Audil CuIluve and AnlIvopoIog Neo-LiIevaIisn in BvilisI HigIev Educalion

AulIov|s) Cvis SIove and Susan WvigIl

Souvce TIe JouvnaI oJ lIe BoaI AnlIvopoIogicaI Inslilule, VoI. 5, No. 4 |Bec., 1999), pp. 557-
575
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AUDIT CULTURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY:
NEO-LIBERALISM IN BRITISH HIGHER EDUCATION
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
Goldsmiths College, London & University of Birmingham
Anthropology as a profession is particularly dependent on universities, institutions that
throughout the industrialized world have been undergoing major structural readjustments
over the past two decades. Central to these reforms has been the introduction of mechanisms
for measuring 'teaching performance', 'research quality' and 'institutional effectiveness'.
Taking British higher education as a case study, this article analyses the history and
consequences of government attempts to promote an 'audit culture' in universities. It tracks
the spread of the idea of audit from its original associations with financial accounting into
other cultural domains, particularly education. These new audit technologies are typically
framed in terms of 'quality', 'accountability' and 'empowerment', as though they were
emancipatory and 'self-actualizing'. We critique these assumptions by illustrating some of the
negative effects that auditing processes such as 'Research Assessment Exercises' and
'Teaching Quality Assessments' have had on higher education. We suggest that these
processes beckon a new form of coercive and authoritarian governmentality. The article
concludes by considering ways that anthropologists might respond to the more damaging
aspects of this neo-liberal agenda through 'political reflexivity'.
Over the past two decades higher education in Britain and in other industrialized
states has undergone a process of radical reform or structural readjustment. A key
element of these reforms has been the introduction of mechanisms for
measuring 'teaching performance', judging 'research quality' and assessing 'insti-
tutional effectiveness'. These mechanisms are intended to ensure 'account-
ability', a principle justified on the rational and democratic grounds that those
who spend taxpayers' money should be accountable to the public. Measuring
performance is characteristically framed in terms of 'improving quality' and
'empowerment', as though these mechanisms were emancipatory and enabling.
However, in Britain at least, accountability is not always as democratic or
empowering as it appears. On the contrary, as we shall argue, a peculiarly coercive
and disabling model of accountability has emerged. There are three main reasons
for this: first, because accountability is elided with policing (Power 1994; 1997);
second, because it reduces professional relations to crude, quantifiable and,
above all, 'inspectable' templates (Strathern 1997); and, third, because it is intro-
ducing disciplinary mechanisms that mark a new form of coercive neo-liberal
governmentality (Foucault 1991; Rose 1992).
J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 5, 557-575
558 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
Universities are just one site where neo-liberal ideas and practices are
displacing the norms and models of good government established by the post-
war, welfare state. The ways in which neo-liberal governance has been intro-
duced in other policy areas in the 1980s and 1990s has become a subject of
increasing interest to anthropologists (Shore & Wright 1997). Some have
explored this by analysing how new forms of power are embedded within
changing patterns of language (Seidel 1988), shifting notions of 'culture' and
'community' (Mackey 1997) and the construction of new subjectivities (Martin
1997). Others have analysed the aetiology and consequences of neo-liberalism
from the perspectives of economic anthropology (Gudeman 1998) or by using
ideas of consumerism and 'abstraction' (Miller 1998). This article provides a
further contribution to these debates by developing four themes of inquiry. First,
it explores how modern audit systems and techniques function as 'political
technologies' for introducing neo-liberal systems of power. Second, it traces the
rise of these managerial technologies since the 1980s, particularly the way they
were introduced into the university sector. Third, it examines the effects of this
'audit culture' on higher education and on British society more generally. Finally,
it poses the question of how anthropologists should respond to these neo-liberal
reforms. 'Political reflexivity' is the term we give to this response.
Audit as political technology
One of the most extraordinary developments in Britain over the past two decades
has been the proliferation of the word 'audit' in novel contexts. It has become one
of the key terms of contemporary management, and a major subject of interest to
policy-makers and governments. The Oxford English Dictionary gives five
categories of use for the noun 'audit', which reveal that its roots lie firmly in
financial management: (1) statement of account, balance sheet; (2) (from Late
Medieval English) periodical settlement of accounts between landlord and
tenants; (3) official examination or verification; (4) hearing, inquiry, judicial exa-
mination; (5) (figurative) reckoning, settlement, especially Day ofJudgement.
All these definitions stem from the Latin verb 'audire', 'to hear'. They all evoke
hearing, scrutiny, examination and the passing of judgement. In each case the
hearing (or inspection) is a public event, what Power (1997) calls a ritual ofverifi-
cation. Moreover, the second definition tells us that the nature of the relationship
created or implied by audit is hierarchical and paternalistic. An audit is essentially
a relationship of power between scrutinizer and observed. Like Victorian photog-
raphy, those scrutinized are 'seen, but do not see'; objects of information, but
never subjects in communication (Foucault 1977: 200).
In the 1980s and 1990s, 'audit' migrated from its original association with
financial accounting and entered new domains of working life. We are witnessing
an example of what we call 'conceptual inflation'. As Martin (1994) demon-
strated for the word 'flexibility', audit has been released from its traditional
moorings, blown up in importance and now, like a free-floating signifier, hovers
over virtually every field of modern working life. Thus, we now have academic
audits, company audits, computer audits, medical audits, teaching audits,
management audits, data audits, forensic audits, environmental audits, even
stress audits. A term which migrates in this way may be called, following
Williams (1976), a 'keyword'. As Williams argues, keywords acquire
a
range of
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 559
historically contingent meanings, and as they are used in a new context, either old
meanings gain new prominence or existing meanings are stretched in new and
unpredictable directions. In this case, as 'audit' entered new areas of working life,
what have become highlighted from its repertoire of meanings are 'public
inspection', 'submission to scrutiny', 'rendering visible' and 'measures of perfor-
mance'.
