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This collection of short essays presents and examines six vignettes of organisational change in British, New Zealand and European universities. Drawing on the social studies of economisation literature, formal research projects and auto-ethnographic insights, the authors detail profound changes in how knowledge is produced in universities. They examine policy documents, calculative techniques and management practices to illustrate how proliferating market rationalities, technologies and relations are reimagining university missions, reframing their practices and refashioning their subjects. Their vignettes demonstrate that market-making pressures are emerging from micro-scale socio-technical arrangements as well as altered funding models and external policy imperatives. They reveal the extent and detail of market-making pressures on academic practice in research and teaching. Finding ways to contest these pressures is imperative.

When history books about Brexit are written a key question asked will be ‘how did it happen?’ How did a country renowned for stable governments, pragmatism and diplomacy produce a chaotic outcome so harmful to its economic interests and international standing? This article examines the factors that produced Brexit by analysing its political and historical context, the main campaign groups and their communication strategies. Drawing on the work of Verdery (1999), Maskovsky and Bjork-James (2020) and other anthropologists, I suggest we need to look beyond conventional political science concepts and consider Brexit in terms of ‘enchantment’, ‘angry politics’ and ‘technopopulism’. I conclude that while Brexit provides a window for analysing fault lines in contemporary Britain, it also highlights problems in the EU, its austerity politics and democratic deficit.

Patron-clientelism and corruption were traditionally viewed as problems endemic to underdeveloped marginal countries with weak states, powerful self-serving elites, and widespread civic disengagement. However, recent decades have seen a dramatic increase in corruption scandals in the Global North, particularly its more developed banking and financial sectors. Paradoxically, this has occurred despite a massive expansion in auditing by international accountancy firms (KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, EY) who often portray themselves as warriors of integrity, transparency, and ethical conduct. How are these trends connected? Drawing on anthropological studies of Mediterranean patron-clientelism, I illustrate how collusive relations between accountancy firms and their clients create ideal conditions for corruption to flourish. Finally, I ask how can these accountancy scandals help us rethink patron-clientelism in an age of “audit culture”?

Since the 1980s universities have been subjected to a seemingly continuous process of policy reforms designed to make them more economical, efficient and effective, according to yardsticks defined by governments and university managers. The pursuit of ‘excellence’, ‘international standing’ and ‘world class’ status have become key drivers of what Hazelkorn (High Educ Pol 21(2):193–215, 2008) has termed the ‘rankings arms race’ that now dominates the world of academia. These policies are changing the mission and meaning of the public university and, more profoundly, the culture of academia itself. While some authors have sought to capture and analyse these trends in terms of ‘academic capitalism’ and the ‘enterprise university model’, we suggest they might also be usefully understood theoretically as illustrations of the rise of audit culture in higher education and its effects. Drawing on ethnographic examples from the UK, Denmark and New Zealand, we ask: how are higher education institutions being reconfigured by these new disciplinary regimes of audit? How are ranking and performance indicators changing institutional behaviour and transforming academic subjectivities? What possibilities are there for alternative university futures? And what insights can anthropology offer to address these questions?

In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.

The Crown and Constitutional Reform is an innovative, interdisciplinary exchange between experts in law, anthropology and politics about the Crown, constitutional monarchy and the potential for constitutional reform in Commonwealth common law countries. The constitutional foundation of many Commonwealth countries is the Crown, an icon of ultimate authority, at once familiar yet curiously enigmatic. Is it a conceptual placeholder for the state, a symbol of sovereignty or does its ambiguity make it a shapeshifter, a legal fiction that can be deployed as an expedient mask for executive power and convenient instrument for undermining democratic accountability? This volume offers a novel, interdisciplinary exchange: the contributors analyse how the Crown operates in the United Kingdom and the postcolonial settler societies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In doing so, they examine fundamental theoretical questions about statehood, sovereignty, constitutionalism and postcolonial reconciliation. As Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign approaches its end, questions about the Crown’s future, its changing forms and meanings, the continuing value of constitutional monarchy and its potential for reform, gain fresh urgency. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.

New calculative techniques of management and accountancy are having a transformative effect on organisations, individuals and society. These processes are often associated with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, but what exactly is driving the proliferation of these measurement systems and how is this change actually occurring? We address these questions by exploring the history of the Big 4 international accountancy firms and their role in spreading audit culture and the rationalities of financial accountancy. Since the 1990s, the expansion of their remit from traditional auditing to a growing emphasis on consultancy services has increasingly blurred the boundary between their public watchdog role and their commercial interests. Combined with the changing values, career trajectories and ‘habitus’ of audit company professionals, and the weaknesses of self-regulation, this has resulted in problems for ethics and corporate social responsibility. Using ethnographic examples, we examine the metamorphosis that occurs as accountants, originally trained in the disciplines of financial probity, become more entrepreneurially oriented when they ascend to senior positions as company managers and partners. If the calculative practices of accountancy are central to modern forms of audit, we argue they are also transforming accountancy firms themselves into evermore calculative and financialised entities. We conclude by showing how the post-1990s shift from auditing to advisory services leads these companies to tread an ever-finer line between entrepreneurship and fraud.

Corruption narratives, like witchcraft accusations, offer a lens for analyzing social relations, economic interests, and hidden structures of power. Developing this theme, I examine discourses of corruption in the context of growing concerns about fraud prevention and anti-corruption in universities. Moving beyond critiques of university administrations as bureaucratic, self-serving entities whose interests are increasingly antithetical to the academic mission of the university, I ask, What is corruption in academia and how does this assumed problem relate to academic capitalism and the rise of audit culture? The empirical context for my study is the extraordinary increase in institutionalized fraud-prevention programs, particularly those offered by the “Big Four” accountancy firms. Taking as my case study the introduction of a whistle-blower hotline at one Australasian university, I examine the politics and interests behind such schemes. The increasing involvement of accountancy firms in nonauditing work, including anti-corruption services, illustrates how corruption narratives operate as market-making strategies. I examine how commercialization, risk management, and auditing proliferate anti-corruption initiatives and how audit firms collude in the risk and corruption that they claim to ameliorate. I conclude by assessing the implications for the anthropology of corruption of the growing penetration of universities by an increasingly commercially focused tax industry that, some argue, cannot even be trusted to regulate itself.

The spread of the rationality and techniques of financial accounting into new systems for measuring, ranking and auditing performance represents one of the most important and defining features of contemporary governance. Audit procedures are redefining accountability, transparency, and good governance and reshaping the way organisations and individuals have to operate. They also undermine professional autonomy and have unanticipated and dysfunctional consequences. Taking up the concept of ‘audit culture’ as an analytical framework, we examine the origins, spread and rationality driving these new financialized techniques of governance, not least through the work of the ‘Big 4’ accountancy firms, and trace their impact across a number of different fields, from administration and the military to business corporations and universities. Following Strathern’s observation that audit is ‘where the financial and the moral meet’ we ask, what new kinds of ‘ethics of accountability’ does audit produce? We build on the work of Mitchell (1999), Trouillot (2001) and Merry (2011) to identify five ways in which the techniques and logics of financial accountancy have notable ‘audit effects’. These are ‘domaining’, ‘classificatory’, ‘individualising and totalizing’, ‘governance’ and ‘perverse’ effects. We conclude by reflecting on the problems of audit culture and suggest ways to reclaim the professional values and democratic spaces that are being eroded by these new systems of governing by numbers.

In the context of rapid neoliberal reform, both anthropology as a discipline and the social and cultural phenomena it studies are undergoing profound changes. In this article we develop June Nash's concept of “peripheral vision” to show how peripheries, and the politics of “peripheralization”, can illuminate processes of neoliberalization and the implications that this has for anthropological knowledge production. We argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to examine the conceptual blind spots produced by capitalism. By recasting “peripheral vision” as an analytic concept and methodological tool, we show how cultivating our ethnographic sensibilities to identify and hone in on events and processes that lie beyond our immediate field of vision can provide a useful antidote to the seductive fantasies of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, we also suggest how this approach can help counter some of the increasing strictures on knowledge production and narrowing of the research imagination that neoliberal reforms impose.

Quantification and statistics have long served as instruments of governance and state power. However, in recent decades new systems of measurement and rankings have emerged that operate both beyond and below the nation‐state. Using contemporary examples, we explore how international measurements, rankings, risk management and audit are creating new forms of global governmentality. We ask, who – or what – is driving the spread of audit technologies and why have indicators and rankings become a populist project? How should we theorise the rise of measuring, ranking and auditing and their political effects? What are the impacts of these ever‐more pervasive systems on organisational behaviour and professional life?

As an early pioneer of market-led institutional reforms and New Public Management policies, New Zealand arguably has one of the most 'neoliberalised' tertiary education sectors in the world. This article reports on a recent academic dispute concerning the attempt by management to introduce a new category of casualised academic employee within one of the country's largest research universities. It is based on a fieldwork study, including document analysis, interviews and the participation of both authors in union and activist activities arising from the dispute. Whilst some academics may collude in the new regimes of governance that these reforms have created, we suggest that 'collusion' and 'resistance' are inadequate terms for explaining how academic behaviour and subjectivities are being reshaped in the modern neoliberal university. We argue for a more theoretically nuanced and situational account that acknowledges the wider legal and systemic constraints that these reforms have created. To do this, we problematise the concept of collusion and reframe it according to three different categories: 'conscious complicity', 'unwitting complicity' and 'coercive complicity'. We ask, what happens when one must 'collude' in order to resist, or when certain forms of opposition are rendered impossible by the terms of one's employment contract? We conclude by reflecting on ways in which academics understand and engage with the policies of university managers in contexts where changes to the framework governing employment relations have rendered conventional forms of resistance increasingly problematic, if not illegal.

The three articles published in this Forum section were all finalists for the Graduate Student Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), which met at the American Anthropological Association’s 2013 meeting in Chicago. While they deal with different parts of Europe (Bulgaria and Romania and Spain, respectively), what unites them is a shared interest in issues of loss, social memory, identity, agency and death, and, in particular, the way people experience temporality and change (see Connerton 1989; Forty and Küchler 1991). The authors brilliantly capture the mood of uncertainty and anxiety facing Europeans in a period of unprecedented uncertainty, insecurity and austerity. What they also show is how Europe’s poor and marginalised are both shaped by and, in turn, try to shape or subvert the national and European policy regimes to which they are subjected.

The growth of ‘third mission’ activities aimed at commercialising universities and creating more entrepreneurial academics is a global phenomenon yet has received scant attention from anthropologists. This paper reports on an ethnographic study that examines the rise of university commercialisation in New Zealand, a country that pioneered many of the reforms associated with neoliberalism. Exploring different sites and spaces of university commercialisation we ask: what impact is commercialisation having on the meaning and mission of the university? Who are the new academic entrepreneurs of the neoliberal university? What does ‘entrepreneurship’ mean in a public university context? Finally, we analyse the challenges and contradictions this is creating for the public university.

