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Auditland
- Author(s):
- Andrew Murphie (see profile)
- Date:
- 2015
- Subject(s):
- Organizational change, Performance, Technology
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- audit culture, societies of control, metrics, performance management, universities, Organisational wellness, Organisation development, Performance and technology
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/x8dh-pg87
- Abstract:
- Audit—the ongoing evaluation of performance—began as a fairly narrow range of technical procedures in financial accounting. However, it has now expanded its range to “account” for a wide range of behaviours, thoughts and feelings, in the workplace and elsewhere. This article suggests that audit cultures are a response to the “abyss of the differential”. This is the abyss faced when too much generative difference threatens established interests, and thus everything these interests control. Such interests often face a double bind, because they also rely on exploiting generative difference and are thus fully immersed in it. Audit is seen as a useful response to this double bind—to the abyss of the differential. Audit technics/cultures use a flexible series of ‘controls of controls’ (Power in Shore and Wright 2000: 73) that differentially declare what is (un)acceptable. They therefore both energise and bound what counts as performance, variably and across multiple contexts. Audit also links local and global, macro and micro, pragmatically, in a combination of instrumental and ‘operational reason’ (Massumi 2002: 110). Controlling events as it does, audit can thus be seen as an expression of fantasies of neofeudalism. These are fantasies of a social order arranged in terms of a new control by the few over the individual existential territories of the many, with a global territorial reach. Finally, the article suggests that audit and related technics/cultures are only partial and transitional technics/cultures. It suggests that a more effective if problematic society of direct control is emerging, yet this in part emerges with the assistance of audit technics/cultures.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 4 years ago
- License:
- Attribution
- Share this:
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