The point to note about this process is that as concepts migrate and their reper-
toire of meanings changes, their previous 'habitual groupings' (Williams 1976:
87-93) with other key terms also change and new semantic clusters form to create
powerful new ways of thinking and acting. These semantic clusters form the
epistemological foundation for the rise of new institutions and the discourses
that sustain them and legitimize their activities. Thus, in the case of education,
'audit' is now associated with a revealing new cluster of terms, including 'perfor-
mance' and 'quality assurance' (or 'quality enhancement' and 'control'), 'disci-
pline' and 'accreditation', 'accountability' and 'transparency', 'efficiency' or
'effectiveness' and 'value for money', 'ownership' and 'responsibility', 'bench-
marks' and 'good practice', 'peer-review' and 'external verification', 'stakeholder'
and 'empowerment' (Audit Commission 1984: 3). This process, whereby a
keyword becomes the centre of a new semantic cluster, is akin to what Strathern
(1992) terms the 'domaining effect', by which the conceptual logic of an idea
associated with one domain is transposed into another domain with interesting
consequences. As we shall argue, the consequence of introducing the new vocab-
ulary of audit into higher education has not simply been to re-invent academic
institutions as financial bodies (Strathern 1997: 309); more importantly, 'audit'
embodies a new rationality of governance.
Central to this process has been the re-invention of professionals themselves
as units of resource whose performance and productivity must constantly be
audited so that it can be enhanced. The discourse of audit has become a vehicle
for changing the way people relate to the workplace, to authority, to each other
and, most importantly, to themselves (Shore &Wright 1997). In this respect, it is
interesting to note how themes of empowerment and self-actualization are
stressed as guiding principles underlying the logic of audit. One of the main
claims made by advocates of auditing is that it 'enables' individuals and institu-
tions to 'monitor' and 'enhance' their own performance and quality, and to be
judged by targets and standards that they set for themselves. This suggests that
audit is an open, participatory and enabling process; so uncontentious and self-
evidently positive that there is no logical reason for objection. The new 'habitual
grouping' of 'audit' with words like 'efficiency', 'effectiveness', 'best practice' and
'value for money' disguises its hierarchical and paternalistic roots and plays down
its coercive and punitive implications.
As political analysts from Vico and Machiavelli to Marx and Gramsci have
observed, power operates most effectively when it is largely invisible to those
whom it dominates. Disguising how power works is one of the key features of
what Foucault termed a 'political technology', which advances 'by taking what is
essentially a political problem, removing it from the realm of political discourse,
and recasting it in the neutral language of science' (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982:
196). Political technologies establish institutional procedures that are presented
in the ostensibly detached language of science, reason, normality and common
sense. This seemingly neutral language conceals the ways institutional mecha-
560 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
nisms operate to introduce new forms of power. Political technologies, to use
Foucault's phrase, are simultaneously both 'individualising and totalising', as
they order and discipline each individual and the system as a whole. A paradig-
matic example of this is the modern prison, where a new technical knowledge of
criminality was used to classify populations and to control individuals by
organizing them minutely in highly regulated space and time, a process
symbolized most succinctly in Jeremy Bentham's design for the Panopticon
(Foucault 1977). The essential component of such a system is that it simultane-
ously imposes a system of external control from above and induces inmates to
internalize the new 'expert' knowledge to reform themselves. In other words,
through a combination of external subjection and internal subjectification
individuals are encouraged to constitute themselves in terms of the norms
through which they are governed. Technologies of the self thus become the
means through which individuals, as active agents, come to regulate their own
conduct and themselves contribute (albeit not necessarily consciously) to the
government's model of social order.
New categories of experts emerge as a consequence of the development of
political technologies. In the case of the prison, these included criminologists,
sociologists, educationalists, psychiatrists, psychologists, theologians and medical
specialists. These specialists fulfilled four main roles. First, they developed the
new expert knowledge that provided the classifications for the new normative
grid. Second, they advised on the design of institutional procedures. Third, they
staffed and presided over the new regulatory mechanisms and systems, and
judged adherence to or deviance from them. Fourth, they had a redemptive role
in so far as they made their expert knowledge available to individuals who wished
to engage in the process of self-improvement in order to modify their conduct
according to the desired norms. The new categories of higher education experts,
referred to as 'educational development consultants', 'quality assurance
officers',
6staff development trainers' and 'teaching quality assessors', are fulfilling
precisely these four functions.
During the 1980s the Conservative government in Britain used a range of
political technologies to challenge post-war thinking about the nature and role of
government. Their mechanics and effects on the working class are exemplified
in Hyatt's (1997) study of women tenants in a Bradford council housing estate.
The estate, a symbol of the welfare state, had been based on the modernist notion
that urban planning and good architectural design would result in environments
conducive to functional communities, happy family life and socially integrated
individuals. Against this notion of 'governing through the social', New Right
thinking rejected what it called the 'nanny state' and extolled the idea of 'enter-
prise culture' based on the laissez-faire model of the self-reliant individual. One
of their icons was the self-managing, empowered tenant, and legislation was
enacted to enable tenants to take over the letting, maintenance and problem-
solving of their estates. This heralded the decline of the old profession of
council-house management, the transfer of their knowledge to the tenants
themselves, and the rise of a new profession of 'trainers in empowerment'.
Initially, women thus trained experienced a sense of being more in control of
their own lives. However, this was mixed with a feeling that they had been
tricked, especially when they had to devote hundreds of hours to managing an
estate previously run by paid professionals. The women brought the self-
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 561
management scheme to an end when they found they were expected to police
each other. The success of this neo-liberal project can be measured in the fact
that the Bradford women altered their sense of self and the way they related to
government. However, the lesson the women learned was that a social
environment composed of enterprising individuals resulted in 'chaos and
confusion within those communities already most battered by the disabling
repercussions of de-industrialisation and economic decline' (Hyatt 1997: 231).
Whereas anthropologists have paid some attention to how working class
people like these Bradford women were experiencing the introduction of neo-
liberal forms of governance, they have neglected an equally important dimension
of this transformation of governmentality. How have middle-class
professionals,
not least academics, responded to the advance of neo-liberal forms of
management in their working lives, which has continued in the New Labour
1990s? 'The spread of audits and other quality assurance initiatives', as Power
(1997:1) writes, 'means that many individuals and organisations 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"'.
