Audit Illiberal Governance

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Anthropological Theory

DOI: 10.1177/1463499608093815 2008; 8; 278 Anthropological Theory

Cris Shore accountability

Audit culture and Illiberal governance: Universities and the politics of

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Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

http://ant.sagepub.comVol 8(3): 278–298

10.1177/1463499608093815

Audit culture andIlliberal governanceUniversities and the politics ofaccountability

Cris ShoreUniversity of Auckland, New Zealand

AbstractThe economic imperatives of neoliberalism combined with the technologies of NewPublic Management have wrought profound changes in the organization of theworkplace in many contemporary capitalist societies. Calculative practices including‘performance indicators’ and ‘benchmarking’ are increasingly being used to measureand reform public sector organizations and improve the productivity and conduct ofindividuals across a range of professions. These processes have resulted in thedevelopment of an increasingly pervasive ‘audit culture’, one that derives its legitimacyfrom its claims to enhance transparency and accountability. Drawing on examplesfrom the UK, particularly the post-1990s’ reform of universities, this article sets out toanalyse the origins and spread of that audit culture and to theorize its implications forthe construction of academic subjectivities. The questions I ask are: How are thesetechnologies of audit refashioning the working environment and what effects do theyhave on behaviour (and subjectivity) of academics? What does the analysis of the riseof managerialism tell us about wider historical processes of power and change in oursociety? And why are academics seemingly so complicit in, and unable to challenge,these audit processes?

Key Wordsaccountability • audit culture • disciplinary technologies • doxa • governmentality •new public management • universities

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to seethe present only when it is already disappearing.

R.D. Laing The Politics of Experience (1967)

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INTRODUCTION: MOMENTS OF HISTORY/THEORIZINGTHE PRESENTR.D. Laing’s statement quoted in the epigraph raises an important epistemologicalquestion: How can we make sense of the ‘present’ when we are in it and part of it? Howdo we take stock of our fast-moving world when there is no Archimedean point ofreference outside of that world to give us perspective or critical distance? Finding sucha theoretic vantage point is not an easy task. The taxonomies we use to structure ourperceptions and classify ourselves are often the things that are most opaque and imper-ceptible to us: like goldfish in a bowl, we cannot always see the contours of the glass thatcontains the water in which we swim. Moreover, the power of any political order oftenresides precisely in the unquestioned nature of the classificatory systems that govern ourthought and action. As Pierre Bourdieu (1977: 164) expressed it, ‘every established ordertends to produce . . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness’. For Bourdieu, part ofthe work of critical social science entails a continual struggle to push back the limits of‘doxa’ (the area of thought ‘beyond question’) and return to a state of ‘heterodoxy’ whichgives the experience of those subject to arbitrary power the ‘right to be spoken publicly’(Bourdieu, 1977: 159, 170). Those regimes of truth that govern the present can onlyever be contested if we are able to disrupt and denaturalize ‘normality’. The subject ofthis article – the new forms of hegemonic governance that are being constructed throughsystems of audit and accountability – provides a good example of this dilemma. Myanalytical focus is the rise of the so-called ‘audit culture’ and its effects on contempor-ary British universities and, moving beyond higher education, on society more generally.

What is ‘audit culture?’It has often been remarked – even before the literary turn of the 1980s – that anthro-pologists actually ‘invent’ the cultures they write about (Clifford and Marcus, 1986;Wagner, 1975) ‘Audit culture’ is no exception: the term is of recent origin and was coinedby sociologists and anthropologists to describe not so much a type of society, place orpeople so much as a condition:1 one shaped by the use of modern techniques and prin-ciples of financial audit, but in contexts far removed from the world of financial accoun-tancy. In other words, it refers to contexts in which the techniques and values ofaccountancy have become a central organizing principle in the governance and manage-ment of human conduct – and the new kinds of relationships, habits and practices thatthis is creating.2

Audits are typically associated with bookkeeping and accountancy, that is, routinesystems of financial management designed to verify budgets and ensure that organiza-tions comply with administrative norms and regulations. Why, therefore, should we beinterested in something as prosaic and dull as a ‘method of accounting’? One reason isbecause small technological changes and routinizations often beckon much moreprofound processes of social change. A case in point is the ‘scientific management’movement pioneered in the late 19th century by the American engineer, F.W. Taylor.‘Taylorist’ techniques were designed to construct a mechanism for governing theconduct of industrial workers in order to improve efficiency and increase the capacity ofmanagement. But the managerial revolution it precipitated had implications that wentway beyond factories or assembly lines. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault(1977, 1991) has shown, routines and disciplinary practices are the vehicles through

SHORE Audit culture and liberal governance

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which governments seek to instil new norms of conduct and behaviour into thepopulations over which they rule.

The spread of audit reveals a great deal about the ways in which processes of ‘neo-liberalization’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) are reorganizing patterns of life in advancedindustrial societies.3 Through it we can also glimpse something of much deeper histori-cal significance: a process that is remodelling our public sector institutions, refashioningworking environments, and transforming our sense of our ‘selves’. Audit culture is aphenomenon closely linked to what sociological theorists have termed ‘risk society’(Beck et al., 1994) and the ‘political economy of insecurity’ (Beck, 2000: 2). The increas-ing use of audits arises largely because of growing concerns about ‘quality assurance’,‘operational risk’, and the ‘crisis of trust’ that is said to afflict most professions today (seePower, 2004). This has become particularly evident in the UK, Australia and NewZealand since the 1990s with the extension of the process of New Public Management(NPM) reforms that began during the 1980s.4 A number of high profile scandals involv-ing the failure of regulatory bodies helped to fuel that crisis of public confidence in theability of professions to regulate themselves. Those scandals included the collapse ofBarings Bank in 1995, the failures of the medical profession (and its apparent culturalbias in favour of doctors) revealed by investigations into the serial murders by Dr HaroldShipman, and the numerous cases of child abuse that have plagued the Catholic Churchover the past decade and more (Power, 2004: 22). All of these are believed to have under-mined confidence in traditional systems of voluntary regulation and have led to pressureto replace the loose adherence to professional codes of conduct with stricter regimes ofexternal audit and control (O’Neill, 2002). Advocates of greater managerial interven-tion typically reject this as a nostalgic myth and argue that the rise of audit came aboutbecause citizens demanded more accountability from distant bureaucracies. Theproblem with this interpretation (as I will illustrate) is that while these audit systemsmay have been designed to restore public confidence, they provide virtually no room forcitizens’ voices to be heard in any meaningful sense. Indeed, as O’Neill noted in her2002 BBC Reith Lectures, audits often create the very mistrust they are supposed toalleviate. As a method of verification, audit displaces informal relations of trust and isonly needed when accountability ‘must be formalized, made visible and subject to inde-pendent validation’ (Power, 1994: 11). This is perhaps the most compelling reason whythe spread of audits warrants closer analysis, because of the way they are increasinglyshaping and encroaching upon our lives and relationships as workers and professionals.

