Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neo-Liberalism in British Higher Education Author(s): Cris Shore and Susan Wright Reviewed

work(s): Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 557575 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2661148 . Accessed: 21/02/2012 09:36
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AUDIT CULTURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY: NEO-LIBERALISM IN BRITISH HIGHER EDUCATION

CRIS SHORE& SUSAN WRIGHT

Goldsmiths of College,London & University 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 radicalreform 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 form of coercive neo-liberal governmentality (Foucault 1991; Rose 1992).
J. Roy. anthrop.Inst. (N.S.) 5, 557-575

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Universities are just one site where neo-liberal ideas and practices are displacing the norms and models of good government established by the postwar, welfare state. The ways in which neo-liberal governance has been introduced 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 extraordinarydevelopments 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 examination; (5) (figurative) reckoning, settlement, especially Day ofJudgement. All these definitions stem from the Latin verb 'audire', hear'. They all evoke 'to 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 ofverification. 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 power between scrutinizer and observed. Like Victorian photogof 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 arewitnessing an example of what we call 'conceptual inflation'. As Martin (1994) demonstrated 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

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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 performance'. The point to note about this process is that as concepts migrate and their repertoire 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 'performance' and 'quality assurance' (or 'quality enhancement' and 'control'), 'discipline' and 'accreditation', 'accountability' and 'transparency', 'efficiency' or 'effectiveness' and 'value for money', 'ownership' and 'responsibility', 'benchmarks' 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 vocabulary 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 institutions 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 selfevidently 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-

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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 paradigmatic 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 simultaneously 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 availableto 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 architecturaldesign 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 'enterprise 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 problemsolving 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-

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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 neoliberal 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, havecometo thinkof themselves auditees. as 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 classificatory 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 apparatushas 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 nevertheless interpolated by them. The audit explosionand 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

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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 performance' (Audit Commission 1996: 4). The Audit Commission had thus taken auditing way beyond its traditional role. In addition to financial accounting, its remit included, interalia, '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 performance 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-

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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 riseof audittechnologies higher in education

The introduction of auditing into higher education was designed to create an efficient, accountable system that could be standardized, disciplined and continuously 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 everchanging tasks and of acquiring new knowledge and skills as 'life long learners'.2 Yet a much smaller percentage of the population had higher education qualifications 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.

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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 standardsthanks to the invention of a rigorous new set of 'quality assurance' procedures.3 Far from a new invention, these procedures 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 organization 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' 30 (Tower Hamlets College 1992 Newsletter, 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 Highereducation: newframework a (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 externaljudgement 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 rectification 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

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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 "unsatisfactorydepartment"', 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 universities. 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 incorporated 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'.5Although 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.

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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 'transparency' 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.

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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 bureaucratized, 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. Parasiticalnew professions One aspect of the audit explosion has been the proliferation of acronyms

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(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 bureaucrats 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. and professionalism Disciplining academicfreedom undermining 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 selfdisciplines 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 accountability, '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 educational 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 observed in an article entitled 'the rise of Stalinism in the BritishMedicalJournal

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the NHS', senior staff 'were convinced that the NHS was becoming an organisation 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 institution against institution. Thus, a pecking order is created between those departments 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. 'Whatwe 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 'administrator', 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'sIn search excellence of (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

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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 The study revealed that most of those Today. managers conducted by Management 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. and neo-liberal Conclusion:political reflexivity governmentality The cumulative effect of these audit technologies has been to create a self-referential 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-shapein 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 organization must actively transform itself into an auditable commodity: one 'structured 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

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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 deleterious consequences of the current financially-derived model of audit, based on disciplinary technologies that impel subjects actively to contribute to authoritarian 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 effectiveness'. 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 'effectiveness'. From here, we can begin to develop ourown ideas about audit processes that would be in keeping with our values. In short, we need to make our discipline'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 representatives 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 'panopticon' alternative. However, organizing the discipline around its own general principles does not necessitate making these transparentto 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

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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, hierarchies and processes of subjectification are experienced and culturally reproduced. Far from audit being 'the supremely reflexive practice' (Strathern 1997: 314), anthropology must use political reflexivity to criticize audit and the rationality 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 particularly 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-appropriatedthese 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 effectively to move between worlds and deal with the political and economic forces that threaten them. 'Whatis 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 selfdetermination by reappropriatingthe 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 (MascarenhasKeyes 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 accountability, 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 imagination 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.