The Bradford women in Hyatt's study were extremely conscious of the
politics of the reforms they were experiencing. How conscious are academics of
the changing norms that govern our professional conduct, and how sophisticated
are we as reflexive and political actors? We suggest that these systems of audit and
inspection are actively changing the way in which we see ourselves. Most of the
time, norms constitute an invisible web of power which is insidious because the
norms go largely unrecognized and unquestioned. They provide the classifi-
catory grid by which we evaluate ourselves and others, and usually there is no
point from which we can take a distanced view of ourselves. That said, in
moments of change like the present, when the new conceptual apparatus has not
been fully naturalized, it is possible and important to be aware (as the Bradford
women were) of the new normative grids that are being established. The
problem is how to use such awareness as the basis for political action given that,
even when people oppose these systems of audit and inspection, they are never-
theless interpolated by them.
The audit explosion and neo-liberal governmentality
The roots of the audit explosion in Britain can be traced to a series of political
developments in the early 1980s following the election of the first Thatcher
government in 1979. That government tried to bring to an end the post-war
welfare society by 'rolling back the frontiers of the state'. They set out to remodel
the public sector by introducing the principles of the supposedly more efficient
and dynamic unregulated, market-driven private sector. The public sector was
privatized wherever possible. Thus, between 1980 and 1982 alone, sell-offs of
public services and utilities included British Petroleum (BP), the National
Enterprise Board, the New Town Development Corporations, the Regional
Water Authorities, the Property Services Agency, British Aerospace, Cable and
Wireless (a global communications giant), Amersham International (a leading
UK computer firm), the National Freight Company and the Crown Agents. At
the same time, oil stock-piles were sold along with the land and buildings of the
562 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
Forestry Commission, motorway service stations and local authority housing
(Keesings 1983: 321-37).
The assumption was that the free market would provide its own effective
quality control mechanisms in the private sector, and government-instituted
audit systems were therefore focused exclusively on what remained of the public
sector. However, the subsequent collapse of the Maxwell communications
empire, the demise of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)
in 1991, the various scandals involving company fraud, executive salaries, insider
dealing in the City of London and the catastrophic losses of Lloyds insurance
underwriters, all challenged this assumption. They demonstrated that financial
auditors, even in their traditional role, had been guilty of gross negligence.
Regardless of these flaws, the government held to a belief that the private
sector provided a model of efficiency and accountability, and that accountancy
was the technology through which the values and practices of the private sector
would be instilled in the public sector. The testing ground for reform was local
government. The Local Government Finance Act of 1982 was effectively a pincer
movement designed to increase central control over local authority spending on
the one hand and, on the other, to ensure that local authorities 'make proper
arrangements for securing economy, efficiency and effectiveness in [their] use of
resources' (Audit Commission 1984: I).
To achieve the latter, the Audit Commission was created in April 1983. The
early documentation of the Commission marks the key moment when the
language associated with financial accounting shifted to embrace the 'quality' and
'effectiveness' of service provision, 'performance' and 'value for money'. In its
ambition 'to be a driving force in the improvement of public services', the
Commission's main functions were: (1) to establish a national 'Code of Audit
Practice'; (2) 'to carry out national studies designed to promote economy,
efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of local authority and NHS services';
and (3) 'to apply national findings to the audited body to help assess local perfor-
mance' (Audit Commission 1996: 4).
The Audit Commission had thus taken auditing way beyond its traditional
role. In addition to financial accounting, its remit included, inter alia, 'monitoring
performance', identifying 'best practice', 'improving value for money' and
'ensuring effectiveness of management systems' (Audit Commission 1984: 3).1
The Commission's initial staff complement was a staggering five hundred
officials, three quarters of whom were seconded from the Department of the
Environment, with a quarter drawn from private accountancy firms.
Significantly, the financial accountancy firms who seconded staff to the Audit
Commission (including Price Waterhouse, Touche Ross, Coopers and Lybrand
and Peat, Marwick, Mitchell) quickly transformed themselves into the leading
consultants in the burgeoning and increasingly global audit and management
professions. Henceforth, ensuring 'value for money' through measuring perfor-
mance outputs and the effectiveness of management systems became a hallmark
of good government.
As the audit explosion extended into more areas of the public sector, new
bodies were established. Thus, in 1992, OFSTED was set up, at first just to
inspect schools, but soon also to scrutinize the effectiveness of local education
authorities, teacher training establishments and curriculum and educational
research (Guardian 28 Oct. 1998). By that year, these instruments and proce-
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 563
dures, initially developed to review local authority purchasing and refuse
collection, had become the model for auditing all areas of performance by public
bodies, including higher education.
The rise of audit technologies in higher education
The introduction of auditing into higher education was designed to create an
efficient, accountable system that could be standardized, disciplined and contin-
uously improved. In many ways this was achieved, albeit in a way that was
coercive and disempowering. The means for realizing these objectives were new
disciplinary norms, institutional procedures and bureaucratic agents which
together precipitated a radical change in academics' own sense of themselves as
professionals. As a result, the progressive advance of this neo-liberal form of
governance has systematically reconfigured the university sector as a docile
auditable body.
Universities were accused of having failed the economy (DES 1987).
According to the Department for Employment's adviser (Wright 1996: 3-4), if
the future lay in service sector 'knowledge and information' industries, the
country would need 'human capital' capable of responding flexibly to ever-
changing tasks and of acquiring new knowledge and skills as 'life long learners'.2
Yet a much smaller percentage of the population had higher education qualifica-
tions than in France, Germany and North America. Britain's 'elite' system, in
which only 2-10 per cent. of the population attended university, was transformed
by the late 1980s into a system of 'mass' higher education, with a participation
rate over 30 per cent. (Trow 1970; Webster 1999). In 1992 the government
rewarded polytechnics for achieving much of this expansion and for keeping
their costs down by abolishing the 'binary divide' and making them universities.
This created another problem: did universities with very different entrance
requirements and levels of resource produce students with very different
abilities? Could employers trust the quality of degree standards? The
government's conundrum was how to increase the number of students,
standardize degrees and improve quality, whilst also driving down the unit of
resource.
