Neoliberal Fictions for the Audit Theater
University Educators and Administrators Navigating Accountability Regimes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3017448 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elena Aydarova (0000-0002-0387-2889, Auburn University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 133-146 |
| Publication date | 2022-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropology & Humanism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1548-1409 • E-ISSN: 1559-9167 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/anhu.12345 |
| OpenAlex | W3187025102 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
This ethnographic story explores fiction-making in the context of audit cultures and accountability regimes. Based on a critical multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2011 and 2015 in the Russian Federation, this composite narrative draws on eighty interviews, casual conversations, and observations at several universities. It documents how educators at higher education institutions responded to audit reviews by constructing paper façades of reports and curriculum documents that obscured what they were doing or how their departments were run. When an inspection took place, the reviewers focused on paperwork to infer the quality of educational services. The fictions and paper façades created to convince the state that institutions were functioning well also sheltered the illicit practices and corruption that operated at various levels of the institutional hierarchy. In this audit theater, faculty participated in producing fakery, dupery, and swagger that protected them from immediate punishment, but they ended up feeling cheated by their own production. As educators navigated new reporting requirements, they also made sense of the state's own fakery, hypocrisy, and duplicity. New relationships among educators, institutions, and the state created by accountability regimes produced a politics of disposability to sustain state fictions of success
Accountability · Audit · Business · Context (archaeology · Narrative · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · State (computer science · Academic Freedom and Politics · Accounting · Global Educational Policies and Reforms · Higher Education Governance and Development · History · Law
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |