Anthropology in Action

This is the first special issue of Anthropology in Action published with Berghahn Books, and we thank them for their involvement and support of the association and its journal. As you will see, in joining up with Berghahn, we are benefiting from their professional publishing team. Further to this, we should benefit over the long term from their marketing. Despite these publishing changes—and we thank the previous publishers and administrative support for their hard work over the years—the journal is retaining its distinct applied niche developed by previous editors and Anthropology in Action members.

Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern 'university of excellence' applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia.

Universities offer environments apparently favourable to open-ended and exploratory research, especially when interdisciplinarity is embraced as an aim. But this is not always quite the invitation it seems. Under the aegis of accountability, a bureaucratic form of interdisciplinarity is reframing the ways society is imagined and drawn into the scientific enterprise. Some problems for Social Anthropology are sketched briefly.

This article addresses the issue of the influence of neoliberalism on French research institutions, especially the future of the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), a public organisation devoted exclusively to doing research. CNRS's detractors argue that there is no reason to keep a specific research organisation in France. The hiring of fewer and fewer researchers, as soon as the baby-boomers retire, means the disappearance of what is considered, at the European level, a French exception. In this paper I try to analyse the impact of the change occuring in research policy, and to characterise the specific features of the global ideological context.

Public higher education has been strangled in Brazil by personnel policies, fragmentation through privatisation and competition with a growing private sector. Central to the productivist turn in Brazil is the annual 'CAPES report' which ranks departments and determines their funding. The Forum of Executive Officers of Graduate Programs in Anthropology was created, years ago, to discuss problems regarding anthropology's teaching and research. Its efficacy depends on the political skills of its members to influence interlocutors. We need to understand the sociology of change around us and the power structures of the agencies structuring our field of action to be able to propose solutions.

This article explores neoliberalism in Australian universities, in the context of the politics of a higher education 'reform package' introduced by the Liberal-National Party Coalition presently in power in federal government. I focus attention on the relationship between the broader national environment and the local university configuration at the Australian National University and the dialectic between university academics and students as objects of bureaucratic practices and self-auditing subjects in these new modalities of power. I situate the Australian experience in broader global debates about neoliberalism and universities and earlier ethnographies of audit cultures.

Higher education in the US stands out for its size and variety, and its complex mix of public and private finance and control. Although this situation makes it hard to 'see' and 'name' the sources of systemic change, academic life in the US is showing the same signs of neoliberal 'market penetration' as elsewhere. One way in which educators in the US are attempting to take some control is through a movement to recognise and reward different kinds of scholarly work. By illuminating this movement's contradictory tendencies, anthropologically informed ethnography can help move debate forward and suggest strategies for action.

Audit culture is examined comparatively in US academic life and in Catalan universities, medical research institutions and scientific publishing. In the case of Catalan universities, audit is shown to be a political practice as well, serving the centralising interests of the Spanish state at the expense of Catalan home rule. Despite the variation in formal practices and institutional contexts, then, the similarities in both the appearance and effects of these practices are remarkable. As anthropologists working across cultural boundaries, we should be attentive to the many forms coercive surveillance may take.

The UK government's 2004 law, aiming to make universities contribute to Britain's success in the global knowledge economy, creates an explicit market in higher education. Students are presumed to occupy the status of consumer in an economic transaction with universities. The law gives students a right to information and an audit function so that their choices as 'intelligent consumers' will 'drive change' in universities. Interviews in two contrasting universities explore students' responses to this discourse and reveal their different aspirations and concepts of education. Yet they share doubts that regimes of audit and notions of accountability to consumers will not make their voices really 'count'.

Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain. By Hilary Marland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 304 pp. ISBN 1-4039-2038-9 (hardback).

A View from the Tower and the Township Post colonialism, Feminism & Religious Discourse. Edited by Laura Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan. London: Routledge, 2002. 220 pp. ISBN 0-41592-888-5 (paperback).

‘Letting Them Die’: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail. By Catherine Campbell. Oxford: James Currey, 2003. 214 pp. ISBN 0-85255-868-6 (paperback).

Would you like to get some practice in writing for publication? Would you like a free copy of that interesting new book you really should read? Would writing a review help you to make sure you read it?

Anthropology in Action is always happy to hear from potential reviewers. Reviews are normally short—about 500 words—but a more in-depth review can also be planned if you wish.