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

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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.