THE RISE OF AUDIT AND ITS CONSEQUENCESThe idea of audit originated in the world of financial regulation. Since the 1990s,however, it has spread into many areas of life where auditing as a method of checkingnever existed (Power, 1997). For example, in addition to financial audits and companyaudits, we now have ‘environmental audits’, ‘waste management audits’, ‘computeraudits’, ‘teaching audits’, ‘clinical and perinatal audits’, ‘democracy audits’, ‘land andwater resource audits’, ‘triple bottom line risk management and profit audits’ – even‘stress audits’ and ‘audits of auditing systems’. Audits are being used to measure andmonitor virtually every aspect of social and professional life. Everywhere, it seems, insti-tutions with names like ‘Quality Assurance Agency’, ‘National Standards Authority’ and‘National Office of Excellence’ have sprung up charged with evaluating everything from

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the provision of public health and university teaching to the quality of urban air and thedata standards used by the International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2003). But auditing isa costly and time-consuming (and increasingly commercialized) activity that is alsosubject to the logic of economic rationality. Thus, it too is characterized by an incessantdrive for efficiency and economy, which is leading to ever more elaborate and cost-effective systems for assessing – and regulating – professional conduct and performance.Whereas earlier audits required teams of inspectors making costly visits, the new ‘lightertouch’ approach now requires that organizations review and police themselves, a systemsometimes referred to as ‘regulated self-regulation’. This fetish for quantitative measure-ment is not confined to the workplace: throughout England and Wales schoolchildrenare now subjected to unprecedented numbers of compulsory ability tests at ages 4, 7, 9,11 and upwards. Preparing pupils for these tests now drives classroom practice,consumes an ever larger proportion of teachers’ time and distorts the curriculum (Gill,2004: 114).

A key characteristic of the audit process is that it actively transforms the environmentsinto which it is introduced – often with dire, unforeseen consequences. Michael Power,a professor of accountancy at the London School of Economics, was the first scholar toseriously analyse this phenomenon. As he observed over a decade ago:

the spread of audits and other quality assurance initiatives means that many indi-viduals and organizations now find themselves subject to audit for the first time and,notwithstanding protest and complaint, have come to think of themselves as auditees.Indeed there is a real sense in which 1990s Britain has become an ‘audit society’.(Power, 1994: 1)

We are familiar with the description of Britain as a ‘class society’ a ‘consumersociety’ and a ‘risk society’, but an ‘audit society’ is something new. Power’s point isthat audit changes the way people perceive themselves: it encourages them to measurethemselves and their personal qualities against the external ‘benchmarks’, ‘perform-ance indicators’ and ‘ratings’ used by the auditing process. An audit society is onewhere people are interpolated as auditees, where accountability is conflated withelaborate policing mechanisms for subjecting individual performance to the gaze ofexternal experts, and where every aspect of work must be ranked and assessed againstbureaucratic benchmarks and economic targets. This is another compelling reason whythe rise of audit culture in academia and elsewhere merits attention; it increasinglyshapes our lives, our relationships, our professional identities and the manner in whichwe conduct ourselves.

Throughout Britain and beyond these auditing technologies are being used toreform and modernize public sector institutions.5 The official rationale for this appearsbenign and incontestable: to improve efficiency and transparency and to make theseinstitutions more accountable to the taxpayer and public (and no reasonable personcould seriously challenge such commonsensical and progressive objectives). Theproblem, however, is that audit confuses ‘accountability’ with ‘accountancy’6 so that‘being answerable to the public’ is recast in terms of measures of productivity,‘economic efficiency’ and delivering ‘value for money’ (VFM). These have become thenew principles of public sector management and reform – and the yardstick by which


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accountability is to be evaluated. They are the same principles that have been used, sincethe 1980s, to drive the IMF and World Bank’s ‘structural readjustment programmes’ –policies that academics and NGOs have often criticized for their ideological fixationwith privatization and liberalization and for the damaging effects these have had ondeveloping countries (Gray, 1998).

Universities are just one site among many where we can observe the effects of neo-liberalism and the rise of ‘New Public Management’. What we have witnessed here isthe transformation of the traditional liberal and Enlightenment idea of the university asa place of higher learning into the modern idea of the university as corporate enterprisewhose primary concern is with market share, servicing the needs of commerce, maxi-mizing economic return and investment, and gaining competitive advantage in the‘Global Knowledge Economy’. Several factors are driving this process: the cost-cuttingfiscal regime of ‘economic rationalism’ in which government funding for universities hasbeen steadily eroded; the move from ‘elite’ to ‘mass’ university education, which hasbrought many more students with no comparable increase in permanent staff numbers;and the trend towards universities increasingly operating like private businesses, accom-panied by the emergence of higher education as a significant export industry (NewZealand Government, 2001). Audits, performance indicators, competitive benchmark-ing exercises, league tables, management by targets, and punitive research assessmentexercises and periodic teaching quality reviews are the technologies that have been usedto spread new public management methods into the governance of universities – andall at a time when overall government funding for universities and per student hasdeclined.

