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Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability and the Academy Academy PDF

323 Pages·2000·1.05 MB·English
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Audit Cultures If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments—they may not be aware how pervasive practices of ‘accountability’ are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon. The challenge is that these new accountabilities are at once obstructive and enabling of good practice. Through accountability the financial and the moral meet in the twinned precepts of economic efficiency and ethical practice. Audit practices have direct consequences, and, in the view of many, dire ones for intellectual production. Yet audit is almost impossible to critique in principle— after all, it advances values that academics generally hold dear, such as responsibility, openness of enquiry and widening of access. The volume also therefore examines some of the parameters of professional ethics. Audit Cultures provides an excellent opening for future debate on the ‘culture’ of management and accountability. It will be an essential resource for students of culture and relevant to academics everywhere. Marilyn Strathern is Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and Mistress of Girton College. European Association of Social Anthropologists Series facilitator: Jon P.Mitchell University of Sussex The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was inaugurated in January 1989, in response to a widely felt need for a professional association which would represent social anthropologists in Europe and foster cooperation and interchange in teaching and research. As Europe transforms itself, the EASA is dedicated to the renewal of the distinctive European tradition in social anthropology. Other titles in the series: Conceptualizing Society Nature and Society Adam Kuper Philippe Descola and Gisli Pálsson Other Histories The Ethnography of Moralities Kristen Hastrup Signe Howell Alcohol, Gender and Culture Inside and Outside the Law Dimitra Gefou-Madianou Olivia Harris Understanding Rituals Locality and Belonging Daniel de Coppet Nadia Lovell Gendered Anthropology Recasting Ritual Teresa del Valle Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Social Experience and Mary M.Crain Anthropological Knowledge Anthropological Perspectives on Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik Local Development Fieldwork and Footnotes Simone Abram and Jacqueline Waldren Han F.Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan Dividends of Kinship: Meanings Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism and Uses of Social Relatedness Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw Peter Schweitzer Grasping the Changing World Constructing the Field: Václav Hubinger Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World Civil Society Vered Amit Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn Gender, Agency and Change: Anthropology of Policy Anthropological Perspectives Cris Shore and Susan Wright Edited by Victoria Ana Goddard Audit Cultures Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy Edited by Marilyn Strathern London and NewYork First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, NewYork, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2000 selection and editorial matter, EASA: individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is availabe from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics, and the academy/edited by Marilyn Strathern. p. cm.—(European Association of Social Anthropologists) Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Education, Higher—Evaluation—Social aspects. 2. Educational anthropology. 3. Educational accountability—Social aspects. 4. Education, Higher—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Strathern, Marilyn. II. European Association of Social Anthropologists (Series) LB2324.A87 2000 306.43–dc2l 00–028073 ISBN 0-203-44972-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-45719-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-23326-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-23327-5 (pbk) Contents List of contributors vii Preface xi Introduction: new accountabilities 1 MARILYN STRATHERN PART I 19 1 The social organization of the IMF’s mission work: an examination of international auditing 21 RICHARD HARPER PART II 55 2 Coercive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education 57 CRIS SHORE AND SUSAN WRIGHT 3 Generic genius—how does it all add up? 90 ELEANOR RIMOLDI 4 Accountability, anthropology and the European Commission 106 MARYON MCDONALD PART III 133 5 The trickster’s dilemma: ethics and the technologies of the anthropological self 135 PETER PELS vi Contents 6 Audited accountability and the imperative of responsibility: beyond the primacy of the political 173 ANANTA GIRI 7 Self-accountability, ethics and the problem of meaning 196 VASSOS ARGYROU PART IV 213 8 The university as panopticon: moral claims and attacks on academic freedom 215 VERED AMIT 9 Academia: same pressures, same conditions of work? 236 THOMAS FILLITZ 10 Disciples, discipline and reflection: anthropological encounters and trajectories 256 DIMITRA GEFOU-MADIANOU Afterword: accountability…and ethnography 279 MARILYN STRATHERN Index 305 Contributors Vered Amit is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She has conducted fieldwork in London (UK), Quebec, the Cayman Islands and Vancouver. She is presently conducting a study of transnational consultants. She is the author of Armenians in London: The Management of Social Boundaries (1989), coeditor of three books and editor of a recent volume in the EASA series entitled Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. Vassos Argyrou is Associate Professor of Social Science at