Cris Shore

IAS Q&A

When you arrived at the Institute you probably had a concrete idea or plan of what you would like to achieve during your stay. Were you able to pursue these plans? Did there emerge new, unforeseen directions?

When I arrived at the Institute I had a well-defined project, but I also wanted to remain open to things I might learn while in Budapest and through participating in CEU events. My original research aim was to examine key changes occurring in academia, particularly around university governance and management, as a result of marketisation, New Public Management, and the spread of ‘academic capitalism’. My research questions asked, ‘how are these redefining the “ecology” of higher education’ and ‘what are the implications for the future of the public university? One novel focus of the study was on the growing – albeit often unrecognised – influence of global management consultants in university affairs, particularly firms like Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG.

What I wanted from the IAS fellowship was time to study this in more depth, but I was also able to pursue new research directions including work for a think-piece on ethical regulation and the problems that university ethics committees have with qualitative social research. Another direction came from a workshop I organized on the theme of universities and democracy. That resulted in a lively two-day seminar in February 2024 entitled ‘Democracy and Academic Freedom: University Futures in the Age of Authoritarianism?’ A third new direction was a collaboration with one of the other IAS fellows, artist-in-residence Nidhi Khurana, for a textual and visual reflection on the river Danube, Budapest and the meaning(s) of water.

More generally speaking, who or what influenced your work and research path the most?

Living in Budapest and working at the IAS certainly influenced my research trajectory. The workshop on ‘Universities and Democracy’ opened a new direction in my work on higher education reform and got me interested in the challenges Hungarian universities are facing as a result of Viktor Orbán’s culture war and project for turning Hungary into an ‘illiberal democracy’. Over the course of the two-day workshop we thoroughly addressed these and other issues. I also benefitted from the weekly IAS seminars and from many informal conversations I had with other fellows. One of the best things about the IAS was being part of a community of scholars that transcended disciplinary boundaries and learning about cutting-edge debates in other subjects such as Economists, Political Science, Cultural Studies, History, Media Studies and Sociology (to mention just a few). Engaging with other people’s work and learning about debates, ideas and issues beyond one’s own academic field can be extremely rewarding.

To which debates or schools of thought do you see your research contributing?

My disciplinary background is in Social Anthropology, but my research projects have always been interdisciplinary and of relevance to other disciplinary fields, particularly Politics, Law, Economics, Geography, and the Social Sciences. My project on university reform is situated between the fields of Anthropology, Higher Education Studies, Organisational Studies, Policy Studies, and social theory. Debates about the marketisation of academia and the ‘future of the university’ are important to all of these disciplines. These are also issues that concern politicians and policy makers. So my research speaks to several different schools of thought, including the anthropology of organisations, critical management studies, political economy, studies in higher educational, the sociology of risk society and audit culture, and what we might call, echoing Michel Foucault, the ‘history of the present’. I hope my research also has some practical, applied or policy relevance, if only by offering a warning about the dangers of the marketisation and managerialist strategies adopted by successive UK governments over the past few decades.

How do you see your field of research today, how is it evolving?

My current research includes the anthropology of policy and critical studies of higher education, both of which are growing fields of study. At its simplest, an ‘anthropology of policy’ approach uses concepts, methodologies and perspectives from social anthropology to examine the way policies work as instruments of governance and power, and to understand the webs of meaning and social ‘worlds’ that policies create. I use this approach in my research on the role of metrics, markets and managerialism in higher education and the financialisation of university. In many respects, interrogating these processes is a way to shed light on the evolution of contemporary forms of capitalism, particularly academic capitalism, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic capitalism and crony capitalism.

What’s next for you after IAS CEU Budapest (if we may ask)?

After Budapest I have a short research fellowship at the University in Melbourne. I am looking forward to being in Australia again: I used to visit regularly when I lived and worked in Aotearoa/New Zealand (a ‘hop across the Ditch’ as New Zealanders say) and I have close ties with many academics there. After Melbourne I plan to return to the UK and am looking forward to warm and sunny British summer. I am also embarking on a new writing project: a book titled ‘European Integration: Debates and Controversies’.

If there were one book or film you could recommend to the reader, what would be that and why?

It is difficult to narrow that down to just one book. I think a really important work, for anyone interested in understanding the way market-driven processes of data commodification have transformed our world, is Shoshona Zuboff’s (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books. But another dimension of this entails the new ways that metrics and accountancy techniques are being used as instruments of commodification and control. Here I would recommend (and apologies for the shameless self-promotion) Shore and Wright’s new book (2024), Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Changing the World, London: Pluto Press.