Universities were deemed to be legitimate targets for radical changes. This
heralded a significant break with the principle of academic autonomy. Under
royal charters, universities set their own standards and were the sole arbiters of
their own quality. State funding of university education had hitherto not been
used to interfere with the manner in which universities conducted themselves.
Without explicitly attacking university autonomy, all this changed with the
reforms of the 1990s. However, the extent of government intervention has been
concealed by the recruitment of a host of intermediary agencies and the
mobilization of academics themselves in this process.
The government's 'White Paper on science and technology (Realising our
potential) set out to affect what it called 'a key cultural change' in education,
science and research (HMG 1993: 5). This change was designed to bring about
tighter financial discipline and 'enforce accountability' on those who spend
taxpayers' money. The new priorities included competitive wealth creation,
greater links between scientists and businesspeople, and more responsiveness to
'user groups', particularly industry, commerce and government departments.
564 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
Under the slogan of 'Enterprise Culture' the government made increasing use of
language and techniques associated with corporate management, such as
'mission statements', 'strategic plans', 'staff appraisal', and the measurement of
'output' and 'efficiency' through competitive league tables, 'performance
indicators' and other statistical indices of 'productivity' (Abercrombie & Keat
1991; Selwyn & Shore 1992).
Budget cuts (now described as 'efficiency savings') were supposed not to
damage academic or teaching standards thanks to the invention of a rigorous new
set of 'quality assurance' procedures.3 Far from a new invention, these proce-
dures have a long and surprising lineage (and are a good example of 'domaining').
Strathern (1996-7: 4-5) has identified how, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, university writing, grading and examining practices were transferred to
the business world and were the basis for 'human accounting', producing a
numerical score for combined financial and human performance. These
practices re-entered universities in the 1990s, many derived from a Japanese
private sector approach to quality assurance called Total Quality Management
('TQM').4 Transmuted into a British context, the key features of TQM as
perceived by one college principal were summed up as follows: (1) the organi-
zation should put its customers at the centre of all it does and assume that there
is always a need for continuous quality improvement; (2) management should
'empower' everyone in the organization, that is, employees should be the
managers of their own areas of responsibility; (3) Quality Assurance needs to be
management-led and driven, but 'quality is in fact everyone's responsibility'
(Tower Hamlets College 1992 Newsletter, 30 Nov.: 8-10). This third feature sums
up one of the interesting aspects of the way TQM has been translated into the
British public sector: it encourages the 'responsibilization' of the workforce.
However, the result is not power without responsibility, but responsibility
without power.
The White Paper Higher education: a newframework (DES 1991) outlined three
mechanisms for ensuring quality. The first two, 'Quality Control' and 'Quality
Audit', involved departmental and institutional reviews with the aim of
providing feedback that would help bodies improve their systems and enhance
their provision. These reviews were organized by the universities and the Higher
Education Quality Council (HEQC
-
an independent non-governmental body
composed of University Vice Chancellors) in an attempt to pre-empt
government intervention. The third measure, 'Quality Assessment', entailed
external judgement about the quality of teaching and learning. The new funding
agency for the universities, the Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE), established panels of inspectors for each discipline, composed of
senior academics and HEFCE officials, to visit, observe and then grade each
department.
Quality Assessment exists to 'ensure that all education for which the HEFCE
provides funding is of satisfactory quality or better, and to ensure speedy rectifi-
cation of unsatisfactory quality', the ultimate aim being to 'inform funding and
reward excellence' (HEFCE 1992; 1993). Quality can be guaranteed, it claims,
through careful measurement of performance and productivity. The procedures
adopted were based upon the principle that individuals and departments are the
managers of their own performance and must ensure the quality of their
provision. Departments were required to submit 'bids' classifying themselves as
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 565
either 'excellent', 'satisfactory' or 'unsatisfactory'. Any claim to excellence had to
be supported by evidence based on 'performance indicators' of 'output' and
'fitness for purpose'. HEFCE inspectors would then confirm or contest the
classification. An "unsatisfactory department"', HEFCE declared (1995: 14) 'will
be given 12 months to remedy its position - after which, core funding and
student places for that subject will be withdrawn'.
By the early 1990s, anthropology departments were subject to Academic Audit
(AA) one year, a competitive ranking of their research output (Research
Assessment Exercise: RAE) in the second year, a Teaching Quality Assessment
(TQA) in the third year, which placed an enormous financial burden on univer-
sities. Individual academics experienced them as a threat to collegiality and a
fragmentation of professional life. Whereas in the first phase of university-led
'Quality Audit' and 'Quality Control', peer assessment was conducted in a
supportive atmosphere of constructive criticism, the RAE and TQA incorpo-
rated competitive ranking. In the RAEs, this had punitive implications as ranking
was used as the basis for determining departmental funding. The Secretary of
State for Education expressed his intention that TQA should also 'be in a form
which can be used to inform funding allocations'.5 Although TQA league tables
have not been used in this way, the view of the Association of University Teachers
on this was quite blunt. Not only were institutions, which were now required to
compete against each other, not starting from a level playing field, but 'the
present policy is based on a funding system which, like the research selectivity
system, punishes those who are experiencing problems by reducing or
withdrawing their funding, rather than encouraging and supporting
improvement' (AUT 1993: 1). According to the rationality of neo-liberalism,
institutions that are struggling or deemed to be under-performing must be
punished rather than aided. Thus, academic peers, like the Bradford tenants in
Hyatt's
study,
found themselves in a policing role, and the whole system acquired
a punitive and divisive character.
The government, dissatisfied with the progress of its reforms, created the
bipartisan Dearing Committee in May 1996, to make 'recommendations on how
the purposes, shape, structure, size and funding of higher education, including
support for students, should develop to meet the needs of the United Kingdom
over the next 20 years' (Dearing 1997: 1). Following the publication of its report
in 1997, two new agencies have been established. The first, the Institute for
Learning and Teaching (ILT), will be responsible for the accreditation of
academics as teachers. All staff are expected to seek ILT membership and to
devote 5-8 days per annum to 'remain in good standing'.
The second Dearing-inspired agency, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA),
proposes a national 'quality assurance framework', with the following elements:
(1) a 'Qualifications Framework' to ensure that degrees with the same title (BA,
MA, Ph.D.) are of a common level and nature; (2) 'Subject Benchmarks' of
agreed national standards in each subject; (3) 'Programme Specification' setting
out the intended outcomes for each programme in each institution; (4)
Academic
Reviewers'"
a panel of senior academics and practising professionals
for each discipline; (5) a six-yearly cycle of Reviews to 'scrutinize' quality
assurance mechanisms in each institution, and 'secure national consistency and
comparability ofjudgments' on the same subject (QAA 1998: 4).
These proposals illustrate how audit culture functions as a political technology.
566 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
First, they focus on policing an organization's own systems of control - the
control of control. Second, they create new intermediaries, seemingly
independent of government, who, in turn, present people with new expert
knowledge through which they can reform themselves. Third, they rely on
techniques of the self that render political subjects governable by requiring they
behave as responsible, self-activating, free agents who have internalized the new
normative framework. Fourth, they require disciplines to re-organize themselves
so as to be more centralized, accountable, and therefore 'auditable'.
The first effects of the government's attempts to introduce audit culture into
higher education can be discerned through a critical examination of the semantic
shifts in keywords that has accompanied the introduction of this new form of
governance. Foremost in the new semantic cluster associated with audit culture
are 'transparency', 'accountability', 'quality' and 'performance', all of which are
said to be encouraged and enhanced by audit. Terms like 'accountability' and
'transparency' are used throughout HEFCE documents as if their meanings were
self-evident and benign. However, they often embody meanings and values that
differ sharply from those of academics.
The new regime of managerialism in British higher education confuses 'trans-
parency' with the Benthamite principles of panopticon visibility and
'inspectability', just as it conflates accountability with policing. This becomes
evident when we ask, 'accountability to whom?' The government holds that
accountability is to 'the public' and to 'stakeholders' (employers, students,
parents and taxpayers). In practice, accountability to the public translates as
accountability to the HEFCE in the self-proclaimed guise of an autonomous
buffer between the government and the universities. A good example of this
emerged after the 1996 RAE. The London School of Dentistry asked the HEFCE
why it had been awarded a low grade. The HEFCE replied that this information
was confidential, arguing that its internal report was analogous to ajob reference
written for an employee. In a subsequent court case, the London School of
Dentistry initially lost, but won on appeal. The point that emerges from this is
that HEFCE demands accountability from the universities, but argues the right
not to be accountable to them.
Linked to this panopticon model of accountability is its damaging effects on
trust. Audit encourages the displacement of a system based on autonomy and
trust by one based on visibility and coercive accountability. As Power (1994: 13)
argues, the 'spread of audit actually creates the very distrust it is meant to
address', culminating in 'a "regress of mistrust" in which the performances of
auditors and inspectors are themselves subjected to audit'. For example, in one
London college, a self-critical review from the first round of CVCP-led 'Quality
Audit' had been used to make constructive departmental changes and was no
longer relevant by the time that it came to the notice of HEFCE inspectors.
Nonetheless, the inspectors used it to make damning criticisms of that
department. The conclusion drawn was that honesty and transparency should be
forsaken if these are likely to give hostages to fortune.
The words 'quality' and 'performance' have undergone an equally radical
transformation in the process of developing the audit culture. As Gudeman
argues, previously uncounted aspects of teaching are now converted into units of
currency. In his US university the two crucial figures are 'cost per FTE' (paid
student credit divided by faculty hours) and the ratio of faculty to space.
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 567
In precommensuration times, I thought good teaching might take place in an office or the
halls, over coffee or a meal off campus. It might happen in a few moments or require hours
of conversation. But those scenes and events are hard to measure and no longer count in the
distribution of funds (Gudeman 1998: 2).
In addition, the learning experience itself is becoming increasingly bureaucra-
tized, standardized and quantified, the new philosophy being that what cannot be
measured is of little value. In many respects the meaning of quality has been
usurped by management teams who are often in offices away from the main
campus and remote from classroom practice. Management styles, values and
goals are written into university mission statements along with the mechanisms
for controlling and auditing the learning experience. The curriculum's merits are
most easily measured in terms of finite, tangible, transferable and, above all,
marketable skills. Johnson (1994: 379) described it succinctly:
It no longer really matters how well an academic teaches and whether or not he or she
sometimes inspires their pupils; it is far more important that they have produced plans for
their courses, bibliographies, outlines of this, that and the other, in short all the paraphernalia
of futile bureaucratization required for assessors who come from on high like emissaries
from Kafka's castle.
Contrary to the HEFCE's claims, critics like Halsey (1995) argue that Quality
Assessment mechanisms actually threaten the quality of university teaching and
research. What is important now is to create a paper trail that can provide
evidence of'systems'. Power (1994: 19) argues that audit has become the 'control
of control' where:
what is being assured is the quality of control systems rather than the quality of first order
operations. In such a context accountability is discharged by demonstrating the existence of
such systems of control, not by demonstrating good teaching, caring, manufacturing or
banking.
We would go further. Even where assessors have observed teaching at the point
of delivery, in many cases this has been a staged performance. For example, one
outer-London university reputedly went so far as to hold a two-day dress
rehearsal in preparation for the TQA visit. Elsewhere it was common practice to
guide staff and students on what not to say and how to 'talk-up' the quality of
provision in their institution. Moreover, the inspections themselves generated a
climate of tension from which many staff spent the subsequent term recovering.
Similar patterns are well known in the school teaching profession where the
periodic OFSTED inspections have become the most important events in the
calendar. As anthropologists, we note that these staged events have acquired
characteristic features of ritual. Far from being an observation of authentic,
everyday teaching and learning activity, these quality assessment inspections are,
in many respects, an example of what Abeles (1988) calls 'modern political
ritual': formalized, choreographed, theatrical and well planned. The audit visits
thus enhance 'performance', but in a very different sense to that intended by the
government's discourse.