The social and psychological effects of these techniques and practices on organizationsand individuals should not be underestimated (Deem, 2004; Sparkes, 2007). Theseinclude a substantial increase in workloads and in stress-related illnesses.7 Managementstrategies geared to creating a more flexible workforce have resulted in a sharp increasein the number of casual staff on short-term contracts who now perform many of thecore teaching and examining duties previously carried out by permanent and tenuredstaff, but at a fraction of the cost as no research component is included in theirconditions of employment. As Susan DiGiacomo (2005: 58) describes it:

Increasingly, departments are staffed by faculty members hired on short-termcontracts for one year, one semester, or one course (for which the pay is abusivelylow). Many fully qualified professionals with competitive CVs are forced to spendtheir entire professional lives in this twilight zone where they are never even offeredthe opportunity to go through the tenure review process. However, as a condition forthe possibility of continued employment, they are required by those who hire themto demonstrate a consistently high level of scholarly productivity, as are their securelyemployed colleagues, whose own scholarly activity is regularly monitored andreviewed, and who have, evidently, internalized fully the need for such surveillanceeven on a playing field which is manifestly not level.

Alongside this reserve army of marginal and casually employed professionals, the auditculture has also fuelled the rise of a regime of bureaucrats, inspectors, commissioners,regulators and experts which, according to Cooper (2001), is eroding professional


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autonomy and threatening our system of government and democratic freedoms. Or isthis really the case? Some would argue that warnings about the danger to civil libertiesposed by government or excessive state intervention are nothing new. As the Frenchanarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon argued two centuries ago:

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven,numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, esti-mated, valued, censured, commanded; all by creatures who have neither the rightnor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. (Proudhon, 1923 [1851]: 293)8

However, I think the ‘audit culture’ heralds something both qualitatively and quan-titatively different from the traditional exercise of state power – and perhaps also moreworrying. In part this is because of the insidious way it has of implicating all of us in itswebs of power: whether it be in the form of annual performance reviews, research assess-ment exercises, or the competitive ranking of our institutions in The Times HigherEducation Supplement league tables of international excellence, we have all bought intothe audit culture and allowed it to shape our thinking and our subjectivities. At a recentconference in Australia, a university dean lamented to me, ‘I keep finding myself usingwords like “continuous improvement”, “performance” and “outcomes” even though Ihate this management-speak’. The subtle and seductive manner in which managerialconcepts and terminologies have become integrated into the everyday language ofacademia is another dimension of this process worth reflecting upon. As Michael Power(1994: 41) writes:

We seem to have lost our ability to question or be publicly sceptical about the fashionfor quality assurance: they appear as natural solutions to the problems we face – butare they not part of the problem?

My argument is that these new systems of audit are not, as they claim, just neutral orpolitically innocent practices designed to promote ‘transparency’ or efficiency: rather,they are disciplinary technologies – or ‘techniques of the self ’ – aimed at instilling newnorms of conduct into the workforce (Foucault, 1977; 1980; Rose, 1999).9 MichelFoucault (1977) showed how this was done in the 19th century when the imperativesof industrial society and mass production required a disciplined, regimented labour forcethat would freely submit itself to the monotonous routines of factory assembly lines. Butif ‘docile bodies’ were the ideal ‘subjects’ for an economy based on Taylorist principlesof mass production, my question is: What kinds of ‘subjectivity’ or ‘selves’ are requiredfor today’s ‘global knowledge economy’ characterized by fast capitalism and flexiblespecialization?

Emily Martin’s (1997) research on management training and leadership in America’sleading corporations suggests one possible answer: The ‘flexible’, active, ‘self-managed’and ‘self-disciplined’ worker who lives in a state of constant reorganization and perma-nent insecurity is likely to be far more productive and cost-effective from a managerialperspective. These qualities were epitomized in a poster that appeared in London Under-ground stations in 2000 advertising the executive-level jobs to be found in the pages ofthe Daily Telegraph newspaper (Figure 1).


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The list of adjectives and the macho celebration of ‘more stress’ and ‘increasedpressure’ reflect the desired qualities and character profile of this new corporate self. Butas Martin concluded, the ideal modern corporate manager actually displays many of thequalities associated with Attention Deficit Disorder (‘ADD’): an exaggerated sense ofurgency when engaged with a task; always changing; easily frustrated, bored by routines;risk-taking; strong sense of individualism – in a word, self-driven (or more accurately,‘results driven’ and ‘proactive’). The techniques of governance promoted by new publicmanagement are geared to producing ‘flexible selves’ – workers who do not need to besupervised but who ‘govern themselves’ through the exercise of introspection, calcula-tion and judgement (Rose and Miller, 1992). A key characteristic of neoliberal govern-ance is that it relies on more indirect forms of intervention and control. In particular, itseeks to act on and through the agency, interests, desires and motivations of individuals,encouraging them to see themselves as active subjects responsible for improving theirown conduct (Burchell et al., 1991; Rose, 1999).10 By internalizing the external normsof management, ‘flexibilized workers’ transform themselves into governable subjects ofmanagerial power and control. This is not to suggest some kind of ‘global conspiracy’ atwork: rather, these processes reflect the logic of economic liberalism harnessed to thetechnologies of modern bureaucracy. The net result, however, is a new ‘rationality ofgovernance’, one, that converts ‘people’ into crude calculable units of economic resource.Nowhere is this process more striking than in the managerial reforms that have beenintroduced into the British education system over the past two decades.11

BRITAIN AS AN AUDIT SOCIETY: GETTING THE MEASURE OFUNIVERSITIESLet me give some empirical examples of how the spread of audit is reshaping professionallife in Britain. In 2001, just before the previous Research Assessment Exercise (orRAE),12 I was summoned, as Head of Department in one of London’s universities, tothe office of the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research. The PVC was worried we might not


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Figure 1. London Underground poster (2000) advertising jobs on the Telegraphbusiness file

Longer Hours. More Stress.Increased Pressure. Apply Below.

Telegraph business file: £50K+ appointmentsThursdays & Sundays

Outstanding Opportunities. Dynamic environments. Profit oriented. Fast track. Pivotalrole. Strategic thinkers. Graduate calibre. Multi disciplinary. Blue chip. Strongcommunicators. Rapid advancement. Entrepreneurial flair. Track record. Problemsolvers. Motivational skills. Proactice approach. Results driven. Significant rewards.Excellent benefits.

