Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings Are Reshaping the World - Paperback

by Cris Shore (Author), Susan Wright (Author)

All aspects of our work and private lives are increasingly measured and managed. 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 is the first book to systematically document and analyze these phenomena and their implications for democracy.

The book explores how audit culture operates across a wide range of fields, including health, higher education, NGOs, finance, the automobile industry, and the military. The authors build a powerful critique of contemporary public sector management in an age of neoliberal market-making, privatization, 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.

Author Biography

Cris Shore is Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London and Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study. One of his recent publications is The Shapeshifting Crown and he and Susan Wright are co-editors of the Anthropology of Policy book series for Stanford University Press.

Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her latest publication is Enacting the University. With Cris Shore, she is the co-editor of theAnthropology of Policy book series for Stanford University Press and Death of the Public University?.