Cris Shore is one of the few anthropologists who have been studying “the makings of politics” and has put forward creative bridges connecting anthropology, political science, organisational studies and sociology. Shore is currently Chair of Anthropology and Head of Department at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), after lecturing at the Goldsmiths College, University of ­London (UK), between 1990 and 2003. Shore’s works include titles such as Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (edited with Susan Wright, Routledge, 1997) and the recent Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (edited with Susan Wright and Davide Pero, Berghahn, 2010), focusing on the cultural uses and meanings of politics in different social contexts, or Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (edited with Dieter Haller, Pluto, 2005). But Europe’s inter-nationalist project has been a strong presence in Shore’s work since The Anthropology of Europe: Identities and Boundaries in Conflict was published in 1994 (edited with Victoria Goddard and Josep Llobera, Berg). Research on European integration policies, namely through the project “Constructing European Identity: EU Civil Servants and Cultural Policy”, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), led him to conduct fieldwork in different offices of the European Union’s institutions in Brussels from 1995 to 1997, giving rise to Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (Routledge, 2000) and European Union and the Politics of Culture (Bruges Group, 2001). Further research interests include the debates about the meaning of ‘European government’, institutional reforms and UE’s role as a global actor. Along with Marilyn Strathern, Susan Wright and others, Cris Shore was one of the first researchers to approach a most original topic in anthropological studies in the 1990s: audit cultures. Guest editor of a special issue of Anthropology in Action on “Universities and the politics of accountability” (with Don ­Brenneis and Susan Wright, 2005), Shore has done research on university reforms and the economy of knowledge, using ethnographic methods to study the new labour and knowledge production regimes at universities, as well as the notions of person and subjectivity involved in them. General anthropological themes such as the discipline’s methodological and epistemological distinctive features were explored by Shore in works like Anthropology and Cultural Studies (edited with Stephen Nugent, Pluto, 1997) or The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World (edited with Akbar Ahmed, Athlone Press, 1995). Cris Shore is currently engaged in an ethnographic study of universities in New Zealand. This is part of a wider international collaborative project between The University of Auckland, Aarhus University (Denmark), and Bristol University (UK) entitled “University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanization”, which is funded by an EU Marie-Curie IRSES grant and the New Zealand Ministry of Research Science and Technology.

This article explores the legacy of three decades of neoliberal reforms on New Zealand's university system. By tracing the different government policies during this period, it seeks to contribute to wider debates about the trajectory of contemporary universities in an age of globalisation. Since Lyotard's influential report on The Postmodern Condition (1994), critics have frequently claimed that commercialisation and managerialism have undermined and supplanted the social mission of the university as governments throughout the developed world have sought to transform the university 'from an ideological arm of the state into a bureaucratically organised and relatively autonomous consumer-oriented corporation' (Readings 1996: 457). Against this I argue that the new model of the entrepreneurial and corporate university has not so much replaced the traditional functions and meaning of the university as added a new layer of complexity to the university's already diverse and multifaceted roles in society. Drawing on an ethnography of one university and personal observations, I explore the effects of that reform process on the culture and character of the university and, more specifically, its impact on academic identities and the everyday practices of academics and students. As in other OECD countries, New Zealand's universities are now required to deliver a bewildering plethora of government priorities and strategic economic and social objectives whilst simultaneously carrying out their traditional roles in teaching, research and scholarship. The challenge for the modern university, as reflected in the case of New Zealand, is how to negotiate these diverse and often contradictory missions.

Calls for anthropology to move ‘beyond ethnography’ are not new, but the frequency of their utterance suggests that they tend to go unheeded. A question increasingly asked today is ‘is it possible to do ethnography on an awkward scale’? (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003). In our increasingly globalized world, the material and moral conditions that animate local events are not easily captured by the ethnographer’s lens. In a recent critique, Paul Willis (2002) chastises anthropology for its lingering empiricism and persistent humanism, concluding with a plea for more ‘theoretically informed ethnographic studies’. This paper shares these concerns. Too often ‘social anthropology’ (the study of human cultures and societies in its broadest sense) is conflated with ‘ethnography’, understood either as the process of participant-observation or fieldwork, or as the textual product arising from that experience: a case of the methodological tail wagging the theoretical dog. This paper sets out to demonstrate why going ‘beyond ethnography’ is necessary if we are to transcend the constraints of empiricism and make sense of wider socio-cultural patterns and processes. I illustrate my argument by reference to the European Commission, the European Union’s civil service, and the strengths and limitations of ethnography for understanding its complexity. While most local, ‘insider’ and ethnographic accounts highlight the hybrid nature and ‘uniqueness’ of the Commission’s organizational culture – and still define the EU as an ‘inter-governmental’ body – I argue that a very different picture emerges when we use a wider theoretical lens that takes into account class and political economy perspectives. I also show how debates over EU institutions recall anthropological arguments over the analysis of patron-client relations: i.e. what appears from an ethnographic perspective as a loose set of inter-personal ties between individuals of unequal status and wealth often turns out to be, on reflection, an emergent class system and the beginnings of a process of state-formation.

