Post on 16-May-2023
Published in: Learning and Teaching. The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 8/2, 2015, pp. 29-47.
Audit culture and the infrastructures of excellence
On the effects of campus management technologies
Asta Vonderau
Abstract
Drawing upon ethnographic data, this article investigates the effects of a new online campus
management system in one of the largest universities in Germany. It shows the various ways in
which this technological innovation influenced students’, teachers’, and administrative
personnel’s relations and everyday working practices and how it is influential in the
reorganisation of university structures. The online management system is regarded as an
important part of an emerging infrastructure of excellence, which materialises the changing
understanding of qualitative studies and teaching. Findings show that the online management
supports standardised and economised study, teaching and administrative practices and silences
creativity and flexibility. However, these standardisations are negotiated and questioned by the
actors involved.
Keywords: Bologna process, Germany, infrastructure, New Public Management
Introduction
From my very first day at work as an associate professor in Cultural Anthropology at the
university, I heard students frequently mentioning a certain Jogustine, a name which initially had
no meaning for me. Over the following months, I regularly came to encounter complaints and
discussions about Jogustine, as for instance expressing the frustration about Jogustine’s constant
mixing up of room numbers, or about her indifferent refusal to register students for seminars or
the students’ anxiety about being ‘deactivated’ by the help of Jogustine for having missed a
seminar. For instance, one student who had been absent from courses a few times begged me in
an e-mail not to ‘deactivate’ her with the help of Jogustine. It was these initial encounters that
prompted my interest in Jogustine, as up to this point I certainly had not been aware of myself
being in a position to ‘deactivate’ anyone. While initially convinced that Jogustine was a person, I
soon learned it to be an acronym, JOGUStINE, the abbreviation for an integrated campus
management system (or CampusNet) introduced at the university in 2009.1
This article is a case study which investigates the effects of this new online management
system. It describes the changing organisational structures, new subjectivities and modes of intra-
university communication. The online management system is regarded as a technological
instrument for the implementation of the Bologna Process and the national study and teaching
reform and as a key actor in the emergence of an academic infrastructure and audit culture that
materialises neoliberal visions of the excellence- and competition-driven university, thus making
such visions manifest and perceptible in the university’s everyday operations.
Since the study has been done at my own workplace, it may be called an ‘anthropology at
home’ (Hastrup 1995: 159). The article’s argument is based on empirical material, which was
collected in the time period of 2011–2013 and consists of participant observations of the
everyday practices related to the implementation of the teaching and study reform (such as
teachers’ and administrative meetings, examination, evaluation and teaching procedures and
related decision-making processes) as well as about twenty interviews with students, lecturers and
administrative staff at the university and with representatives of the IT company developing its
online management system. The material also contains group discussions with students which
took place in the context of the postgraduate seminar ‘Audit Cultures: Public Management,
Entrepreneurial Subjects and Modes of Governance’ that I taught in spring 2011. References are
also made to documents relating to the official representations of the new management system,
the teaching and study reform and the university itself (for instance booklets, the Study and
Teaching Department’s publications and the university’s website).
My analytical perspective builds on anthropological studies conducted under the banner of
‘anthropology of policy’ (Shore and Wright 1997; Shore, Wright and Però 2011), ‘audit cultures’
(Strathern 2000) and also on recent infrastructure and standardisation studies (Bowker and Star
1999; Lampland and Star 2009; Larkin 2013; Star 1999) that have highlighted the ethical and
ideological aspects of technological innovations. Accordingly, the article is neither aiming to
question the practical administrative usefulness of online-management and other administrative
reforms, nor to negate the competence of individuals and institutional units that are responsible
for these reforms. Instead it aims to make the ideological dimensions of the apparently neutral
infrastructures of excellence visible as well as their (un)intended effects. The article asks how
auditable subjects and economised modes of university governance are constituted through these
technology developments; how the common understanding of fairness, quality and academic
freedom is changing as a consequence of the ongoing study reform; and finally, how
controversial negotiations emerge between actors involved in the process of infrastructural
change and standardisation.
Managing new diversity
The introduction of the Bologna Process has caused a sudden diversification of the study
programmes offered at German universities. Over the past fifteen years, around 14,000 new study
programmes have been implemented, 2,000 of which underwent major changes or ceased to exist
within that same period of time (Wissenschaftsrat 2012: 36). As of today, reorganising study
programmes according to the BA–MA model has been almost completed, while this model’s
impact is still being widely and controversially discussed.
