Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

John Welsh

doi:10.1177/14634996211010508

Abstract

Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.

Highlights

A post-COVID-19 conjunctureFor those unfamiliar, let us be clear at the very outset upon what the academic audit regime is
In Britain and elsewhere, an entire population of universities, departments, and even individuals have become subjected to periodic assessment of their ‘output’ by government review bodies, such as in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is periodically quantified according to certain criteria and presented either as indexed scores and/or tabular rankings that are published by newspapers (e.g. Times Higher Education, Guardian, and Newsweek), government agencies (e.g. REF and Exzellenzinitiative), or specially tasked ranking publications (e.g. Centre for Higher Education and Academic Ranking of World Universities)
To get the meta-disciplinary character of the modulation common to both the camp and academic audit regimes, one must see how enforced scarcity, a manufactured external void, and panopticism are combined with techniques that play upon affective investment, commitment, and identification engendered in the transforming subjectivities of individuals through their relative position in the target population

Summary

Introduction

A post-COVID-19 conjunctureFor those unfamiliar, let us be clear at the very outset upon what the academic audit regime is. It is the way in which similar parameters of contingent necessity, established by the common dynamic of enforced scarcity in a population, place a similar decision-making framework over the individual subjectivities produced in those populations – zek (inhabitant of the gulag camps) and academic.4 It is essential to be able to parse what is somewhat obscene about the comparison from what is a potentially penetrative crossfertilization of insight and understanding regarding a distinctively modern technical repertoire of social control.

Results

Conclusion