As the rational choice model of “policy” proliferates in “policy studies, ” the social sciences, modern governments, organizations, and everyday life, a number of anthropologists are beginning to develop a body of work in the anthropology of public policy that critiques the assumptions of “policy” as a legal-rational way of getting things done. While de-masking the framing of public policy questions, an anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results. In a rapidly changing world, anthropologists’ empirical and ethnographic methods can show how policies actively create new categories of individuals to be governed. They also suggest that the long-established frameworks of “state” and “private, ”“local” or “national” and “global, ”“macro” and “micro, ”“top down” and “bottom up, ” and “centralized” and “decentralized” not only fail to capture current dynamics in the world but actually obfuscate the understanding of many policy processes.

This article explores the politics of translation in the context of the European Union and, more specifically, the 2004 EU Constitutional Treaty. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the broader theoretical and conceptual debates in anthropology that have been waged around the idea of ‘cultural translation’. Drawing on the work of Asad (986), Palsson (1993) and others, I assess the utility of metaphors of domination and appropriation for understanding the politics of translation. I ask, ‘does translation necessarily entail asymmetrical relations of power and betrayal, or is it more appropriately conceived as a reciprocal and hermeneutic process of ‘empathy’ and ‘conversation’? I also reflect on some of the problems with the idea of translation as cross-cultural understanding. Using these ideas as an analytical framework, Part Two turns to consider the EU Constitutional Treaty and the contrasting ways that this text was interpreted by European leaders. I suggest that what was presented to the peoples of Europe for ratification was in fact a constitution disguised as a treaty, and one that contained a number of contradictory political agendas. I conclude with two points. First, that where legal texts are concerned, ‘translation’ is hard to separate from the politics of interpretation. Secondly, that anthropological approaches to translation require a far more expansive definition of what ‘cultural translation’ actually entails; one that recognizes the complex layers of meaning surrounding this elusive idea and what translation means as institutional practice.

AT You have worked extensively on EU-related issues. Tell us about your research and principal findings in this area. CS: My first fieldwork in the EU in 1992 explored the European Community's evolving 'cultural policy'. The principal finding was that European policy-makers were actively engaged in inventing new symbols for 'Europeanness' through the ingenious use of EC-funded 'cultural actions'. Although typically denied, this instrumental use of cultural policy as a tool to promote the EU's integrationist agenda bore striking parallels with the strategies and techniques used by national elites in the formation of European nation-states during the 19th century. Marc Ab6l1s (2000) has shrewdly observed that the EU suffers from a paucity of rituals and symbols when compared to Europe's nation-states. However, this lack of symbols underlies a more fundamental problem: the EU's chronic lack of cultural legitimacy and popular consent. Despite enormous advances towards economic and legal integration, there is still little tangible sense of belonging or shared identity among the putative citizens of Europe. I concluded that EU attempts to forge a European identity were primarily motivated by its search for legitimacy and its need to create a European people (or 'demos') without which the EU's political system will continue to be perceived as fundamentally undemocratic. My later research focused on EU civil servants and the 'organizational culture' of the European Commission. My guiding question was whether the EU had succeeded in creating within its own institutional heartlands the kind of 'European identity' and culture espoused in its literature. A secondary aim was to test the hypothesis that once appointed, EU civil servants would undergo a cognitive change and become progressively more 'Europeanist' in their allegiance. As I discovered during fieldwork, the local idiom for this process was the French term engrenage (meaning 'gearing' or 'enmeshing'). I found that national officials had indeed melded traditions to create a uniquely complex institution a veritable 'culture of compromise' as Ab6l6s, Bellier and McDonald have variously portrayed it (Ab6l1s et al. 1993, Ab6l1s & Bellier 1996, McDonald 1996). Just as Jean Monnet predicted, the Commission's institutional structure has functioned as a laboratory for the formation of a new type of European identity and subjectivity. However, I also discovered a more negative dimension to this. Those very qualities that were once encouraged and esteemed in EU officers (Euro-idealism, political connections, flexibility, entrepreneurialism, distance from national public, elitism, sense of 61an etc.) had also given rise to what insiders termed the Commission's 'parallel system of administration', a system based on 'pragmatic codes' with little respect for due process. The consequences of this were clearly evident in the 1999 Committee of Independent Experts' report into allegations of nepotism, fraud and mismanagement in the Commission. These findings invite us to rethink the concept of 'supranationalism' and view integration from a class and materialist perspective. What we are witnessing in the Commission is the transformation of a category into a group with its own self-interests and political identity. The implications of an increasingly unaccountable Brussels-based transnational elite that is transforming itself from a 'class in itself to a class for itself' raises fundamental questions about the future of democracy, citizenship and governance in Europe. MA: From 1989 to 1992, I did field research on the European Parliament. I think this was the first ever anthropological study of the EU, which at that time was still known as the European Community. I undertook the study of a European institution because, as a political anthropologist, I was interested in how politics is conducted at a transnational level. How does it work in this kind of multi

