The I assume young but nevertheless venerable Larval Subjects has an excellent post on the destructive nature of what I’ve been calling “Auditland”, in which work practices are subject, for better or worse, to the long and history of cognitive bureaucracy. I’ve been working on this for a long time, particularly with regard to education, performance management and new forms of labour. In any case, here’s a draft of something I’ll probably try to cut back, improve and publish one day. I’ll leave it up for a while at least if anyone’s interested. It’s impossible long and perhaps clunky, but is maybe becoming at least a little timely.
Auditland- Education and Cognitive Labour
I guess I wanted to add something else on reflection. No, this is not “of course I’m in favour of quality” (well of course I am but I’m already enveloped in the rhetorical haze of Auditland the moment I say it). The final note is rather that Audit cultures resist even what would seem their own logical outcome, if such cultures were truly serious about the real world working better. They tend to haunt the non-Deleuzean middle ground of the great avoidance – avoidance of either what is going on on the ground, or of the more interestingly abstract, the theoretical, the idea. Occasionally you see glimpses of what might happen if audit culture drifted closer to the ground (I doubt we’ll ever see it head towards theory/ideas). A few years back I saw a news item on root cause analysis. At least root cause analysis sometimes finds that the problem might be aspects of the bureaucracy (in this case often the health system).
And if you see what happens when people really want things to work, really evaluate effectively with social ends in mind, it’s pretty amazing. I go to Denmark a lot and I’ve been lucky enough to talk with quite a few designers and academics there about innovation. What can I say – they really do seem to have figured out how to make things work (and they still go home at 4-30).
At the same time, maybe The Big Lebowski got it right. Maybe the question is about “what condition our condition is in”. Now there’s a question.
[...] ago I wrote an article called “Auditland” which I never published. In it, I wondered a lot about the new micro-controls over education. Since [...]