Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World with Cris Shore and Susan Wright
Bush House North East Wing, Strand Campus, London
Please join the Department of International Development at KCL for a discussion with Cris Shore and Susan Write on their book: "Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World"
About "Audit Culture" from Pluto Books:
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 analyse 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, 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.
About the speakers
Cris Shore
Cris Shore is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London, visiting fellow at the University of Auckland, and currently co-Chair of the UK Association of Social Anthropologists. His research over the past 4 decades has addressed issues in political and legal anthropology, including the study of power, the State, European integration, corruption, higher education reform, and organisational management. Together with Susan Wright, his work has pioneered the anthropology of policy, ‘audit culture’ and the analysis of new forms of governance. His current project explores the role of management consultants in universities and new forms of academic capitalism.
Susan Wright
Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology and Co-Director of the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. She studies people's participation in large-scale processes of political transformation in Iran and UK. For the last 35 years she has studied students’, academics’ and managers’ engagement in higher education and university reforms in UK and Denmark. She co-edits the journal LATISS (Learning and Teaching: International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences) and the book series ‘Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies’ (Berghahn). She has worked with Cris Shore in developing concepts of audit culture, and the anthropology of policy and governance, and their latest book is Audit Culture. How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World (2024, Pluto).
About the Interrogating Development Seminar Series
The 'Interrogating Development' seminar series is organised by the Department of International Development at King's College London. The series examines some of the most pressing issues of development facing global society today, with the authors of new books presenting cutting-edge research on a variety of topics related to development.
The talk will be followed by a wine reception. The event is open to everyone.
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