ABSTRACT
One of the questions raised in the introduction to this volume is how one recognizes epochal change, particularly when one is in the midst of it. The rise of what some authors have termed ‘audit culture’, and the rapid and relentless spread of coercive technologies of accountability into higher education is a case in point. Few processes have had such a profound impact in re-shaping academics’ conditions of work and conditions of thought since the post-war expansion of the university sector in Britain, yet this major transformation remains curiously under-researched and untheorized. If, as anthropologists argue, culture is constantly being invented and re-invented, nowhere is this becoming more evident than in the milieu in which most anthropologists themselves operate: the university sector.