In addition to the Bologna reform, in 2007 a shortening of the period of school education
from 13 to 12 years was introduced in almost all of Germany’s federal states, causing a strong
increase in student application numbers across the country’s universities and creating the need for
additional resources. It was calculated that all in all, 625,000 additional study places would be
needed during the 2011–2015 period, but the actual demand for additional teaching capacity has
appeared to be much higher than the authorities originally expected. These ongoing processes of
transformation and diversification have shed light on long-standing deficiencies in Germany’s
higher education system, including insufficient public funding, and they have caused confusion
and uncertainty among students, lecturers and other actors involved in shaping the future of the
university as an institution (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz 2011). Several country-wide measures
have been adopted in an attempt to cope with emerging deficiencies in the system. For instance,
in order to improve research conditions, universities have been invited to participate in
‘excellence initiatives’ (Exzellenzinitiative) called for by the federal government and federal
states since 2006. Winners in this inter-university competition are awarded Ivy League status and
become eligible for participation in a funding scheme stocked with 1.9 billion EUR. Aiming to
increase the capacity of universities to accept more students while maintaining high quality in
teaching and research, the so-called high school pact (Hochschulpakt) was introduced, providing
universities with additional material resources for the 2005–2020 period during which student
numbers are expected to rise.2
In accordance with the Bologna Process and the excellence and high-school pact
initiatives, universities are now expected to make academic work measurable and auditable in
economic terms, with the increasing diversity of study programmes and student numbers urging
the development of new administrative and management routines. As a consequence, many
universities are currently establishing quality monitoring centres, and they are introducing new
expert positions within traditional university structures such as so-called examination and study
managers who are responsible for implementing the new regulations. German universities also
have adopted a number of methods and instruments for quality measurement, supported by and
made possible through auditing technologies. This includes public management systems that
standardise and make commensurable the various disciplinary cultures, following arguments of
transparency, efficiency and fairness.
The university’s new online management system known as CampusNet (Jogustine is its
user-friendly name) cannot easily be described as a clearly defined entity: it is not a thing, but a
constellation (or assemblage) of software, user groups, programme providers, net administration
tools and the political ideologies that go together with the German high school reform and the
Bologna Process, all of which are closely linked to each other (Shore, Wright and Però 2011).
Despite its non-human origins, Jogustine certainly is capable of acting. She always needs to be
consulted for advice or permission when it comes to the organisation of student consultations and
other professional meetings, or before making any decision that concerns teaching or examination
procedures, in order to ensure that those decisions do not contradict the rules inscribed into the
system. Yet Jogustine not only works as a non-human actor on the level of university
administration. Being the product of a software development company named Data Pilots
(Datenlotsen), which specialises in the development of university management systems (under
the motto ‘Educate the Future’)3, Jogustine also successfully connects the university as a public
space to the sphere of private economy. In fact, Jogustine is one of the very first collaborations
between a private enterprise and a German university in the field of university management,4
pointing to a profitable niche in the IT business. Up to date, more than seventy universities have
licensed and implemented CampusNet, using different names to personalise the system, among
them Stine (at the University of Hamburg), Kathi (Catholic University of Applied Sciences,
Mainz), or Fridolin (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena).
According to the official product description, the campus management system CampusNet
of which Jogustine forms part aims at covering the entire ‘lifecycle’ of university teachers and
students by translating it into software commands using a so-called modularisation method.
CampusNet thus takes full command of managing the student application process, student
admissions, the course of studies, the assignment of seminar rooms, the examination process and
it also takes charge of alumni and documentation management. Apart from that, the system will
even automatically produce reports for the state’s statistical department, and it will make the
quality of teaching measurable through seminar evaluations, thus guaranteeing quality service
despite growing student numbers. In doing so, CampusNet promises to reduce costs and to
increase the time efficiency of teachers, students and administrators. By investing in CampusNet,
universities expect to modernise their organisation, in order to increase international
competitiveness. The chancellor of the university describes the standardisation of student and
examination management procedures made possible through CampusNet as the ‘single biggest
transformation of teaching and learning since the university’s reopening in 1946’.
Emerging infrastructures of excellence
Anthropologists have referred to the transfer of audit and management techniques from the
banking and other economic sectors into the academic public sphere as an ‘epochal cultural
change’ leading to a new audit culture (Shore and Wright 2000: 57). Prompted by the radical
policies introduced in the 1980s and 1990s to standardise and economise the British university
system, for instance, Marilyn Strathern’s edited collection, Audit Cultures: Anthropological
Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (2000) defined ‘audit cultures’ as an important
and at the same time, difficult topic for anthropology. Important since auditing appeared to
become a foundational principle for social organisation, and difficult due to the constant
entanglement of research in auditing practices, and also because of the ethical ideas of
responsibility and justice implied in the very ideology of auditing.