Telegraph Business file.

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maintain our ‘5’ rating obtained in the last RAE. In front of him was a list of all staffmembers and the books and articles they had published during the assessment period(an impressive 26 books out of a staff complement of 13). Yet each individual also hada score against their name: ‘5’, ‘4’, ‘4’, ‘5-star’ and so on. Two members (both womenand both Senior Tutors for undergraduate students) were classified as ‘3bs’. ‘So what areyou doing about the tail?’ I was asked. ‘You do realize that if you drop to a 4 you’ll lose£86,000. That’s equivalent to two academic posts.’ I was told that I could either ‘buy Xand Y out next term’ so that they ‘get that book published’ or else simply not enter themfor the RAE at all, in which case they would be stigmatized as ‘non-research active’ (andtherefore potentially in breach of contract since 40% of an academic’s salary is nomi-nally apportioned for research and scholarship). What I learned that day was that theRAE not only ranked departments, but each individual; that the scores it gave took noaccount of personal circumstance (such as illness, bereavement, or family circumstances),and that departments had ‘tails’ that were considered a liability and had to be hidden orremoved.13

These observations were confirmed the following year when in June 2002 Birming-ham University announced that its Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies hadbeen earmarked for closure by the end of July. This came as a shock, not only to staff inthe department, but to the academic community in general. Why had BirminghamUniversity’s new Vice Chancellor and Management Team decided to close one of theirmost prestigious and internationally successful departments – widely regarded as one ofthe jewels in its crown? Certainly not for financial reasons: the department was econ-omically buoyant with 250 undergraduates and 50 postgraduate research students andwith the anticipated arrival that autumn of a further 30, mostly high fee-paying, overseasresearch students (something that most university departments can only dream of ). Norfor its poor reputation: the department had a proud heritage and enjoyed enormousinternational prestige as the founder of modern Cultural Studies. Nor too because ofpoor teaching records or low staff morale: the department had just achieved a perfect 24in its last Teaching Quality Assessment and its staff were primarily young and highlymotivated teachers and scholars (Boden and Epstein, 2002: 14). The answer was becauseof the department’s ‘performance’ in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The newmanagement team in its strategic plan had decreed that any score below a ‘4’ rating wasunacceptable. Accordingly, members of the department were invited to take voluntaryseverance or else face the threat of compulsory redundancy.

My second story concerns a former head teacher from a primary school in southernEngland who was jailed for three months for forging hundreds of his pupils’ ‘Stage 2SATs tests’. These national assessment tests for all children at different stages in theirprimary education were partly designed to identify successful or failing schools. Theresults are published nationally in order for parents to select, on the basis of theseperformance indicators, the best school for their children. Poor results will lead to lossof pupils and a loss of core funding, and may trigger a downward spiral towards ‘specialmeasures’, or even closure. The defence told the court that this head teacher had feltunder pressure from the publication of league tables and financial difficulties at theschool.14 However, the judge deemed his crime ‘so serious’ that an immediate 3-monthcustodial sentence was required. In his summation, he told the court: ‘If others were toact in this fashion the whole system would be immediately and utterly destroyed, and


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that cannot be allowed to happen.’ But in a system that demands ‘improved ratings’ andrewards ‘highly motivated’ and ‘results driven’ chief executives, it is logical to assumethat head teachers might be encouraged to cheat in this way – and of course, others havedone so too.15

My third example also concerns performance targets and education. In August 2006the school ‘A-level’ and ‘GCSE’ exam results for England were announced. As usual,these were reported in the national newspapers, many of which constructed league tablescomparing the overall exam performance of different schools. The results showed thatoverall A-level grades had improved over the previous year – for the 22nd year in succes-sion in the case of A-levels. GCSE results had also witnessed a year-on-year improve-ment since the GCSE was introduced in 1988. However, in 2006 the pass rate rosesharply to an unprecedented 98.1 per cent, leading commentators to describe it as the‘exam that’s almost impossible to fail’ (Lightfoot, 2006). For their part, the examiningauthorities were adamant that the exam had not become easier to pass and insisted thatstandards have been maintained. The explanation for the rise, according to the Directorof Quality and Standards at Edexcel, one of the three examining groups in England, wasprimarily ‘because more pupils were taking courses that matched their abilities’.16

However, as usual, some schools with very poor results were singled out as failures. Thepolicy of ‘naming and shaming’ failing institutions has become an annual ritual ofnational humiliation. The logic of the system requires that league tables ‘expose’ theschools that are performing badly; this results in the school’s loss of reputation whichquickly translates into falling rolls as parents (or those middle-class families who are ableto) send there children elsewhere. This tends to result in even poorer results the nextyear, and thus a spiral of decline is triggered until the point is reached where ‘specialmeasures’ are called for, such as the appointment of a new ‘super head teacher’, or eventhe school’s closure.

League tables are a particularly insidious instrument of audit culture and part of whatStephen Ball calls ‘management as moral technology’ (Ball, 1990). There are now leaguetables for hospital operations, ambulance trusts, fire service call-out responses, policearrests, train punctuality, cervical cancers, benefit fraud, court occupancy, beach cleans-ing, rent collecting and local council efficiency. Even government ministries are nowranked according to managerial criteria of ‘leadership’, ‘strategy’, and ‘delivery of publicservice targets’.17 All of this is of recent origin. The idea of league tables for schools andhospitals was introduced in the early 1990s by the Conservative government, which sawthis as a way to improve productivity and reallocate resources. The justification for thesetables was that they would ‘empower’ taxpayers and parents (now defined as customersand consumers) by providing the information needed to make rational choices in theirconsumption of health and educational ‘commodities’. By reducing everything to a neat,simple, mathematical score, these measurements enable commensurability across allschools and subject areas. Thus, the performance of every pupil, teacher, or institute cannow be quantified, calibrated, compared, scrutinized, rendered visible, ranked, rewardedor punished – all in the name of ‘improving quality’. It does not matter that conditionsbetween institutions may differ: the league table score provides a grid that ranks theperformance of each and every one. Like Jeremy Bentham’s model of the PanopticonPrison, the system is simultaneously both ‘individualizing and totalizing’ (Foucault,1977).