Parasitical new professions
One aspect of the audit explosion has been the proliferation of acronyms
568 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
(HEFCE, ILP, QAA, TQA, RAE, UCOSDA, CEDA, SHEFC, UCET) for the
organizations that have risen to sudden prominence. They embody a new kind
of disciplinary apparatus. Within this emergent body are three categories of
specialist: the intellectuals who provide the conceptual repertoire, the bureau-
crats whose job is to design the various audit procedures, the trainers whose role
is to use their new expert knowledge to provide methods of self-improvement
for university staff Gudeman (1998: 2) describes the alienation between these
new specialists and teaching faculty, although of course the categories are not
discrete: some faculty members become administrators and, although they
remain bilingual for a time, the language of audit soon dominates.
While advocates claim that these specialists are redemptive and enabling,
critics argue that they are agents for subjecting staff to a new normative gaze and
instilling its rationality into their working life. Their rise to prominence is the
counterpart to the decline of status and autonomy among other disciplines.
Speaking at a recent conference on teaching and learning anthropology,
a leading
figure in the academic discipline of higher education warned anthropologists
against using their own discipline to critique the new order. His advice was to
organize and re-shape our agenda in keeping with the new orthodoxy
(Mascarenhas-Keyes 1998a: 24), or else 'you are going to be rolled over by the
battalions mustering on the horizon'. In other words, resistance is futile and the
trick is to 'get ahead of the game' - without falling into the trap of advancing this
new order by policing ourselves.
Disciplining academicfreedom and undermining professionalism
While the government claims that modern systems of audit have enhanced the
quality of learning and teaching in higher education, critics argue that they have
merely created a 'culture of compliance' and a climate of fear. Audit procedures
place emphasis on form rather than content, and non-compliance with the
managerial drive for normalization and standardization is punished (Alderman
1994; Shore & Roberts 1995). As the AUT (1993) put it, 'the quality assessment
system is merely an invitation to outward conformity'. Few academics really
believe it, yet all have to perform to its dictates. We find we are both subject to
new disciplines imposed by our institutions and subjecting ourselves to new self-
disciplines which together are re-shaping our sense of professionalism.
In a climate of intense inter-institutional rivalry created by the compelling
need for each university continuously to improve its position in the competitive
league tables of performance,f6 staff are under pressure to conform to a university
'line'. For example, if individual lecturers, inspired by the call for pubic account-
ability, 'blow the whistle' on the extent of falling standards, they may find
themselves up before a disciplinary committee. This is what happened when a
professor at a new university wrote to a national newspaper to correct its
misleading report, which had uncritically echoed the management's rosy
argument that larger class sizes and reduced resources had not lowered educa-
tional standards. The professor received an official warning about bringing the
institution into disrepute and was advised that this was a sackable offence. This
pattern is also evident in the health service where new 'gagging clauses' are being
incorporated into staff contracts (Mihill 1994; Waterhouse 1994). As the editor of
the British MedicalJournal observed in an article entitled 'the rise of Stalinism in
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 569
the NHS', senior staff 'were convinced that the NHS was becoming an organi-
sation in which people were terrified to speak the truth' (Smith 1994: 1640). The
logic of audit's coercive accountability, whether in higher education or the health
service, is that no one dares to say that standards have declined because to admit
this is tantamount to an admission of failure, and in a regime of competitive
allocation of declining funds, failure must be punished if 'excellence' is to be
rewarded.
Like Foucault's argument about modern forms of power, the audit system is
simultaneously individualizing and totalizing, as it orders the whole system
while ranking everyone differentially within it. The new audit norms focus on
adherence to selective performance indicators to produce a quantifiable score
that is then used as the basis for pitting department against department and insti-
tution against institution. Thus, a pecking order is created between those depart-
ments ranked as 3, 4, 5 and 5* ('international excellence'). Increasingly, that
ranking system is also being applied informally to individuals, thus creating new
ways of conceptualizing colleagues as, for example, 'a 3b', or a '5' researcher. Each
of us is under pressure to improve our 'performance' so as to move to a higher
position in the grading system. 'What we are witnessing here is the imposition of
a new disciplinary grid which, by inculcating new norms, 'empowers' us to
observe and improve ourselves according to new neo-liberal notions of the
performing professional (Shore & Selwyn 1998).
A further effect of the various audit systems implemented so far has been a
fragmentation of the professional self into 'researcher', 'teacher' and 'adminis-
trator', as individuals attempt to 'perform' to the various ways in which discrete
aspects of their work are being inspected. Academics are also caught between two
conflicting notions of the professional self: the old idea of the independent
scholar and inspiring teacher, and the new model of the auditable, competitive
performer. One consequence of this has been the increased number of hours
academics now work. An AUT survey of 2,670 academics in 1994 found that the
length of the working week, averaged across term time and vacations, was 53.5
hours. Administration consumes an average of 18 hours a week
-
an hour more
than for all forms of teaching, and 7 hours a week more than for personal
research' (Court 1994: 14). A more recent AUT membership survey reported
that two-thirds of respondents found their work stressful, and one-quarter had
recently taken stress-related sick leave (AUT 1998: 1). Stress has become a
condition to be managed by experts and insecurity has been built into the
HEFCE procedures: during a conference of the Society for Research in Higher
Education at Sussex University in December, 1993, a HEFCE official admitted
that performance indicators should only have a shelf-life of about two years
because 'after that time people get wise to them'. The undeclared policy,
therefore, is to keep systems volatile, slippery and opaque. In this respect,
HEFCE's policy of constantly moving the goalposts echoes ideas from the 'new
wave management' of Peters and Waterman's In search of excellence (1986).
Whereas professional identity was previously framed in terms of academic
freedom to determine research agendas, curriculum and teaching styles, now
there is an additional issue: academics' ability to control their conditions of work.
