CONCEPT
Audit Culture
The institutional regime of quantified metrics, rankings, and performance targets that replaces professional judgment with measurement — Berg and Seeber's diagnostic for the corporatized university and the template for AI productivity metrics.
Audit culture names the institutional configuration in which professional activity is governed through continuous quantified measurement — impact factors, citation counts, student satisfaction scores, grant dollars, performance metrics — rather than through peer judgment or internal standards of craft. The concept, developed by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in the 1990s and adopted by Berg and Seeber as a central diagnostic, identifies both a technology (the specific apparatus of measurement) and an ideology (the assumption that what cannot be measured does not matter). In the AI age, audit culture acquires new capabilities: the tools that augment knowledge work also generate the telemetry through which that work is measured, closing a feedback loop in which productivity metrics shape the very behaviors they are supposed to observe.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Strathern's 1997 analysis of British universities identified audit as a distinctive cultural formation — not merely the application of quantitative tools to academic work but a transformation in what academic work was