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These numerical scores or star ratings usually have little to do with ‘quality’ as under-stood by most professionals,18 but as any head teacher or university vice-chancellorknows, their publication can make or break a career. Not surprisingly, they have trans-formed the atmosphere of every public institution in Britain. In primary and secondaryschools, this obsession with ratings leads to unprecedented attention to the top 40–50per cent of pupils, while those at the bottom end of the ability range drop out of sight– or may even be discouraged from sitting exams in which they might score D or Egrades. As Simon Jenkins (1996: 20) sums it up: ‘results must be standardised andrendered statistically robust. The question should be “right or wrong”, multiple-choice,modular and tabular, as against essays or coursework. Professional discretion must beminimised. The bureaucrat must be in control.’ The problem is that quantificationdistorts the character of what it claims to measure. What these statistics demonstrate ismerely the extent to which ‘targets’ have been met. In short, statistics and league tablesare the instruments through which a new regime of management is being imposed, onethat extends audit technologies into the art of government itself.

THE RISE OF AUDIT CULTURE IN BRITAIN: A BRIEF HISTORYRecent years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the idea of audit, and faith in its abilityto deliver effectiveness and efficiency in all areas of work. One effect of this has been totransform audit and regulation into one of the fastest growing professions in the UKtoday. Unlike other areas of the public sector that are shrinking, the regulatory appar-atus of the state is booming. In 1997 when the Conservatives left office, this consistedof ‘150 regulators, ombudsmen, inspectorates, auditors and watchdogs employing some20,000 people and costing around 1 billion UK sterling to run directly’ (Caulkin, 2002).Since 1997, this regulatory apparatus has grown even larger. The Economist recentlyidentified 600 new targets that the public sector is now subject too, from hospital waitingtimes to literacy levels and crime clear-up rates (Caulkin, 2002). For all of these, figureshave to be collected and measured internally and then audited externally. Audit firmssuch as KPMG, Ernst and Young, and PricewaterhouseCooper have grown rich on theback of a state-guaranteed market. In the UK today, over 600,000 limited companies,plus hospitals, universities, local authorities, pension funds, schools, trade unions,housing associations and charities, need to have their financial statements audited byprofessionally qualified accountants. While the mission of these international auditingfirms is to promote accountability, transparency and ‘good governance’, many conducttheir own internal affairs in ways that are far from transparent or accountable to thepublic (Mitchell and Sikka, 2002). Indeed, the four largest commercial firms thatdominate the international accountancy business are all ‘headquartered in secretive taxhavens without information sharing treaties with other countries’ (Cousins et al., 2004:4). The image these firms like to promote is one of ‘pillars of integrity’ protecting publicservice ideals. This may partly explain why academics so readily accept their authority.The reality, however, is that these audit firms are private financial corporations whoserationale is the pursuit of profit – a legally-binding mandate that overrides any claimabout corporate social responsibility. As Joel Bakan (2004: 55) reminds us, the moderncorporation is an institution defined by ‘greed and moral indifference’.

All this begs the question ‘how did we get here?’ The rise of audit culture in Britaincan be traced to the reforms of the 1979 Thatcher government, which sought to reduce


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public spending, ‘roll back the state’, and increase the efficiency of public servants bysubjecting them to the simulated disciplines of the market. Ministers insisted that theprivate sector was regulated effectively by market mechanisms and that this modelshould therefore be applied to the public sector. Increasing efficiency invariably entailedspending cuts and measures to transform public institutions into pseudo-businesses. The1982 Local Government Finance Act, introduced by Michael Heseltine, was the firststep in disciplining Local Authorities. In government departments civil servants were cutby 14 per cent over five years, cash limits were imposed on most public service activi-ties, and each department was set up as a ‘cost-centre’ with performance indicators forits work and annual personal objectives for each individual. Behind these economicinitiatives lay a political agenda. According to Collini (2003: 7) it was ‘a calculated assaultby Tory governments on institutions which they perceived as expensive, self-absorbed,arrogant and liberal’. It was also an attempt to impose the discipline of markets and NewPublic Management on the professions, and in the process, to reclassify staff as ‘workunits to be incentivised and measured’ rather than ‘people to be encouraged anddeveloped’.

To ensure compliance, the government created the ‘Audit Commission’ – a new regu-latory body that would be, in its own words, ‘a driving force in the improvement ofpublic services’ (Audit Commission, 1984: 1). The birth of this agency marked the keymoment in British history when the discourse and practices of financial accountancyshifted and expanded to include the ‘monitoring of performance’ and identification of‘best practice’ (1984: 3). Audit no longer meant just checking the books: it now shapedthe definition of what constitutes ‘good governance’ and the formation of public policyitself.

The Audit Commission epitomized the neoliberal idea of the regulatory state and‘governance at a distance’, insisting that its staff (many of whom had been secondedfrom private auditing firms like Coopers and Lybrand and Peat Marwick) operatedindependently of central and local government. This claim of ‘independence’ was disin-genuous, however, as the Audit Commission derived its entire income from the feescharged to local authorities, and these local authorities were compelled by law to paythe Audit Commission for regular inspections and participation in its auditingprogrammes (Audit Commission, 1996: 4). The reform of higher education followeda similar pattern. The 1985 Jarrett Report on ‘efficiency’ in the university sectorheralded the first major shift in the discourse of what universities are for. Echoing themood of the new era, it argued that ‘universities are first and foremost corporateenterprises’ and that ‘the crucial issue is how a university achieves value for money’.The government’s line was that since universities were ‘failing the economy’ they werelegitimate targets for swingeing reforms and external controls. The solution proposedin the Government White Paper of 1993 was to create an ‘Enterprise Culture’ withinBritain’s universities to make them leaner and more competitive (HMG, 1993). At thesame time, the plan was to double the number of students entering university withoutsignificantly increasing university funding. These reforms constituted a major breakwith the government’s traditional ‘hands off ’ approach to the management ofuniversities – a practice linked to the hitherto sacrosanct principle of academicfreedom. To maintain the illusion of non-interference, the government created a newfunding agency called the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).


