Susan Wright

Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neo-Liberalism in British Higher Education

La profession danthropologue depend particulierement des universites ; or ces institutions, dans tout le monde industrialise, ont subi des re-ajustements majeurs pendant les deux dernieres decennies. Lintroduction de mecanismes pour mesurer la performance educative, la qualite de la recherche et lefficacite institutionnelle a ete centrale a ces reformes. Prenant leducation superieure en Grande Bretagne comme etude de cas, cet article analyse lhistoire et les consequences des efforts du gouvernement pour promouvoir une culture daudits dans les universites. Il retrace lorigine de lidee daudit depuis ses associations originales avec la comptabilite financiere et son expansion dans dautres domaines, particulierement leducation. Ces nouvelles technologies daudit sont typiquement definies en termes de qualite, de responsabilite fiscale et doctroi de droits, comme si elles etaient vraiment emancipatoires et douees du pouvoir de realisation. Nous critiquons ces presomptions en illustrant certains effets negatifs que les pratiques daudit tels que les Exercices dEvaluation de Recherche et les Evaluations de Qualite dEnseignement ont eu sur leducation superieure. Nous suggerons que ces pratiques signalent une nouvelle forme dintervention gouvernementale coercive et autoritaire. La conclusion de cet article considere les reponses que les anthropologues peuvent donner aux aspects les plus pernicieux de cet agenda inspire du Nouveau Liberalisme, par la pratique dune reflection politique.

The politicization of 'culture'

En tant que presidente de la section de recherche anthropologique dun institut de recherche britannique (British association for the Advancement of Science), lA. propose une reflexion sur le concept de culture tel quil est utilise en anthropologie culturelle. Selon une perspective chronologique elle analyse deux sens donnes a ce concept : 1) lancienne anthropologie culturelle se proposait de montrer lequivalence entre culture et peuple, ce dernier identifie selon un ensemble de caracteristiques ; 2) plus recemment le concept de culture nest plus un objet en soi sinon un processus politique de contestation contre le pouvoir dominant imposant la conceptualisation de la culture meme. Depuis 1980, le concept de culture dans son double sens est introduit dans de nombreux domaines incluant aussi bien les theses racistes que celles defendant le pluralisme culturel, la culture corporative ou les politiques de developpement. LA. analyse les usages politiques du concept a travers divers exemples : politique britannique interne, revendication culturelle des Indiens Kapayo du Bresil, rapports officiels de lUNESCO.

Governing by numbers: audit culture, rankings and the new world order

Quantification and statistics have long served as instruments of governance and state power. However, in recent decades new systems of measurement and rankings have emerged that operate both beyond and below the nation-state. Using contemporary examples, we explore how international measurements, rankings, risk management and audit are creating new forms of global governmentality. We ask, who – or what – is driving the spread of audit technologies and why have indicators and rankings become a populist project? How should we theorise the rise of measuring, ranking and auditing and their political effects? What are the impacts of these ever-more pervasive systems on organisational behaviour and professional life?

Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society

The spread of the principles and techniques of financial accounting into new systems for measuring, ranking, and auditing performance represents one of the most important and defining features of contemporary governance. Audit procedures are redefining accountability, transparency, and good governance and reshaping the way organizations and individuals have to operate. They also undermine professional autonomy and have unanticipated and dysfunctional consequences. Taking up the concept of audit culture as an analytical framework, we examine the origins, spread, and rationality driving these new financialized techniques of governance, not least through the work of the Big Four accountancy firms, and trace their impact across a number of fields, from administration and the military to business corporations and universities. We ask, what new kinds of ethics of accountability does audit produce? Building on Mitchell (1999), Strathern (2000a), Trouillot (2001), and Merry (2011), we identify how the techniques and logics of financial accountancy have five audit effects. These are “domaining,” “classificatory,” “individualizing and totalizing,” “governance,” and “perverse” effects. We conclude by reflecting on the problems of audit culture and suggest ways to reclaim the professional values and democratic spaces that are being eroded by these new systems of governing by numbers.

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

Reclaiming “Anthropology: The forgotten behavioral science in management history” – Commentaries

Purpose – This collection of commentaries on the reprinted 1987 article by Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history”, aims to reflect on the treatment of the history of anthropological work in organizational studies presented in the original article.Design/methodology/approach – The essays are invited and peer‐reviewed contributions from scholars in organizational studies and anthropology.Findings – The scholars invited to comment on the original article have seen its value, and their contributions ground its content in contemporary issues and debates.Originality/value – The original article was deemed “original” for its time (1987), anticipating as it did considerable reclamation of ethnographic methods in organizational studies in the decades that followed it. It was also deemed of value for our times and, in particular, for readers of this journal, as an historical document, but also as one view of the unsung role of anthropology in manageme...

The Imaginators of English University Reform

This chapter traces changes to English universities as a result of changing political economic conditions in the United Kingdom. These conditions shifted funding and governance mechanisms in unprecedented ways, and so entailed dramatic transformations for English universities. The chapter calls attention to the “imaginators,” meaning a group of campus officials and government officers, who systematically laid the groundwork for these reforms. Analysis of documents such as speeches and policy reports highlights the imaginators’ collective efforts to recast and repurpose existing university infrastructure. This effort has been gradual and concerted, creating mechanisms that could be redeployed when the Great Recession provided a crisis moment. The resulting system yields numerous opportunities for private-sector actors to capture profits from state-subsidized activities, but may provide more limited options to students and faculty.

Can the University be a Liveable Institution in the Anthropocene

On Monday 29 August 2016, the International Geological Congress meeting in Capetown, declared the start of a new geological epoch. The Holocene (defined by glaciers) was over. Its successor, the Anthropocene, is an epoch in which humans are the greatest shapers of the planet. They dated the start of the Anthropocene to 1950.

Organizational culture, Anthropology of

Anthropologists have studied organizations since the 1930s. In the 1980s, anthropologists concepts of culture were instrumentalized by nonanthropologists to promote ‘organizational culture’ as a management tool. In subsequent decades, concern shifted to welding employees from different ‘national cultures’ into transnational corporations and organizations concerned with international governance. In such organizations, anthropology graduates are increasingly employed as ‘cultural experts.’ We track the anthropological research on organizational culture and argue that the sensibilities and analytical skills acquired and the concepts developed through the ethnographic encounter gives anthropology a unique voice in the study of cultural matters in organizations.