, reassembling and reinventing the public university

ABSTRACT In Britain and New Zealand the neoliberal assault on universities has shifted from new public management and funding models to the special status of the public university. The project aims to complete neoliberal business initiated 25 years ago by more fully marketising and financialising universities, starting with ‘unbundling’ and outsourcing and culminating in new forms of privatisation, rent-extraction and rebundling. This paper analyses two documents commissioned beyond government to create political momentum for this project: Avalanche is Coming and The University of the Future. These both capture the zeitgeist of reform while simultaneously creating the university futures that they portend. We examine the market-making work they perform in reimagining and reinventing universities ahead of policy reform. We argue that claims made to support fundamental restructuring of public universities lack substance or evidence. Rather, each is underpinned by different configurations of ideology and self-interest that together envelope universities in new agendas of marketisation, financialisation and privatisation. We suggest that in this latest restructuring of public universities critics should pay more attention to the work of consultancies and think tanks alongside the micro-details of market making. By doing so, they too might reimagine public universities, but for a different political project.