This does not affect only those at the bottom of the organizational pyramid, on
whom the weight of the audit gaze seems to fall heaviest. The hegemonic nature
of audit rationality increasingly draws middle and senior staff into the process as
570 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
they become simultaneously the inspectors and the inspected. While the
language that justifies this system proclaims 'peer review', the rationality is that
of the panopticon, or constant visibility: in the most economic, efficient and
effective form of power, the guards must themselves feel watched. Other sectors
share this experience, as was borne out in a recent survey of 6,000 British
managers conducted by Management Today. The study revealed that most of those
surveyed felt they had diminishing control over their work. Two-thirds admitted
that because of their organization's 'high-performance work culture' they had to
'push their staff too hard', and half of this number said that they 'had no choice
if they were to meet their targets' (Olver 1998: 5-6). This figure rose to 77 per
cent. among managers working in the public sector. The detrimental effects of
this performance-dominated organizational culture were affecting all aspects of
managers' lives. Only 19 per cent. of male managers and 33 per cent. of female
managers reported working less than 40 hours a week, and most work 40-60
hours. The majority felt they had lost the balance between their working and
personal lives. More significantly, they listed the personal sacrifices they had felt
compelled to make for their career. This list was headed by 'missing children
growing up and letting work intrude on home life'. It also included 'missing
school events or the birth of a child ... the postponement of a parent's funeral
and not being with a partner during serious illness or even death' (Olver 1998:2).
It would appear from this that managers as much as academics are caught in a
disciplinary system whose negative characteristics they are actively reproducing,
not least in their own construction of themselves as professionals, yet over which
they feel increasingly powerless.
Conclusion: political reflexivity and neo-liberal governmentality
The cumulative effect of these audit technologies has been to create a self-refer-
ential and self-reinforcing system from which it is very difficult to remain
unaffected. As audit spreads to new domains, it acquires momentum for
colonizing yet more areas of society. The audit phenomenon thus has a dynamic
of its own and, like Frankenstein's monster, once created, is very hard to control.
A pervasive feature of the new wave of audits across the public sector is their
capacity to re-shape in their own image the organizations they monitor. Far from
being a neutral and objective verification of'auditee' compliance with commonly
accepted standards, audits 'do as much to construct definitions of quality and
performance as to monitor them' (Power 1994: 33). To be audited, an organi-
zation must actively transform itself into an auditable commodity: one 'struc-
tured to conform to the need to be monitored ex-post' (Power 1994: 8). In the
case of the
TQA,
this resulted in a flurry of bureaucratic activity throughout
universities. New 'quality assurance officers' and 'monitoring committees' were
created to review all areas of university life, in a desperate attempt to invent
'auditable structures' and paper trails that would demonstrate 'evidence of
system' to visiting inspectors. Making such structures visible became part of the
ritualizing of performance. Thus, even though the audit explosion has
encouraged cynicism and staged performance, it is very hard for individuals or
institutions to escape its influence. However academics may try to remain aloof,
the publication of league tables comparing the performance of their department
and institution has direct effects on an institution's reputation, funding and
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 571
student applications. The league table has thus become a powerful technology
for inducing respect: non-compliance is not an option.
How should anthropologists respond to the 'audit culture' and the neo-liberal
norms that are propelling it ever-onwards? The first point to stress is that we are
not arguing against accountabilityper se. Rather, our aim is to expose the delete-
rious consequences of the current financially-derived model of audit, based on
disciplinary technologies that impel subjects actively to contribute to authori-
tarian and coercive processes of accounting. The rationale behind current audit
thinking stems from neo-liberal experiments of the Conservative government in
the 1980s. The assumption was that market forces provide the best model of
accountability and, where they are absent, it is the duty of government agencies
to introduce them through pseudo-market mechanisms. However, there is a vast
sector of public services whose performance cannot be measured by these
financial yardsticks of 'value for money' or 'economy, efficiency and effec-
tiveness'. The key flaw in the current model is that it is reductionist and punitive
and therefore counterproductive. What is needed is a different way of thinking
about accountability: one that restores trust and autonomy to the professions,
that uses qualitative, multiple and local measures, and is based on public
dialogue.
There are three ways in which anthropologists can use their own disciplinary
knowledge to challenge and move beyond current audit orthodoxy. First, the
danger at present is that audit has become so naturalized and pervasive that it goes
increasingly unchallenged. As we have tried to show, political anthropology can
be used effectively to un-mask the way power is disguised and the mechanisms
through which it is made effective.
Second, it is necessary to develop a dialogue within anthropology about what
we mean by keywords such as 'quality', 'enhancement', 'performance' and 'effec-
tiveness'. From here, we can begin to develop our own ideas about audit processes
that would be in keeping with our values. In short, we need to make our disci-
pline's 'culture' more explicit for ourselves, and not merely at the behest of
external inspectorates. For example, in the
QAA's
new quality assurance
framework, 'peer review' means a few senior academics setting the 'benchmarks'
for their discipline as well as inspecting performance. A 'discipline', which once
might have been characterized as a loose network of colleagues sharing common
discourses and ways of seeing, is now coming to mean a hierarchical organization
whose senior members are capable of acting on behalf of all its staff and students
and of speaking to government with one voice. This has already had an effect: the
six British anthropology associations have formed a Coordinating Committee
for Anthropology to respond to policy proposals. Yet at a recent workshop repre-
sentatives of these organizations agreed that the 'discipline' should be developed
more in line with the metaphor of a 'web' of networks than the QAA's 'panop-
ticon' alternative. However, organizing the discipline around its own general
principles does not necessitate making these transparent to external agencies like
the HEFCE or QAA. To do so may weaken our ability to re-assert our autonomy
and claim to self-determination7.
Third, we can learn from the people anthropologists study. Often they have far
more experience than we do in dealing with the imposition of new forms of
governance and power, from colonialism in the nineteenth century to aid and
structural adjustment in the twentieth. 'Political reflexivity' is the term we give
572 CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT
to the pursuit of this third point. Political reflexivity is neither navel-gazing nor
'rendering the implicit explicit' by revealing the inside to the outside (Strathern
1997: 314). Rather, as Okely (1992) argues, it is a political activity. It is about
understanding critically the way individuals, as social persons, are positioned
within systems of governance and how concepts, categories, boundaries, hierar-
chies and processes of subjectification are experienced and culturally repro-
duced. Far from audit being 'the supremely reflexive practice' (Strathern 1997:
314), anthropology must use political reflexivity to criticize audit and the ratio-
nality that drives it.
