Shore, Cris & SusanWright. Audit culture: how indicators and rankings are reshaping the world. 256 pp., bibliogr. London: Pluto Press, 2024. £19.99 (paper)

Published in 2024, Audit culture: how indicators and rankings are reshaping the world is a critical and systematic study of the impact of the internalization of the demands and values of audit culture which have infiltrated industries worldwide, reshaping them in line with a logic of competitiveness. Using an ‘anthropology of policy’ approach, the authors, Cris Shore and Susan Wright, draw from the work of governmentality theorists, Gramscian, and cultural Marxist approaches, to demonstrate how, in the name of efficiency, public services such as healthcare and education are increasingly governed by abstract numbers, rankings, and ratings. This trend, however, undermines local knowledge, professional autonomy, and the intrinsic value of these services. Through several case studies in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, and China, the book provides important insights into the everyday consequences of ‘audit culture’. Most notably, the authors shed critical light upon how ‘professionals’ are increasingly pressured to constantly measure and demonstrate their worth in ways that reinforce a political rationality rooted in the market logic fuelled by the neoliberal reforms. According to Shore and Wright, auditing practices emerged with the economic and political reforms of the 1980s. While intended to improve accountability, auditing practices often lead to a focus on performative outputs rather than substantive goals. The rise of audit culture is linked also to major shifts towards new forms of capitalism: from large corporations to more flexible and fluid forms of organization, resulting in a process of ‘agencification’, the process of reorganizing public sector services into independent agencies to enhance efficiency, accountability, and transparency (chap. 2). Over time, those agencies came to be dominated by a small number of audit firms – the ‘Big Four’ – that had a history of facilitating fraudulent accounting practices, creating offshore tax havens, and other forms of financial misconduct (chap. 3). Chapters 5 and 6 explore how audit practices were introduced to the healthcare and higher education sectors in the United States and United Kingdom, which changed the nature of the organizations and affected their services. Governments are increasingly focused on transforming universities into profit-driven enterprises; universities are pressured to prove their worthiness for funding by emphasizing administrative control over teaching and research, often treating students as paying customers. This has resulted in more fragmented research output on account of researchers favouring quicker publishable results over long-term innovative scholarship. In the case of healthcare, audits used to be a locally embedded process utilized by health professionals to improve their practices and patient outcomes. Over time, these audits became more managerial, focusing on external measures of performance and efficiency rather than clinical improvements. Chapter 7 elaborates on arguments put forth in previous chapters by analysing the rise of other forms of audit such as self-tracking and social credits systems. The authors discuss military techniques adopted by private companies, the data collected by big-tech companies, and the tracking of individuals, as well as how those techniques enhanced surveillance and how performance indicators are adopted by governments, such as the example of social credit in China. The rise of audit culture has been fuelled by the belief that professionals cannot be trusted to govern themselves and that audits are necessary to restore public trust. Yet, Shore and Wright argue that auditing often erodes trust rather than fostering it, creating cycles of mistrust and misalignment. The authors reflect on a lack of political will to discipline the big audit firms or restore integrity to the audit process, fostering a collusive relationship between the Big Four, politicians, and the world's wealthiest individuals. To counter this, the authors propose a reimagining of auditing as a social process, one that resists the neoliberal hegemony that prioritizes market values. They propose that auditing should be guided by professional values and take into account the social and environmental context of institutions, and that professionals should be empowered to redefine what truly ‘counts’ in their work. In summary, the book examines a critical and relevant problem shaping our world. It provides an ethnographic, in-depth exploration of the issue, using several case studies to show how audit systems function in practice and highlights the shifts these systems enforce. Nevertheless, the authors overlook the opportunity to track the consequences of auditing culture in places such as the so-called ‘Global South’. Given the clarity with which the authors examine practices that impact the lives of everyone working and studying at universities, the book will be an absorbing if not enlightening read for many scholars and students. Auditing culture might even become a foundational text to understanding how academic freedom is ultimately undermined by ideas of efficiency, ‘safe research’ over innovation, and competition over collaboration.