Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World. Cris Shore and Sue Wright in conversation with David Mills and Alis Oancea

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.

All are welcome to join the authors and the two discussants – David Mills and Alis Oancea –  to talk about the book, its genesis and its contributions.

The launch will be held in Seminar A, Education Dept, followed by refreshments.