Susan Leigh Star has called for an ethnography of infrastructures – understood as ‘boring’
and seemingly neutral techno-social constellations – regarding them as embodiments and
materialisations of audit, which relate the ideas of standardisation to everyday practice (Star
1999: 381). With similar reforms now hitting the German university system, more recent studies
have discussed strategies and practices of audit and standardisation as technologies of
governmentality or political technologies of the self, following Michel Foucault (1997). For
instance, German sociologist Richard Münch has pointed to the transnational spread of New
Public Management, and suggested that it now functions as a ‘world culture’ or a global model
for rationality, which offers weakened national actors a new frame for orientation (Münch 2011:
11). The emerging infrastructure of New Public Management can thus be regarded as an
anthropological site and analytical concept for studying the interconnectedness of global
governmentality modes, Europe-wide standardisation policies initiated by the Bologna Process,
nationally framed high school reforms, and local everyday working worlds. But how does global
rationality operate in a given local context? How are new standards and rituals of verification
normalised and enlived? For whom do they become effective? In order to answer these questions,
I will rely on Chris Shore’s and Susan Wright’s (2000) suggestion to study standards and audit
mechanisms on three different levels: on the level of rhetoric and language; on the level of
practice; and on the level of socio-cultural effects.
The language of auditing
On the level of rhetoric, Jogustine appears as a political project designed to make academic work
more economic and efficient and to constitute auditable subjects. From the very beginning,
implementing CampusNet in the university was a top-down project. Implementation was not
assigned to the university’s own Center for Data Processing, which normally provides university
employees and students with information and communication services, but to a newly established
‘competence team’ in which experts from different branches of the economy took part. The
university’s Board of Directors praised CampusNet for its modernity, functionality and for its
potential facilitation of studies and teaching, for its automated routines, time-saving measures,
and for the quantified data it would generate. Neither the criticism made by local computer
scientists relating to technological shortcomings of the system, nor an open letter sent by
Hamburg students warning against its proven low programming quality and the problematic
effects of economisation were able to alter the official rhetorics. At first, it was promised that
already existing, locally developed online management systems, which had successfully been
used at some departments such as Informatics, would be fully integrated into CampusNet, but
then they were no longer updated and eventually discarded, based on the argument that running
systems in parallel would be inefficient. At the same time, Jogustine got support from
competence teams, hotlines and experts.
Although Jogustine is meant to function as a service-oriented dialogue partner (the
feminine name contributing to this intended effect), the system addresses the user in a resolutely
technical language. Teachers are invited to create an ‘attendance matrix’ for seminar participants,
or again, to ‘deactivate’ undisciplined students, or to put them into a ‘floating condition’, that is:
on the waiting list for a specific course. In their communication with Jogustine, users are not
required to engage in complicated choices since all possible actions are pre-programmed and only
need to be click-activated. Options which are not considered by the programme’s binary logic
cannot be negotiated, as used to be the case in previous administrative face-to-face situations. By
transferring face-to-face communication into a communication between an online management
system and its users, diverse translation processes are undertaken. Everyday situations and
language are translated into economic terms and numbers that are made understandable to
Jogustine by study and examination managers and other Bologna Experts or technical assistants
who form part of this process.
Such translations can be traced by following the way central concepts and metaphors of
the study reform have been defined by the actors involved. Take the notion of ‘Studierbarkeit’,
for instance, a key term that can be found in different documents concerning the Bologna
implementation, as for example those published by the German Rector’s Conference (HRK)
(HRK 2008: 4).5 Usually used to describe and to measure the probability by which a given course
or study programme can be finished in time so that students fulfil the expected teaching aims, the
term has changed its shape and meaning while being translated into technological audit language.
Asked to reflect on the concept, a student told me: ‘I am not really familiar with the concept of
‘Studierbarkeit’, but I would think that it relates to that which allows one to study successfully, as
for example how the study programme is built up. It also might include questions such as how
much time and energy a student has to invest in her studies, and if it is possible to combine
studies with a job or family life’ (Interview 15 July 2013). Experts working for the university’s
Centre for Quality Assessment, on the other hand, suggest that ‘Studierbarkeit’ is a ‘formal
institution’ (formelle Institution) designed to make studying economically measurable; that is,
‘studyability stands for those institutional arrangements that are seen as minimum standards by
the accreditation board and have to be implemented by universities’ (Burck and Grendel 2011:
102). Finally, a study manager responsible for the integration of everyday study processes into
CampusNet defines the concept as follows:
Rules of studyability include: The total minimum of 180 ECTS (one ECTS refers to 30
working hours), 60 ECTS in one study year +/- 4 ECTS, of which 40 (+/- 3 ECTS) are in
the major subject and 20 (+/- 1 ECTS) in the minor subject. Module size covers 12 ECTS
(+/- 3 ECTS), with only one examination per module, and a maximum of five
examinations during one semester (3 in major and 2 in minor subject) (Interview 9
October 2013).
