Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

Abstract

Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.

Gendered disruptions in academic publishing during COVID‐19

“…These workers make up the majority. Scholars in precarious positions acutely experience the pressure to perform (Wilson and Smith 2021), especially amid the rise of academic audit—“an attempt to render academic activities, institutions, and decisions accountable through the application of quantified indices, rankings, and other measurements of quality” (Welsh 2021, 461; see also Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000).…”

Service Labor, Freedom, and the Technique of Tipping

“…While waged-work makes of the relation of remuneration an exclusive and contractual matter between individual employee and their employer, tipping places the worker into a matrix of unstable relations among their co-workers, whose collective remuneration through a tip pool depends upon the degree that each worker satisfies both Customer and Owner. Tipping turns fellow workers into a work brigade that no longer is incentivized to band together in solidarity, but instead potentially to mistrust and resent one another as threats to the collective income pool (see Welsh, 2017b: 99–100, 2021a: 473–477). Extra effort must be made then not to displease co-workers.…”