ABSTRACT
As any academic research manager will tell you, doctoral students count. They count in intellectual terms as contributors to a culture of research and scholarship, and they count literally as performance indicators, as quantifiable units of enrolments and timely completions. This naming of doctoral student as performance indicators (along with grants and publications) does a particular kind of work in the contemporary university, and it is the nature and purpose of this work that is elaborated in this chapter. In broad terms, I am interested in how the university becomes visible and calculable to itself as an efficient and effective higher education organisation – how it performs itself to itself and others as a ‘quality institution’. In particular I am interested in the way risk-consciousness provides scripts for performing this task through the management of doctoral education.