Although all definitions given above seem to converge on the meaning of ‘Studierbarkeit’ as
describing the best possible study conditions, their underlying translation processes tend not to be
simple reformulations of concepts into other words and numbers, but rather contain controversial
negotiations between the different groups involved. The official administrative understanding of
‘Studierbarkeit’, for instance, had to be revised after student protests that developed as part of a
country-wide education strike (Bildungsstreik) during the winter of 2009. Apart from protesting
against the Bologna Process in general, students complained about their work overload and
inflexible study regulations introduced in the course of the study reform. In addition to constant
negotiations, various technical devices are needed to support the translation processes. This
includes for instance the so-called ‘mirroring’ technique employed to ease Jogustine’s hotline
assistance. Being responsible for supporting students in their daily self-administration (for
instance course and examination registration and applications) the Jogustine-hotline staff simulate
(‘mirror’) user problems on their own desktops using fictive data, thus avoiding the need to
request actual user data which are not always legally accessible to hotline personnel.
As the Head of the Jogustine hotline stressed in an interview, translating individual
situations and problems into the technological language of Jogustine becomes especially
complicated in situations where the mirroring does not work. To give just one example, since the
introduction of CampusNet, applications for study can only be made online. However, many
students from abroad do not fit into the registration categories provided by the system’s input
mask, leading to problems that cannot be solved by simulating or ‘mirroring’, and causing
applicants considerable time and effort to get their application registered, and repeated long-
distance calls. Study and examination managers also point to conflict situations which cannot be
pre-standardised (or mirrored) but have to be handled individually. Such exceptional cases
quickly turn out to be problematic for the staff concerned since they are less regulated and often
lead to legally unclear situations. As a result, managers tend to avoid exceptional cases, often
defending themselves by pointing to the rules of Jogustine, which leads to a situation where study
management becomes even less flexible.
By investigating such seemingly neutral translations, frictions between the necessary yet
often impossible translation of study procedures and situations into the language of audit become
observable. Such frictions constitute a leaky connection between standards of excellence as ideal
visions on the one hand, and everyday language and practices on the other, leaving room for
negotiations, informal rule-making and creative solutions that allow for a change of auditing
concepts and procedures. An anthropological perspective on these translation processes benefits
from suggestions made by Shore and Wright in reference to policy research. Rather than asking
what the concepts and metaphors of the study reform mean, we should ask how they mean
(Shore, Wright and Però 2011: 20). How do their meanings and functions change in the course of
the translation processes and what effects do these changes entail?
Zones of transparency
Given that communication with Jogustine can occur from any computer and at any time,
everyone is empowered to administer himself or herself and can thus be made accountable for the
success of his or her self-management. While permanent online-access is required as a
precondition for students being able to study, nowhere is it discussed whether this might exclude
potential students. The student–computer connection is simply taken for granted. For instance, the
Jogustine hotline staff admits experiencing situations which make them feel that a computerised
normalcy might not apply to everyone. Assisting applicants in the application process, they had to
realise that online applications and phone consultations might entail unexpected costs for some
candidates, especially for those coming from less wealthy countries.
With the new online management of the student ‘life cycle’ (as the official description of
CampusNet reads), students are asked to act as self-administering subjects and are held
responsible for ensuring that the quality and pace of their studies is translatable into audit
language. As study instructors and lecturers would admit, this mode of subjectification requires
students to pursue verifiable study results that reduce their curiosity and readiness to engage in
more experimental and creative study practices whose outcomes cannot be verified in a similar
way. Students understand they are seen as being lazy; although all their activities are permanently
monitored, only achievements which can be translated into audit language are officially
recognised. The official counter-argument to this widespread critique points to the supposed
moral superiority of the new management system and its economic-numerical understanding of
quality and efficiency. Jogustine’s advocates argue that standardised study and teaching
management is more flexible, fair and transparent than previous management systems that were
based on interpersonal human communication. The claim is that online tools treat all users in the
very same way, so that teachers do not have the possibility of privileging some students, and
students are not able to cheat or to press teachers for alternative deadlines or grades. This
software-administered fairness does of course not guarantee the same chances for all students, as
it – to give but one example – does not offer equal access to all courses that they would like to
attend, since the lack of course instructors and seminar rooms still exists. Jogustine usually sorts
students according to standardised criteria which are seen as ethically preferable. In short, the
particular ‘fairness’ represented by Jogustine resembles what Michael Herzfeld has aptly called
‘bureaucratic indifference’ (Herzfeld 1993: 2) – an attitude of indifference towards the diversity
of possible everyday situations and the singularity of individual needs.