Inter- college, Nicosia, Cyprus. Among his publications are Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean (1996), ‘Is “Closer and Closer” Ever Close Enough? De-reification, Diacritical Power, and the Specter of Evolutionism’ (Anthropological Quarterly), and ‘“Keep Cyprus Clean”: Littering, Pollution, and Otherness’ (Cultural Anthropology). Thomas Fillitz is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, and Lecturer at the Institute of Volkskunde (Folklore Studies), University of Graz. Research and teaching: theoretical anthropology, consumerism and anthropology of art. Field researches: northern Nigeria (1991) on political movements; Ivory Coast and Benin (1997) on contemporary art in Africa. He is preparing a book on The Construction of Cultural Space: Thirteen Contemporary African Artists; and directs a research project on ‘Intercultural teaching and learning: a case study of eighteen schools in Vienna and Upper Austria’. viii Contributors Dimitra Gefou-Madianou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, Athens, Greece. She studied at Athens and New York (Columbia). Fieldwork has been conducted in various parts of Greece and she has published in the fields of alcohol, gender, ‘anthropology at home’, ethnicity and identity formation, drugs, anthropological theory, culture and ethnography. She is currently Head of the Section of Social Anthropology and Vice- Head of the Department of Social Policy and Social Anthropology at Panteion. Recent publications include Current Trends in Anthropological Theory and Ethnography (ed.) (1998), ‘Cultural polyphony and identity formation: negotiating tradition in Attica’ (Amer. Ethnologist, 1999), and Culture and Ethnography: From Ethnographic Realism to Cultural Critique (1999). Ananta Kumar Giri is on the faculty of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. Dr Giri has an abiding interest in alternative movements and alternative ideas for social reconstruction and cultural renewal. He is the author of Global Transformations: Postmodernity and Beyond (1998), Values, Ethics and Business: Challenges for Education and Management (1998), and (in Oriya) Sameekhya o Purodrusti (Criticism and the Vision of the Future) (1999). Richard Harper is Director of the Digital World Research Centre, at the University of Surrey, UK. He has been at the forefront of research into the use of sociological and interdisciplinary techniques for understanding the digital technologies in organizational life, and is a regular public speaker on this theme. Published and forthcoming work includes The Myth of the Paperless Office, with A.J. Sellen (forthcoming); Organizational Change and Retail Finance: an Ethnographic Perspective, with D. Randall and M. Rouncefield (2000) and Inside the IMF: An Ethnography of Documents, Technology and Organisational Action (1998). Maryon McDonald was formerly Reader in Social Anthropology at Brunel University and is now Fellow and Director of Studies in Anthropology at Robinson College, Cambridge, UK. Her work includes ‘We are not French!’ Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany (1989), History and Ethnicity (with E. Tonkin and M. Chapman, 1989), Gender, Drink and Drugs (1994) and several articles, reports and a forthcoming book on European Union institutions, which she has been researching since 1992. Contributors ix Peter Pels (University of Amsterdam/University of Leiden) currently works on the historical ethnography of elections in 1950s Tanganyika, and a history of occultism in relation to 19th- and 20th-century anthropology. He edited (with L.Nencel) Constructing Knowledge (1991) and (with O.Salemink) Colonial Subjects: Essays in the Practical History of Anthropology (1999). He wrote A Politics of Presence: Contacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika (1999), and is an advisory editor of Current Anthropology. He has been active on the EASA Ethics Network. Eleanor Rimoldi is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Albany Campus, Auckland, New Zealand. Research interests currently focus on civic life in urban New Zealand (‘Culture: the Private, the Public and the Popular’, Social Analysis, 1997), the history of social anthropology (forthcoming special issue of Social Analysis on New Zealand social anthropology, eds E. and M.Rimoldi), and on comparative education (‘Education in Bougainville-Buka: Site of Struggle’ in Critical Perspectives on Education Policy, ACCESS, 1992). A Rotary Grant for University Teachers will enable her to teach in Bougainville in the year 2000 and follow up her interest in the re-establishment of education systems on the island after nine years of civil war. Cris Shore is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. His first research was an ethnographic study of the Italian communist party, and his most recent work has explored the cultural politics and organizational cultures of the European Union. Recent books include The Future of Anthropology (with A. Ahmed, 1995), Anthropology and Cultural Studies (with S. Nugent, 1997), Anthropology of Policy (with S. Wright, 1997), and Building Europe: the Cultural Politics of European Integration (2000). Marilyn Strathern is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, UK. Her interests are divided between Melanesian (Women in Between, 1972) and British (Kinship at the Core, 1981) ethnography. The Gender of the Gift (1988) is a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations as

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Do audit cultures deliver greater responsibility, or do they stifle creative thought?We are all increasingly subjected to auditing, and alongside that, subject to accountability for our behaviour and actions. Audit cultures pervade in the workplace, our governmental and public institutions as well a
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