ABSTRACT

This chapter highlights the potential of audit-based university performance management systems to render much academic effort less effective than it otherwise would be. It challenges the university audit culture, demonstrate how such a culture is stimulated by a New Public Management (NPM) ideology, and critique how it operates in public universities. The chapter draws particular attention to how an audit culture systematically facilitates several dysfunctional outcomes, such as the loss of academic freedom. An audit culture is 'a condition [that is] shaped by the use of modern techniques and principles of financial audit, but in contexts far removed from the world of financial accountancy'. Major features of an audit culture in universities include outcome-based assessment systems for research productivity and for other matters. An audit culture resides in the bureaucratic oversight of universities and the evocation of a perverse sort of accountancy mind-set of performance management – one that is obsessed with quantification and measures of output.