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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. REFERENCES Abeles, M. 1988. Modern political ritual: ethnography of an inauguration and a pilgrimage by President Mitterand. Curr Anthrop.29, 391-404. Abercrombie, N. & R. Keat (eds) 1991. Enterprise culture.London: Routledge. Alderman, G. 1994. Who scores the college dons? The Guardian(Education Supplement) (25 Jan.), 3. 1995. Audit, assessment and academic autonomy. (Inaugural lecture.) Middlesex University, 27 Nov. Audit Commission 1984. Audit CommissionforEngland and Wales:report accountsforyear ended31 of March 1984. London: HMSO. 1996. Annual report accountsfor and yearended31 March 1996. London: HMSO. AUT (Association of University Teachers) 1993. Letter to Council Members concerning quality assurance. Circular No. LA/5061 (November). 1998. UpDate 50 (30 April). Binns, D. 1992. Administration,domination and 'organisational theory': the politicalfoundations of surveillance work. (UEL occ. Pap. Bus. Econ. Soc.) London: University of East London. at Castells, M. 1996-7. The information economy, age: societyand culture.Oxford: Blackwell. Court, S. 1994. Long hours,littlethanks:a surveyof the use of time byfull-time academic related and staffin the traditional UK universities. London: AUT. Dearing, R. 1997. Higher education the learning in society:The National Committee Inquiryinto Higher of Education.London: HMSO. DES (Department of Education and Science) 1987. Higher education: meetingthe challenge(Cmnd 114). London: HMSO. 1991. Higher education: newframework(Cm 1541). London: HMSO. a Dreyfus, H. & P Rabinow 1982. Michel Foucault:beyondstructuralism hermeneutics. and Brighton: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Disciplineandpunish. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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1991. Governmentality. In The Foucaulteffect: studiesin governmentality (eds) G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P Miller. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Guardian (newspaper) 1998. Analysis: school inspectors. 28 Oct., 21. Gudeman, S. 1998. The new captains of information. Anthropology Today14 (1), 1-3. Halsey, A.H. 1995. The declineof donnishdominion.Oxford: Clarendon. HMG (Her Majesty's Government) 1993. Realisingourpotential:a strategyfor and science,engineering technology (Cm 2250). London: HMSO. HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council of England) 1992. Quality assessment(H.EFCE circular 10/92). 1993. Assessment the qualityof education of (HEFCE circular 3/93). 1995. A guide tofundinghighereducation England. Bristol: HEFCE. in Hyatt, S. 1997. Poverty in a 'post-welfare' landscape: tenant management policies, self-governance and the democratization of knowledge in Great Britain. In Anthropology policy:critical of perspectives on governance power (eds) C. Shore & S. Wright. London: Routledge. and Jenkins, S. 1996. In league with ignorance. The Times (20 Nov.), 20. Johnson, N. 1994. Dons in decline. 20th Cent. Brit. Hist. 5, 370-85. Keesings 1983. KeesingsRecord World of Events.Vol. 29. Harlow: Longman. Mackey, E. 1997. The cultural politics of populism: celebrating Canadian national identity. In on Anthropology policy: criticalperspectives governanceand power (eds) C. Shore & S. Wright. of London: Routledge. Martin, E. 1994. Flexible bodies:tracking immunityin Americanculturefromthe days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press. 1997. Managing Americans: policy and changes in the meanings of work and self In Anthropologyof policy: criticalperspectives governanceand power (eds) C. Shore & S. Wright. on London: Routledge. Mascarenhas-Keyes, S. 1998a. Anthropologicalreflectionson pedagogic culture and its institutional organisation:reporton conference held at Sussex University, 14-15 November 1997. Birmingham: National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology. 1998b. Higher education policy and the implicationsfor pedagogic practice anthropology: in report of workshopheld at ManchesterUniversity,24-25 April 1998. Birmingham: National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology. Mihill, C. 1994. Health service 'gagging doctors'. The Guardian (16 Dec.), 6 Miller, D. 1998. Conclusion: a theory of virtualism. In Virtualism: new politicaleconomy(eds) J.G. a Carrier & D. Miller. Oxford: Berg. Okely, J. 1992. Anthropology and autobiography: participatory experience and embodied knowledge. In Anthropology autobiography and (eds) J. Okely & H. Callaway. London: Routledge. Olver, J. 1998. Losing control. Management Today(2 June) (On-line search of FT Profile database). Peters, T.J. & R.H. Waterman 1986. In searchof excellence. New York: Harper & Row Power, M. 1994. The audit explosion.London: Demos. auditsociety: 1997. T7he ritualsof verfication.Oxford: Univ. Press. QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) 1998. The way ahead. Higher Quality 4 (Oct.). Rasmussen, H. & I. Sjoerslev 1998. Culture and indigenous rights. In Worldculturereport: culture, creativity markets. and Paris: UNESCO. Reich, R. 1991. The work of nations: preparing ourselvesfor 21st Centurycapitalism. New York: Vintage. Rose, N. 1992. Towards a critical sociology of freedom. (Inaugural lecture.) Goldsmiths College, University of London, 5 May. Seidel, G. 1988. Right-wing discourse and power: exclusions and resistance. In The natureof the Right:afeminist analysisof order patterns(ed.) G. Seidel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Selwyn, T. & C. Shore. 1992. Education, markets and managers: a clash of cultures? Reflections on HigherEducation4 (November), 88-95. Shore, C. & S. Roberts 1995. Higher education and the panopticon paradigm: quality assurance as 'disciplinary technology'. HigherEducationQuarterly (3), 8-17. 27 & T. Selwyn 1998. The marketisation of higher education: management discourse and the politics of performance. In The new highereducation: issuesand directionsfor post-Dearinguniversity the (eds) D. Jary & M. Parker. Stoke-on-Trent: Staffordshire Univ. Press. & S. Wright 1997. Policy: a new field of anthropology. In Anthropology policy: critical of on and perspectives governance power (eds) C. Shore & S. Wright. London: Routledge. Smith, R. 1994. The rise of stalinism in the NHS. Brit. med.J. 309 (17 Dec.), 1640.

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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, GoldsmithsCollege,Lewisham Way,New Cross,London SE14 6NW CShore@pavilion.co.1uk.

Susan Wright, Department CulturalStudiesand Sociology,University Birmingham,Edgbaston, of of BirminghamB15 2TT S.A.Wright@bham.ac.uk