Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World. Cris Shore and Sue Wright in conversation with David Mills and Alis Oancea
- Cris Shore, Goldsmiths, University of London and Melbourne University
- Susan Wright, Aarhus University, Denmark
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All aspects of our work and private lives are increasingly measured and managed. Indicators, rankings and algorithms are now everywhere used to calculate productivity, enhance performance and, increasingly, as instruments of governance. But how has this ‘audit culture’ arisen and what kind of a world is it producing? Cris Shore and Susan Wright provide a timely account of the rise of the new industries of accounting, enumeration and ranking from an anthropological perspective, drawing on political economy, ethnographic observation and genealogical excavation. Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World, published with Pluto Press, is the first book to systematically document and analyse these phenomena and their implications for democracy. The book explores the operation of audit culture across a wide range of fields, including schools, the military, the automobile industry, higher education, public health, NGOs and the finance industry. The authors build a powerful critique of contemporary public sector management in an age of neoliberal market-making, privatisation and outsourcing. They conclude by offering a raft of suggested actions to reverse its damaging effects on communities, reclaim professional autonomy and restore the democratic accountability that audit culture is systematically undermining. This book is both a timely analysis of the new forms of audit capitalism that the global accounting industry is creating and a warning about the dangers this poses for organisations, democracy and society.
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Cris Shore is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently MacGeorge Fellow, Melbourne University. His recent publications include The Shapeshifting Crown (CUP Press, 2019) and ‘The Bureaucratization of Ethical Integrity’ Anthropology Today (2024).
Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her latest publication is Enacting the University (Springer, 2019) With Cris Shore, she is the co-editor of the Anthropology of Policy book series for Stanford University Press and Death of the Public University?, Berghahn, (2017).