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Like the Audit Commission, this was supposedly independent of government but inpractice served as an instrument of its bidding.

Lack of space prevents me from detailing all the subsequent innovations; suffice tosay that the government (via its ‘independent’ bodies) introduced a raft of new measuresdesigned to make universities more responsive to market forces. These includedchanging the legal status of academic tenure and steps to make university funding depen-dent on meeting government targets; the introduction of Academic and TeachingQuality Audits to ensure the quality of university provision in the face of rising studentnumbers and diminishing funds; and the Research Assessment Exercises introduced in1986 to measure and ‘enhance’ the quality of university research.

Leaving aside the enormous cost these audits placed on universities and the increasedworkloads for overstretched staff, the competitive ranking of departments through researchand teaching league tables had a damaging effect on collegiality (Shore and Wright, 1999).Reports from erstwhile colleagues became the basis on which the HEFCE determineddepartmental funding. Departments with problems, instead of receiving support, werepunished by further withdrawal of their funding. By the early 1990s, British academics hadbecome fully enmeshed as auditees and accomplices in an auditing system that was bothpunitive and divisive. As one recently retired male academic put it: ‘[t]he daily, creeping,moral exhaustion that is the RAE was certainly my main reason for retiring . . . the systemactively encouraged the publication of rubbish, the pointless, or the absolutely obvious’.19

HOW AUDIT TRANSFORMS ORGANIZATIONS – AND INDIVIDUALSThe question posed at the outset was ‘how have these audit technologies changeduniversity culture, and what effect have they had on professional organizations andidentities?’ At the institutional level, audit has revolutionized the way British universitiesdefine themselves: they are transnational financial corporations, the emphasis being ongenerating income through commercialized research, on training rather than education,and on providing students (now called ‘customers’ and ‘users’) with marketable ratherthan critical skills. The new regimes of audit have also precipitated a shift in the manage-ment of universities, which are now defined in terms of their administrations andmanagement teams. Academics are no longer treated as constitutive members of theuniversity but as its employees, an individualized proletarian workforce that must be‘subordinated to the organisational hierarchy of managers, people of whom the“University” must demand excellence’.20 As Bill Readings observed a decade ago,universities have become ‘market leaders’ in quality brands and the pursuit of ‘excel-lence’. However, ‘the general applicability of the term excellence’, Readings continues(1996: 23), ‘is in direct relation to its emptiness’.

The audit revolution has similarly changed the definition of the terms ‘quality’ and‘standards’. Despite the emphasis on these words, their meaning is invariably vague.Some universities looked to business for clarity, and have adopted the British StandardsInstitute definition of quality as ‘fitness for purpose’. But this simply leads to an evenmore circular and convoluted line of reasoning in which ‘quality’ means ‘fitness forpurpose’, ‘fitness for purpose’ is measured in terms of ‘excellence’, and ‘excellence’ isdefined in terms of ‘quality’, and so on.

To prepare for audit, most British universities have created new ‘quality assuranceofficers’ and committees to bring their procedures into alignment with the anticipated


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standards demanded by external assessors. A whole new discipline has been createdaround the career opportunities offered by the new quality assurance industry. In orderto render themselves ‘auditable’, each department must submit lengthy paper trails sothat inspectors can assess whether their ‘internal control mechanisms’ and ‘qualityassurance’ structures are robust (see Power, 1996). Making these structures visible forscrutiny is a major drain on university resources. British academics increasingly designtheir research with the quality assessment bureaucracy in mind and create measurableevidence of performance that will produce positive scores in the next assessment exercise.Preparing for the ‘next’ TQA (Teaching Quality Assessment) or RAE is now the singlemost important event in every university’s 5-year plan. Many universities even hold dressrehearsals and brief students and staff on what to say to the TQA inspectors (the newmaxim being ‘careless talk costs money’). Some departments allegedly invented minutesof meetings that never existed. Dealing with the new performance measures has itselfbecome a ‘performance’ in the theatrical as well as sociological sense (Shore and Selwyn,1998). Audit has also changed the content and style of the curriculum. To be audited,the ‘learning experience’ must now be quantified and standardized so that it can bemeasured. The curriculum’s merits are now calculated in terms of what is most visibleto external scrutiny: tangible, transferable and marketable skills. For many academics:

It no longer really matters how well an academic teaches and whether or not he orshe sometimes inspires their pupils; it is far more important that they have producedplans for their courses, bibliographies, outlines of this, that and the other, in shortall the paraphernalia of futile bureaucratization required for assessors who come fromon high like emissaries from Kafka’s castle. (Johnson, 1994: 379)

CONCLUSION: AUDIT CULTURE AND ITS DISCONTENTSThe story I have told is one of accounting as a powerful force in reshaping the UK’spublic sector. Audit has been successfully deployed to support a regime of new publicmanagement that places little emphasis on professionalism and a great deal of relianceon overt managerialism (Fitzsimons, 2004). In raising these arguments I do not seek tomake a case against auditing or transparency per se. I am sure that audits, when usedproperly, can be very effective instruments for preventing fraud, mismanagement andwaste of public money. My point is rather that a slippage has occurred between audit asa method of financial verification and bookkeeping, and audit as a generalized model(and technology) of governance. Audit technologies may have succeeded in producinggreater economy, compliance and productivity in the workforce, but in the process theyhave also changed the definition of what constitutes legitimate knowledge and bestpractice. As Fredrik Barth sums it up:

What is put in the hands of this bureaucratic Leviathan is nothing less than the powerto replace and shape the criteria of validity governing anthropological knowledge inBritain: If traditional scholarly criteria of validity have not been totally eclipsed, theycertainly will be significantly supplemented by this regime. (Barth, 2002: 9)

As I have tried to argue, the managerialist conception of accountability is coercive andauthoritarian (Shore and Wright, 2000); it also reduces professional relations to crude,


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quantifiable and inspectable templates (Strathern, 1997). Far from ‘promoting account-ability’ to taxpayers and stakeholders, audits tend to obscure transparency and fuelmistrust. Furthermore, while audits claim to be instruments for making professionalsmore accountable to ‘the public’, the accountability they demand is to government-appointed officials and regulatory bodies – in other words, to the state. The centraliza-tion of state power through audit and regulation is a phenomenon that should worrythose concerned about the erosion of civil liberties.