La profession d'anthropologue depend particulierement des universites ; or ces institutions, dans tout le monde industrialise, ont subi des re-ajustements majeurs pendant les deux dernieres decennies. L'introduction de mecanismes pour mesurer la performance educative, la qualite de la recherche et l'efficacite institutionnelle a ete centrale a ces reformes. Prenant l'education superieure en Grande Bretagne comme etude de cas, cet article analyse l'histoire et les consequences des efforts du gouvernement pour promouvoir une culture d'audits dans les universites. Il retrace l'origine de l'idee d'audit depuis ses associations originales avec la comptabilite financiere et son expansion dans d'autres domaines, particulierement l'education. Ces nouvelles technologies d'audit sont typiquement definies en termes de qualite, de responsabilite fiscale et d'octroi de droits, comme si elles etaient vraiment emancipatoires et douees du pouvoir de realisation. Nous critiquons ces presomptions en illustrant certains effets negatifs que les pratiques d'audit tels que les Exercices d'Evaluation de Recherche et les Evaluations de Qualite d'Enseignement ont eu sur l'education superieure. Nous suggerons que ces pratiques signalent une nouvelle forme d'intervention gouvernementale coercive et autoritaire. La conclusion de cet article considere les reponses que les anthropologues peuvent donner aux aspects les plus pernicieux de cet agenda inspire du Nouveau Liberalisme, par la pratique d'une reflection politique.

En Grande-Bretagne, un rapport revele une image publique de l'anthropologie plutot negative. Les stereotypes de l'anthropologue excentrique, en rapport avec le colonialisme, demeurent. Ces images ne sont pas seulement dues aux medias mais aussi aux anthropologues eux-memes. Afin d'ameliorer cette perception, les anthropologues se doivent d'elargir leur lectorat, un enseignement pre-universitaire pourrait etre donne, et l'anthropologie popularisee. Une telle demarche permettrait aux etudiants de trouver des emplois en dehors de l'universite et d'affirmer leur identite d'anthropologues au lieu de cacher leur formation

Apres un examen des modeles anthropologiques qui rendent compte de la formation identitaire europeenne, et de leur valeur explicative pour l'integration europeenne, l'A. se demande si l'etude des dynamiques d'integration en Europe ne pourrait pas amener a repenser ces modeles. La construction de l'« Europe » par la CE pose probleme. L'A. se demande s'il est possible de construire une identite europeenne saillante sans l'erosion des anciens nationalismes « centres », et si la campagne de la CE pour le renforcement de la conscience des Europeens par rapport a leur heritage culturel commun pourra eviter le developpement de nouvelles formes de xenophobie et de chauvinisme culturel.

Part 1 Socialism in crisis. Part 2 The PCI's approach to power: history and identity of the PCI the theory and practice of Italian Communism political socialization and party allegiance. Part 3 The PCI and the question of democracy: PCI organization, role and theory Communism at the crossroads - Eurocommunism and the Soviet question pluralism versus Democratic centralism - Leninism versus Marxism.