A good example of political reflexivity is the way some indigenous people
organize themselves in pursuit of self-determination and in the face of state and
global encroachment. Using case-studies from Australia, Greenland and partic-
ularly Brazil, Ramussen and Sjoerslev show (1998) that this process has several
elements. First, self-defined indigenistas develop a conscious attitude to their own
culture and re-create their traditions reflexively. Whereas key concepts like
'culture', 'tradition', 'authenticity' and 'indigenousness' are often used by
external agents to define and control the peoples in question, these
indigenistas,
by
making explicit to themselves their own values, have re-appropriated these terms
and mobilized them strategically in their dealings with governments and other
agencies. Second, this is often accompanied by new forms of self-organization.
Third, this reflexive understanding of themselves and others is used very effec-
tively to move between worlds and deal with the political and economic forces
that threaten them. 'What is thus achieved is an example of what, in a different
context, might be called 'regulatory capture': those who were to be regulated
from above, the
indigenistas,
succeed in making their own definitions and
meanings of the terms by which the regulators operate.
Anthropologists could learn from those they study to assert a measure of self-
determination by reappropriating the terms of debate, developing new forms of
organization, unmasking the way the new political technologies operate, and
using a reflexive understanding of ourselves to negotiate with the new agencies
of neo-liberal power. The space for manoeuvre lies in the fact that audit systems
can only acquire functional legitimacy within the professions if they succeed in
stimulating the active compliance of their subjects through processes of peer
review. Furthermore, as a spokesperson for the QAA suggested (Mascarenhas-
Keyes 1998b: 11), there are no effective sanctions (as yet) if a discipline as a whole
asserts, and re-organises itself around, its own definitions of quality and account-
ability, even if these diverge from those of the
QAA. Thus, the audit system
appears to rely largely on fear, expectations of compliance and a lack of imagi-
nation regarding the possibility of alternatives. To seize the agenda requires an
alternative semantics of accountability and a knowledge of power.
Anthropology's predicament recalls that of Joseph K, the protagonist in
Kafka's The Trial. Part of the reason he was so powerless was because he was
unable to identify and therefore challenge the reason for his arrest. And because
he never understood the system of power to which he was subjected, all his
resolve dissipated and he eventually went meekly and willingly to his own
execution. The lesson for anthropology in the new neo-liberal 'trial' is that we
have become the agents through which power operates and unless we wish to
follow in the steps of Joseph K, we would do well to engage in more political
reflexivity.
CRIS SHORE & SUSAN WRIGHT 573
NOTES
An earlier version of this article was presented to the session 'Auditing Anthropology: The New
Accountabilities' at the Fifth EASA Conference, Frankfurt 4-7 September 1998. Our thanks to
Marilyn Strathern for organizing the session and to participants for their comments.
'
The Audit Commission emphasizes its independence from central and local government and
its special status as a 'body corporate' whose officers are not 'Crown servants' (Audit Commission
1984: i). That the Commission derives its income not from central government but from public
bodies, which are compelled to pay for regular inspection of their books and of the particular
services targeted for review, hardly warrants the 'independent' sobriquet. This further exemplifies
how power disguises the mechanism of its own operations.
2 Our thanks to Frank Webster for this point. See Castells's (1996-7) discussion of
'informational labour' and Reich's (1991) discussion of 'symbolic analysts'. According to Webster
(1999), Reich's analysis undergirds Blair's New Labour stress on 'education, education, education'.
3Professor Brian Fender told his audience at a HEFCE conference held in Brussels on 6 March,
1996, that 'despite the drop in funding, standards have been maintained and the quality of teaching
and the student learning experience has remained unaffected thanks to the battery of quality
control mechanisms'.
4 As Binns (1992) points out, TQM was brought to post-war Japan by occupying American
forces to encourage a new corporate culture that would incorporate Japanese workers into the
framework of global capitalism. Our thanks to Professor Tom Selwyn for drawing our attention to
this article.
I
Letter from Secretary of State for Education to HEFCE Chairman 1992, cited in Alderman
(1995: 8).
6 League tables are another example of the domaining effect. There are now league tables
comparing hospitable deaths, police responses, academic output, cervical cancers, benefit fraud,
court occupancy, beach cleansing, rent collecting and local council efficiency (Jenkins 1996).
7 The autonomy of anthropology as a discipline is further threatened by the QAA's plan (1998)
to subsume anthropology within sociology.
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Birmingham: Birmingham University for the National Network for Teaching and Learning
Anthropology.
La culture d' audits et l'anthropologie: le nouveau liberalisme
dans l'education superieure en Grande Bretagne
Resume
La profession d'anthropologue 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 m6canismes pour mesurer la 'performance educative', la 'qualite de
la recherche' et 'l'efficacite institutionnelle' a ete centrale a ces reformes . Prenant l'education
superieure en Grande Bretagne comme etude de cas, cet article analyse l'histoire et les
consequences des efforts du gouvernement pour promouvoir une 'culture d'audits' dans les
universites. II retrace l'origine de l'idee d'audit depuis ses associations originales avec la
comptabilite financiere et son expansion dans d'autres domaines, particulierement l'education.
Ces nouvelles technologies d'audit sont typiquement definies en termes de 'qualite', de
'responsabilite fiscale' et d"octroi de droits', comme si elles etaient vraiment emancipatoires et
'douees du pouvoir de realisation'. Nous critiquons ces presomptions en illustrant certains effets
n6gatifs que les pratiques d'audit tels que les 'Exercices d'Evaluation de Recherche' et les
'Evaluations de Qualite d'Enseignement' ont eu sur l'education superieure. Nous suggerons que
ces pratiques signalent une nouvelle forme d'intervention 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 d'une 'reflection politique'.
Cris Shore, Dept ofAnthropology, Goldsmiths College, Lewisham Way, New Cross, London SE14 6NW
CShore@pavilion.co.1uk.
Susan Wright, Department of Cultural Studies and
Sociology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,
Birmingham B15 2TT S.A.Wright@bham.ac.uk