ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON/IN CULTURE OF AUDITING
Keywords:
anthropology and auditing, audit culture, anthropology of public policies, system of higher educationAbstract
This paper presents and analyzes a relatively young research tradition of the "audit culture", a tradition that is becoming interdisciplinary more relevant and present, and which is especially interesting for anthropology. Syntagm culture of auditing (audit culture) is used in anthropology (and other social sciences and humanities) as a general term referring to the description of the state or conditions in which contemporary scientists pursue their research, teaching and write papers. It refers to the atmosphere of administrative pressure, check-up and control, in which they are forced to be more "productive", "quality" and "user-friendly" by means of specific techniques designed with analogy to accounting auditing. Since the panel within which this text is situated is dedicated to pointing out problems caused by the audit culture in the ethnologic/anthropologic context (and of other social sciences and humanities in Serbia as well), I will point out the context of the spreading of the audit culture in the domain of higher education and scientific research (where the biggest share of ethnologic/anthropologic studies and papers are produced). Up till now, anthropological criticism in this area has mostly been focused on questioning relevancy of evaluation/estimate/authentication of scientific work by means of different auditing techniques of metric/numerist character (most often scientomeric), and on some of consequences which reduction of the meaning of practicing science to mere sports-like gathering of points could have (or already has) on anthropological production and its quality.
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