Cris Shore and Susan Wright, February 2024

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.