What alarms me is the extent to which we have so passively and uncritically acceptedthe claims of audit. It is worth noting that the greatest corruption scandals in history –Enron and WorldCom – both involved companies that were subject to the most rigorousforms of financial audit by one of the most respected global auditing firms – ArthurAnderson. Our misplaced faith in techniques of audit and accounting, it seems, isdestroying the very organizations we care about. Universities bear only superficial andlargely misleading resemblances to commercial companies, and as Collini (2003: 5)notes, the quality of university provision, for the most part, ‘can be judged but it cannotbe measured’. To echo Albert Einstein’s famous aphorism: ‘not everything that countscan be counted, and not everything that is countable counts’.

The puzzle in all this is ‘why is it so difficult for academics to challenge audit?’. ‘Everyacademic I know’, wrote one of the referees on an earlier draft of this article, ‘loathesthis trend, is furious at the ways it distracts our attention from what we feel is our “real”work, and distorts that work by trying to measure it in ridiculously inappropriate ways’.How have we ever allowed arbitrary quantitative measures to determine value?21 Moreimportantly, how have we become complicit in its operation? It is partly that auditappears so ‘reasonable’ that makes it is hard to contest; who can legitimately standopposed to ‘transparency’, or ‘quality’ or ‘accountability’? In this sense, the new regimeof governmentality engendered by audit and new managerialism is designed to work onand through our capacities as moral agents and professionals. The values that mostacademics subscribe to (including self-discipline and a desire to produce quality research)have thus become instrumental in eliciting compliance and governing conduct (Burchellet al., 1991; Rose, 1999). This may also be part of the reason why audit culture is sodifficult to contest; the university environment has become so steeped in managerialprinciples and practices that it is difficult to find that Archimedian point outside of thesystem that enables us to critique it. As Bourdieu (1977: 189) wrote, ‘[t]he most success-ful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more thancomplicitous silence’.

The complicity of academics also stems from the fact that the system can only becontested collectively – and there are huge costs and penalties if individuals, or individ-ual institutions, try to challenge or opt out of the auditing process. Indeed, the auditprocess has made it far too costly for individuals and institutions even to admit short-comings or problems, as we saw in the example of the 2001 RAE and in the schoolheadmaster who forged his pupils’ test results. But other factors besides the threat ofsanctions engender our complicity. The competitive forces encouraged by these newmanagerial systems, as Hey (2001) and Ozga (1998) suggest, are highly seductive inrecruiting our behaviour through their systems of reward and punishment. Someacademics clearly benefit from the new regimes of audit as they disrupt old hierarchiesand provide new avenues for rapid promotion, at least for the more research-active or


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managerially-inclined staff.22 Most academics may know that faith in audit (like faith in‘the market’) is not borne out by its actual effectiveness in doing what it claims, but thestructures, careers and interests that have been forged as a result of these audit systemshave created a powerful disincentive for individuals to rock the boat publicly.

My argument is that audit is not just a series of technical practices: it must also beunderstand as an idea, a process, and a set of management techniques. The extension ofaudit into different settings like hospitals, universities, water companies and governmentdepartments is not simply a self-evident response to problems of governance andaccountability; rather, it is about the politics of regulation and managerial control. I alsowanted to give an anthropological critique of what happens when auditing practices‘migrate’ into areas for which they were never intended. And this is the point I wish toend with: audit has a life of its own – a runaway character – that cannot be controlled.23

Once introduced into a new setting or context, it actively constructs (or colonizes) thatenvironment in order to render it auditable. The effects are irreversible. One of thoseeffects is the loss of room for creativity and initiative. The imperatives of risk manage-ment leave professionals with an increasing sense that ‘one is becoming a functionary inan edifice that is concerned only that you have carried out specific functions, and thatthe necessary checks on this have also been carried out’ (Clapham, 2006: 6). At a recentconference of clinical psychologists and psychotherapists (two professions that are beingturned inside-out by government demands for accountability and accreditation basedon conformity to the principles of ‘evidence-based medicine’), one psychotherapistsummed up his dilemma thus:

It now seems difficult, if not impossible, to practice medicine as a professional, exceptby moving through the cracks of the clinically governed and audited world. To havea professional relationship with the patient, in which there is a contract, unspokenand unsigned, in which both parties have a responsibility . . . one must now be asubversive, and fly in the face of the power of government, and of governance.(Clapham, 2006: 7)

According to several speakers at that conference, the ever more intrusive regimes ofaudit and inspection being driven forward by ‘risk aversion’ and National Health Servicemanagerialism generate contradictory policy agendas in which ‘subversion’ becomes theonly way to maintain one’s professional integrity as a practitioner. As with the universityand education sectors, audit culture has not promoted organizational transparency orefficiency; quite the reverse, in fact. The ethnographic examples I have drawn on indicatethat these auditing processes are having a corrosive effect on people’s sense ofprofessionalism and autonomy. In an age where ‘risk aversion’ has become a mantra ofmodern organizational management, it is time to hold the managerialism to accountand speak out publicly against the risks that audit culture now poses for our universitiesand public professions.

AcknowledgementsA version of this article was first presented as a keynote lecture at the annual meeting ofthe Philadelphia Association at the Tavistock Centre, London, in September 2006.Comments on previous versions of the article from my colleagues Christine Dureau,


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Julie Park, Susanna Trnka, Veronica Strang, Mark Busse, Phyllis Herda and MaureenMolloy, and from two anonymous reviewers for Anthropological Theory, are gratefullyacknowledged. I also wish to thank my colleagues at Goldsmiths College London withwhom I shared and discussed many of the audit processes described in this article.Finally, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Susan Wright for the many conversa-tions we have had and essays we have written together on the problem of audit cultureas an anthropological phenomenon and form of governmentality.