As Lampland and Star have noted, the ethics and morality of standards make certain
groups and possibilities of action visible while at the same time silencing ‘other’ choices
(Lampland and Star 2009: 8). The task of anthropological analysis then is to question this
technocratic ‘normalcy’ and moral normativity. Accordingly, I would argue that the current quest
for standardisation does not aim at a full transparency that would completely dissolve individuals
as objects of power. Rather, the university’s new campus management system operates according
to a principle of differentiated transparency. Standardisation aims to establish certain regimes of
visibility, or ‘zones of differentiated transparency’, which situate individuals and groups in a new
hierarchical relationship to each other (Krasmann 2011: 55). Various user groups are given
different forms of user and access rights to the system (the university president’s office, study
accounts, etc.). These different roles, forms of access and user rights are listed in an official
document entitled ‘Data Protection Concept for the Use of CampusNet’, but it is only the
administrator of the competence team who has access to the system’s so-called ‘global rights
management’. Other individuals involved in the management system cannot decide to which
‘transparency zone’ they will be assigned. As the head of the CampusNet competence team told
me in an interview, this caused some controversy during the early phase of the implementation
process when representatives of different disciplines argued against being assigned to the same
user groups and categories, emphasising the discrepancies between the ways teaching and
learning were organised in their respective departments, and underlining how important this
diversity was for their understanding of academic quality. ‘But believe me’, the Head of the
competence team argued, ‘many processes of teaching and learning are actually exactly the same,
the way in which the course of studies is regulated or the process of examination are the same’
(Interview 1 October 2012). As Mary Douglas once wrote, ‘only institutions can decide what is
supposed to be classified as same and similar’ (1991: 93). Only the trained eyes of the competent
expert are legitimised to see analogies, even without understanding a discipline’s specific
traditions, terminologies and ways of reasoning. When students log into Jogustine they access a
different screen from their teachers, and the teachers in turn are accessing different bits of
information than administrative staff users.
One effect of this hierarchically fragmented visibility is a sense of anonymity and
uncertainty. The academic’s everyday routine feels strictly organised, but at the same time
individuals can only follow their own work routine and are not able to grasp the whole process,
thus being unable to estimate, for instance, how much time an overall procedure will consume,
and who else will be involved. As a result, confusing situations constantly occur in everyday
working practice. For instance, if a member of a user group forgets to click-activate the ‘visibility
button’, this leaves other members of the same group in the dark about, say, examination grades,
and about the reason why this particular information was withheld. Individual users work within
specific zones of visibility bound to their role in the management system, hoping that somebody
(some experts?) will keep an overview and that things will somehow turn out right in the end. As
one examination manager told me, this creates respect for but also fear of Jogustine, especially
among younger students who often panic in the face of system errors that they attribute to failing
self-management practices, rather than to the system itself.
Unevenly distributed efficiency
Shifting the perspective from an analysis of ideology and the rhetorics invoked in the
standardisation processes of online campus management systems to the everyday practice of
standardising, even more tensions become apparent, which put into question the omnipresent
rationality and efficiency implied in systems of technological certainty. Observations of everyday
life with Jogustine make it strikingly clear how far this management system is still away from its
own explicit technological aim of managing the whole academic life cycle. Until now, only some
of the initially designed functions have been successfully implemented, and users still have to
cope with continual technical failures. As a professor for informatics reported during one of my
interviews, Jogustine is a typical example of what he calls ‘banana software’, which ripens while
being used and which is in constant need for improvement and additional financial investment.
Even members of the Jogustine competence team admitted that CampusNet actually is not as
efficient and functional as initially claimed by systems developers, although they say it has
continuously improved during the five years since its introduction. While Jogustine users –
students, lecturers and study administrators – approach the system in a pragmatic way, trying to
utilise its advantages and to avoid its deficits, they still hesitate to characterise this system as
efficient. Instead, Jogustine users point to the increasing bureaucratisation of work routines and to
the steady rise in time and financial investments necessary for maintaining the system.
