Escaping numbers? Intimate accounting, informed publics and the uncertain assemblages of authority and non-authority

Numbers have long been associated with statecraft. In bureaucratic processes of accounting, regulation was effected by forming centres of calculation. This paper suggests that contemporary post-bureaucratic regimes are evolving new forms of accounting, in which the centre inserts itself into individual sites to exercise authority. This ‘intimate accounting’ involves technologies of transparency through which individual sites such as schools are required to declare intimate information publicly. In turn, the public, armed with information, is exhorted to become informed and to exercise influence on institutions to excel and to hold them to account. Using the case of Australia’s ‘Education Revolution’, this paper describes the processes of intimate accounting. It then explores the efforts to resist, subvert and undo such calculations. Finally, it speculates on why these calculations have continued to appear robust in the face of opposition and what would need to be done to escape or resist such calculations.    Keywords: Sociology of Numbers; Education Policy and Numbers; Accountability &nbsp

Policy as assemblage

In this article, the author tells the story of her search for appropriate tools to conceptualise policy work. She had set out to explore the rela tionship between the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Australia’s education policy, but early intervie w data forced her to reconsider her research question. The plethora of availabl e models of policy did not satisf actorily accommodate her growing understanding of the messiness and complexity of policy work. On the basis of interviews with 18 policy actors, including former OECD officials, PISA analysts and bureaucrats, as well as documentary analysis of government reports and ministerial me dia releases, she suggests that the concept of ‘assemblage’ provides the tools to better understand the messy processes of policy work. The relationship between PISA and national policy is of interest to many scholars in Europe, making this study widely relevant. An article th at argues for the unsettling of tidy accounts of knowledge making in policy can hardly afford to obscure the untidiness of its own assemblage. Accordingly, this article is somewhat unconventional in its presentation, and atte mpts to take the reader into the messiness of the research world as well as the polic y world. Implicit in this presen tation is the suggestion that both policy work and research work are ongoing attempts to find order and coherence through the cobbling together of a variety of resource