Notes1 Among the earliest published analyses of audit as an emerging cultural system were

Strathern (1997), Shore and Wright (1999), and contributors to Strathern’s editedcollection (2000). Much of this work was reflexive in nature and analysed changingconditions of work and thought within the academy itself.

2 In this respect, the article also contributes to anthropological debates on Foucault’s(1991) concept of ‘bio-power’ and its role in disciplining both individuals and wholepopulations. For a more detailed description and analysis of what is meant by ‘auditculture’ see the contributions to Strathern (2000).

3 The influence of audit culture is arguably most visible in the public sectors of NewZealand, Australia and the UK: all countries that were subject to major neoliberalreforms of deregulation and privatization of areas of government that were previ-ously regulated according to professional codes of conduct and informal systems ofcooperation and trust.

4 Those NPM reforms typically included a focus on management, performanceappraisal and efficiency; the use of agencies which deal with each other on a user-pay basis; the use of quasi-markets and contracting out to foster competition; cost-cutting; and a style of management which emphasizes output targets, limited termcontracts, monetary incentives and freedom to manage.

5 For anthropological perspectives on the politics of accountability and universityreform in different countries, see Brenneis, Shore and Wright (2005).

6 These are very different phenomena: accountancy refers to ‘the profession or dutiesof an accountant’, whereas ‘accountability’ is a much broader concept that refers tothe ‘requirement for representatives to answer to the represented on the disposal oftheir powers and duties, act upon criticisms or requirements made of them, andaccept (some) responsibility for failure, incompetence, or deceit (Oxford EnglishDictionary; Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics).

7 According to an Association of University Teachers’ survey, the average length of theuniversity lecturer’s working week is 53.5 hours, and one-quarter had, in the last 12months, taken sick leave due to stress (AUT, 1998: 1).

8 Proudhon’s essay ‘What is Government?’ continues:

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered,counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized,admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, underpretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placedunder contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from,squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of


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complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused,clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot,deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided,outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.(Proudhon, 1923 [1851]: 293–4)

9 Deem and Brehony (2005) draw similar conclusions.10 As Larner (2000: 246) puts it, ‘the object of these technologies is to encourage us to

exercise our agency and transform our own status and manage our own risks’. Seealso Larner and Le Heron’s (2003) analysis of the neoliberalization of universities inNew Zealand and beyond.

11 For analyses of the way new managerialism is reshaping UK universities, see alsoDeem (2004); Deem and Brehony (2005); Hey (2001); Shore and Wright (2000).

12 The RAE, introduced in 1986, was the brainchild of Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer. Itinvolves a series of exercises conducted nationally to assess the quality of UK researchthat is used to inform how UK higher education funding bodies allocate public fundsfor research. These exercises aim to provide quality profiles for research across alldisciplines. Submissions from institutions are assessed by experts in some 70 unitsof assessment who accord a numerical score to each department. The results are thenpublished by the funding bodies in national league tables of comparative researchexcellence (see RAE, 2001, 2008).

13 In this particular university, the senior management team also tried to use RAEscores to dismiss some 20 ‘non-research active’ academics (virtually of all of whomwere women) for breach of contract.

14 BBC News at Ten, 7 March 2003.15 In May 2003 a head teacher from Reading was reprimanded by the General Teaching

Council for allowing pupils to cheat in their science and maths SATs. Two daysearlier, head teachers had discussed boycotting national primary and secondary testsand demanded the abolition of exams for seven-year-olds (Guardian 7 May 2003).

16 Jim Dobson, Director of Quality and Standards at Edexcel, cited in Lightfoot(2006: 22).

17 Jill Sherman, The Times, 6 June 2003: 14.18 Most of the academics that I have interviewed for my own current research on

university reform express cynicism towards the idea that research quality can bemeasured by numerical scores, or by the ‘impact factor’ of a journal. Many alsopointed out how these impact factor measures and citation scores can be manipu-lated and distorted.

19 See Sparkes (2007: 545).20 These changes in governance – and relegation of the role of academics – are also key

features of university reform in New Zealand.21 This is a question raised by one of the UK academics in Andrew Sparkes’ article

(2007: 541).22 As one disillusioned male academic put it, ‘some academic toilers like (no, love) the

RAE system – they can apply for research grants just for the sake of it and demon-strate a heartfelt, fetishistic desire to pleasure the system’s devisers’ (cited in Sparkes,2007: 545).


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23 Strathern makes a similar argument in writing about the ‘runaway effects of this[audit] process that began, so to speak, with the pristine aims of educationalimprovement’ (1997: 310).

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Cambridge University Press.Rose, Nikolas and Peter Miller (1992) ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics

of Government’, British Journal of Sociology 43(2): 173–205.Shore, Cris and Tom Selwyn (1998) ‘The Marketisation of Higher Education:

Management Discourse and the Politics of Performance’, in D. Jary and M. Parker(eds) The New Higher Education: Issues and Directions for the Post-DearingUniversity, pp. 88–95. Stoke on Trent: Staffordshire University Press.

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CRIS SHORE is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Europe Institute

at the University of Auckland. His research interests range across the field of political anthropology, including

the anthropology of policy, the ethnography of organizations, the European Union, and theorizations of the

modern state and forms of governance. His books include Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (edited with


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Dieter Haller, 2005), Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (2000), Elite Cultures:

Anthropological Perspectives (edited with Stephen Nugent, 2002) and Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspec-

tives on Governance and Power (edited with Susan Wright, 1997). Trained originally as an ethnographer of

political organizations and bureaucracies in Europe, his current research projects include an ‘anthropology of

universities in the era of the knowledge society’ and his ongoing work (with colleagues in the Interest Group

for the Anthropology of Public Policy) to develop the ‘anthropology of policy’ as a new disciplinary field.

Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland, Private Bag, Auckland, New Zealand. [email:

[email protected]]


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Audit Illiberal Governance