While the alleged efficiency of online management is usually justified by its producers
and university officials in quantitative terms, as for instance by highlighting the fact that
CampusNet manages 700 study programmes and 10,000 modules countrywide, the inefficiencies
described above are mostly experienced individually and become visible while observing the
everyday working routines of individuals involved in online-management processes.
For instance, a study manager at the Department for German Studies summed up her daily
time-consuming encounters with Jogustine for me as follows. In order to make the obligatory
online course registration for students available, this study manager has to feed the department’s
entire study course information into the system. With several (old and new) examination
regulations simultaneously used at the department, the system is incapable of ‘translating’ this
situation into auditing language. In addition, due to the shortage of teaching personnel, each
seminar has to be linked to up to eleven different modules and this cannot be done automatically
either. Furthermore, some of these same seminars have been given three to four different titles
depending on the module they have been assigned to. Due to the mismatch between the actual
situation in the department and the standardised functionality of Jogustine, the study manager
perceives herself as working inefficiently ‘like in the stone age’, as she puts it:
I consult the study regulations, write all the courses down and mark manually with which
modules they should be connected. Since this is still rather confusing, I have even started
to additionally mark them with different colours and numbers. Then I provide the system
with all this information and check the data once more by logging into Jogustine,
checking if all the individual courses are placed within the correct modules (Interview
June 2013).
Being aware of the discrepancy between earlier official promises to reduce administrative work
and her everyday realities, the study manager even contacted CampusNet’s competence team
about alternative examination regulations that could be represented more easily in this system. As
the study manager recalls, ‘the revealing answer was that “we do not want science to suffer from
an insufficient management system”. But nobody cares if I have to suffer because of that, as I do
now!’ (Field diary June 2013).
Prior to the system’s introduction, Jogustine was expected to simplify study
administration processes in such a significant way that only one half-time study manager position
per department would be needed, while in fact at least two new study management positions had
to be introduced in most departments after CampusNet was launched. These new management
positions have mostly been financed through High School Pact funds which could – or should, in
the opinion of many of my interviewees – be used for employing teaching personnel. The overall
volume and scope of financial, work, time and energy investments in this new infrastructure of
excellence consequently is perceived by many of its users as being disproportionate to its
practical advantages. Given the extent of the investment made, however, my interviewees also
seriously doubted the university board’s willingness to consider alternative forms of study
management, or its interest in returning to at least some of the former study management
practices. Such a move also would mean acknowledging that the officially heralded solution
indeed was problematic in itself. It could also harm the public image of an ‘excellent’ university
that intends to be at the forefront of technological innovations, out-competing others in its
capability to realise both the aims of the Bologna Process and the national study and teaching
reform (efficiency, transparency, comparability). As Larkin recently pointed out, the appeal and
political address of infrastructural innovations precisely lies in their inherent link to imaginations
of modernity and progress (Larkin 2013: 332). The contradiction between the official vision of
this infrastructural innovation as being particularly effective on the one hand, and various user
experiences on the other demonstrates that CampusNet’s efficiency indeed is unevenly
distributed. We thus may ask in which respect, for whom and when does this new study
management system actually turn out to be effective?
The technological obstacles do not mean, however, that Jogustine has failed in achieving
its programmatic ideological aims or that the system has not already changed routines of teaching
and studying in a profound way. Jogustine is actually highly efficient in producing and
disseminating new expert knowledge and competencies, and in creating new structures and
professions. Among these new professionals are, for example, the already-mentioned
examination, course and study managers whose positions were established earlier in the Bologna
Process. These experts are responsible for ensuring that the software commands of the campus
management system are reflective of academic life, especially when the system does not
represent a university’s actual everyday routine. Experts are major actors in the work of
translating and harmonising conflicting everyday processes in that they connect public discourses
and policies (e.g. the Bologna Process, excellence in academia) to people (professors, students)
and technologies (Jogustine). But while these new experts indeed play a crucial role in the
process of implementing standards, many of them work under rather precarious conditions
marked by short employment contracts and extremely high workloads. This is why the experts
themselves often express sceptical attitudes vis-à-vis the Bologna reform and its audit culture.
