Published in

Social Anthropology
Volume 23, Issue 1, pages 80–82, February 2015
The Audit Juggernaut
Steven Sampson

Modern-day anthropology has excelled at revealing mechanisms of power and domination where
we did not think they existed. We explore reciprocity and find exploitation, we research kinship
and find violence, we observe political institutions and find domination, we investigate social
movements and discover bureaucratic hierarchies. Everywhere we look, we discover yet another
Panopticon, more structural violence, more of that insidious governmentality.

The papers in this issue, on policy, audit, indicators and rankings, are part of this ‘uncovering of
power’ project. They describe what seems to be a kind of ‘audit monster’ or ‘rankings
juggernaut’ that constructs scientific or policy objects, and that undermines or removes our
much-exalted ‘subjectivity’. The audit juggernaut soaks us up like a sponge; it penetrates us like
Foucauldian biopower. Some of us – or the people we study – have the capacity to adapt to or
circumvent this audit culture, but the rest of us are its hapless victims.

We have numerous studies of how rankings and indicators are promoted, imposed, mediated,
manipulated or distorted, but our fascination has also led us to a blind acceptance of the audit
juggernaut. One gets the impression that every audit project, indicator matrix or ranking system
works flawlessly to undermine people's autonomy. Yet here a note of caution is needed. Some
audit and ranking projects do not work. They are subverted or simply ignored. We have been
attracted by the dramatic case, and this has led us to overlook the instances where the audit
machine falters or sputters to a halt. One does not have to be an anthropologist to understand that
certain discourses or messages with which we are constantly bombarded – eating healthy food,
not smoking, driving at the speed limit – can be challenged or ignored. Panopticons and
hegemony aside, the people we study are often extraordinarily adept at avoiding, evading,
manipulating, circumventing or resisting the audit machines. Why have some kinds of audit
systems, rankings and indicators exerted such great influence, while others have not?

In our studies, we commonly observe people invoking rankings, audit terminology and statistical
indicators as justifications for their actions. But this is hardly the same as asserting that these
systems have somehow taken over or refashioned us into neoliberal automatons. How do we
actually know that people who once acted on the world in terms of judgement or context (the
subjects of pre-audit culture) are now simple objects of the audit-ranking-indicator juggernaut?
How do we know that our subjectivity has been ‘snatched’ from us by the audit monster?

Without invoking the latest faddish terminology: is there an ontological threat posed by audit
culture? Or is the audit/rankings/numbers practice only a kind of ritual or performance? How do
we know that audit culture has done something to us? What kind of data would we need to show
that audit culture, rankings and numbers have indeed ‘taken over’ our way of being in the world?
I myself have studied one set of rankings that seems to have this juggernaut character: the
ranking of corrupt countries known as the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI was
developed in 1995 by the German economist Johan Graf Lambsdorff and has since been
popularised by the anticorruption NGO Transparency International
(http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/).The CPI ranking is an aggregate of surveys, using
assessments by international and local experts about the level of corruption in about 140
countries. Year after year, the smaller advanced industrialised countries (Denmark, Finland,
Iceland, New Zealand, etc.) lie at the top of the ranking (the least corrupt countries), while at the
bottom are the most impoverished, war torn, fragile states. In between are various transitional or
more authoritarian post-socialist or post-conflict countries. The CPI rankings are only a
perception index. Nevertheless, countries with low rankings are embarrassed when the CPI is
launched, and they may also receive lower credit ratings, less foreign investment, higher interest
rates for IMF loans, or be declared unqualified for foreign aid or US Millennium Challenge
grants. Government leaders and opposition politicians take these rankings very seriously, despite
the fact that the CPI is about ‘perceptions’ and does not measure any corrupt practices (since the
definition of corruption is constantly changing). The CPI is now part of the burgeoning
anticorruption industry (Sampson 2010a, 2010b), an assemblage of international conventions,
policies, experts, diagnostics, projects, programmes, trainings and budget lines that now has a life
of its very own. The CPI is so important that Transparency International has considered it its
‘brand’.

There are other corruption indexes ‘out there’ in the anticorruption landscape, but none of them
has had the impact of the CPI. The World Bank, for example, has assembled a large dataset
called Governance Matters, using 31 different indices to measure 200 variables across 200
countries. In the Control of Corruption subset, one group of indices measures something called
‘State capture’: the ability of private actors to exert illicit influence over laws and policies
through bribes to judges or lawmakers, for example (the ‘illicit’ criteria would distinguish state
capture from ‘lobbying’ or ‘advocacy’).

The state capture index is based on surveys of local firms and can be a very useful concept for
understanding governance and state fragility. Yet the state capture index is hardly ever used or
cited in policy circles. It remains in a few strictly academic studies. The number of Google search
hits for ‘state capture index’ is 3,900, the number for the CPI is 2.1 million. There is no
equivalent of a ‘launching’ of the state capture index, as Transparency International does each
autumn with its Corruption Perceptions Index.

Why has the state capture index not had an impact? Is it because it takes the form of an Excel file,
while the TI Corruption Perception Index can be more easily put into the column of a newspaper?
Is it because ranking countries by their level of ‘corruption’ is more emotional than ranking them
according to the ability of private actors to influence laws? Is it because the CPI, with its ‘naming
and shaming’ character, has a degree of moral indignation attached to it? State capture was a
World Bank creation. But no one seems to have taken to it. Every country and development
organ has an anticorruption budget line. None have a budget line for fighting ‘state capture’.

We need to explore why a whole range of ostensibly powerful rankings, indices and categories
does not seem to have had any impact. Should we look at their production? Their marketing? Is
there something wrong in the anticorruption ‘assemblage’? Perhaps we anthropologists of policy
could develop models or hypotheses to explain (a) when rankings and indices have genuine
agency in an actor-network, (b) when they are simply rationalisations or convenient codes and (c)
when they are wholly irrelevant or marginalised.

Political anthropology, the anthropology of power, has tended to assume that rankings and
indices always have the kind of impact that can alter practices and reshape people's subjectivity.
But in fact, not all such audit technologies are so powerful that they construct new objects or
reconstitute subjects. A lot of them, like so many academic discourses, just fade away or get put
on the shelf. Perhaps it is time that we forget the Panopticons and the hegemonies and take some
of these negative cases seriously.

References

 Sampson, S. 2010a. Diagnostics: indicators and transparency in the anti-corruption

industry, in S. Jansen, E. Schröter and N. Stehr (eds.), Transparenz: multidiszplinäre
durchsichten durch phönomene und theorien des undurchsichtigen, 97–111. Wiesbaden:
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
o CrossRef,
o Web of Science®
 Sampson, S. 2010b. ‘The anti-corruption industry: from movement to institution’, Global
Crime 11: 261–78.