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

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.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 'institutional effectiveness'. These mechanisms are intended to ensure 'accountability', 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 introducing disciplinary mechanisms that mark a new f...

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