For instance, in interviews the study and examination managers consistently criticised the
image of the student on which the new infrastructure of excellence has been modelled. This
image is based on the idea that students are able and also obliged to attend the university for eight
hours per day, although in practice this is unrealistic both in relation to the actual course schedule
and to the situation of many students, and it is exclusionary as a consequence. As one
examination manager admitted in an interview, most students who do not receive sufficient
financial support from their families want to earn their living themselves rather than relying on
social benefits. Even though she believed that such an attitude should be supported by allowing
more flexible study and examination schedules, she did not see possibilities for creating such
flexibility because of the system’s standardised vision of students as full-time workers.
As mentioned previously, study course or examination managers and other new experts
involved in the reform process understand their own professional situation – often marked by
temporary employment, unclear work tasks, work overload and uncertain career prospects – as a
product of the very reform they are asked to implement. They criticise the reliance on learning-
by-doing and the late introduction of professional training programmes which would help avoid
legally problematic decisions. Many of the managers who occupy part-time positions are
simultaneously enrolled as part-time PhD students or researchers. While some of them see that it
is impossible to bring research and management work together, all still try to keep up this double
occupancy in an attempt to increase future career options. Individual uncertainty persists despite
recently introduced professional training programmes and an increasing integration of the
manager position within university structures. Interviewees interpreted these developments as
institutional efforts to secure the manager positions while not making any commitments to the
individuals involved: ‘They always say we should participate in professional training
programmes because the certificates we get might be useful for future applications. But tellingly,
they never mention that these programmes also could be useful for our work here at this
university or even guarantee us the prolongation of our contracts’ (Interview 2 July 2013).
Similar to examination and study managers, many students and teachers are highly
reflexive about the new infrastructures of excellence. They deal critically with standardisation
issues in their everyday working life, negotiating the meaning of standards and audit and often
trying to avoid or subvert the system’s rules. Although supported by experts and authorities,
Jogustine was affected by such subversive interactions with its users. Its domain name was
‘cybersquatted’ (stolen), which made it necessary to insert a warning on Jogustine’s welcoming
page pointing to the fact that another, unauthorised Jogustine website existed on the net – with the
announcement of an imminent legal investigation sounding rather helpless. Student online
platforms and social networks contain discussion groups with names such as ‘Jogustine is a
bitch’, or ‘Sarah Connor will stop Jogustine’. These groups contain hundreds of comments such
as: ‘Well done, you heroes. Buying a software which already failed at other universities! Luckily
enough, real human contact persons will be able to help out if one encounters problems with this
bitch’.6 In these groups, solutions for technical problems are discussed, the meaning of the
management reform is critically questioned, and tactics for gaming the system are exchanged.
Such critical reflections however might not necessarily be helpful when it comes to problematic
study and teaching situations caused by study management technologies. As mentioned, due to
the restricted transparency it is especially difficult for students to recognise the actual reasons for
these problems and to identify responsible individuals and institutional units, not least since these
units often try to hide technological failures that could harm their expert status. Obviously, the
technocratic certainty of CampusNet does not necessarily eliminate individual uncertainty. On the
contrary, with the introduction of an infrastructure for excellence at the university, individual
uncertainty seems to materialise as a basic principle for a new organisational administrative
structure that functions in the most effective and economical way.
Conclusion: effects and productivities
While the fragmented visibility described above makes it difficult to discern an overall impact of
the emerging infrastructure of excellence, my investigation of the language and everyday practice
of online study management makes some of the effects of this infrastructure visible. The
introduction of New Public Management and audit at the university has reorganised actions and
competencies among the different actors involved in teaching and study processes. It has changed
and standardised the collaboration between lecturers and students by channelling it through study
offices and related expertise centres (CampusNet Competence Team, Jogustine Hotline, etc.)
which serve as new nodes of communication and competence. Through these nodes, political,
technological and everyday concepts of study excellence are translated and harmonised with each
other. With the spread of economic and technological thought that understands quality teaching
and studying as quantifiable and verifiable comes the urge for lecturers and students to regard
themselves as self-enterprising and self-administering individuals, responsible for making their
own individual achievements visible and transparent in numerical terms. To paraphrase Susan
Leigh Star, it seems as if the new standards currently implemented at this and other German
universities promote a neoliberal, economised university model, thus silencing the previously
dominant Humboldtian ideal of academic work based on a vision of academic independence, trust
and interpersonal communication.7 At the same time, however, it is important to stress that these
new standards, understood as a ‘set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual material)
objects’ (Lampland and Star 2009: 11), are still very much in the making. In addition to
economisation and standardisation, which constitute the invisible but obvious impact of current
infrastructural change, multiple unintended consequences of this process – moments of friction
and ‘critical subjects’ (Shore, Wright and Però 2011: 21) – have emerged.
Such frictions and spaces of critical subjectivity that are expressed in daily practice or
through spontaneous action remain less prominent than official representations of the study
reform and infrastructural change. They should not be regarded as unimportant, however, but as
forming part in a larger negotiation process. Although it may look as if the standardisation and
development of a new audit culture implemented through the management technologies was a
streamlined or normalising procedure, it is rather the opposite that is the case. Standardisation and
auditing are not yet normalised or taken for granted, but contested and constantly negotiated
between different groups involved in a university’s lifeworld. It should be an anthropological
concern to make these frictions within the university reform process visible and to take them
seriously.
Contributor details
Asta Vonderau obtained her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2008. She is currently a
postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University and an
associate professor for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Mainz, Germany. Her current
research project is entitled Farming Data, Forming the Cloud: The Environmental Impact and
Cultural Production of Information Technology.
Email: asta.vonderau@socant.su.se
References
Bowker, C.G. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences,
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Burck, K. and Grendel, T. (2011) ‘Studierbarkeit – ein institutionelles Arrangement?’,Zeitschrift
für Hochschulentwicklung ZFHE 6, no. 2: 99–105.
Douglas, M. (1991) Wie Institutionen denken?, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Foucault, M. (1997) ‘Technologies of the self’, in M. Foucault (author), Paul Rabinow (ed.)
Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, New York: New Press, 223–251.
German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) (2008) Educating for a Global World? Reforming German
Universities toward the European Higher Education Area, Bonn: Bologna Centre Service
for the Universities.
Hastrup, K. (1995) A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory, London:
Routledge.
Herzfeld, M. (1993) The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of
Western Bureaucracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hochhsculrektorenkonferenz (2011) Entschließung “Finanzierung der Hochschule”, (German
Rector’s Conference: Resolution on Funding), 22 November,
http://www.hrk.de/positionen/gesamtliste-beschluesse/position/convention/entschliessung-
finanzierung-der-hochschulen/ (accessed 11 February 2014).
Krasmann, S. (2011) ‘Der Präventionsstaat im Einvernehmen: Wie Sichtbarkeitsregime
stillschweigend Akzeptanz produzieren’, in L. Hempel, S. Krasmann and U. Bröckling
(eds) Sichtbarkeitsregime: Überwachung, Sicherheit und Privatheit im 21. Jahrhundert,
Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 53–70.
Lampland, M. and Star, S.L. (2009) Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying
and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, Ithaca: Cornel University Press.
Larkin, B. (2013) ‘The politics and poetics of infrastructure’, The Annual Review of Anthropology
42: 372–343.
Münch, R. (2011) Akademischer Kapitalismus: Über die politischer Ökonomie der
Hochschulreform, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
Shore, C. and Wright, S. (eds) (1997) Anthropology of Policy: Perspectives on Governance and
Power, London: Routledge.
Shore, C. and Wright, S. (2000) ‘Coercive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher
education’, in M. Strathern (ed.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability,
Ethics and the Academy, London: Routledge, 57–89.
Shore, C., Wright, S. and Però, D. (2011) Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of the
Contemporary Power, New York: Berghahn Books.
Star, S.L. (1999) ‘The ethnography of infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3:
377–391.
Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and
the Academy, London: Routledge.
Wissenschaftsrat (2012) Empfehlungen zur Akkreditierung als Instrument der
Qualitätssicherung, (The German Council of Science and Humanities: Accreditation as an
Instrument for Quality Assurance), http://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/2259-
12.pdf, 25 May (accessed 11 February 2014).
Notes
1 CampusNet is the name of the IT product (Campus Management System), while Jogustine is the
name that was given to this system at this university when it was introduced to its users. System
users therefore normally refer to the system as Jogustine, while system administrators often use
the name CampusNet.
2 Bundesmininterium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research),
http://www.bmbf.de/archiv/newsletter/de/6142.php?hilite=Hochschulpakt (accessed 11 February
2014).
3 Datenlotsen Informationssysteme http://www.datenlotsen.de
4 Before Data Pilots entered the market, only one state-owned company, Hochschul-Informations-
System GmbH (HIS), was responsible for IT management system development for universities.
5 German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) is an association of German universities representing them
in politics and public. The term ‘Studierbarkeit’ does not have one standardised definition, it is
sometimes translated into English as ‘studyability’.
6 Studiverzeichnis (Social network for students) http://www.studivz.net
7 The so-called Humboldtian university ideal builds on a vision of the university as a place for
self-determined free studies and for independent individuals, following Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767–1835). The Humboldtian university ideal was very influential in many European countries
throughout the twentieth century.