Paper short abstract:

This article shows how accountability and audit regimes are objects which can be manipulated by skilful professionals with considerable artistry - reworking the metrics to fit their own subjectivities and thereby making sense of their roles in the organisation.

Paper long abstract:

Audit cultures are often portrayed as regimes which generate truths, fix responsibilities and constrain or produce certain forms of subjectivity. Yet they can also be subject to experimentation, optimization and contestation (Winthereik & Jensen, 2017). This article draws on an ethnographic study of an international development organisation to show how accountability and audit regimes are objects which can be manipulated by skilful professionals. If audit regimes do institutional work by expressing and pressing for values within an organisational hierarchy, then the richness of these regimes – the variety of metrics and indices and indicators within the organisational landscape – permits opportunities for creativity and lassitude. Drawing on two cases within the ethnographic study, the article shows the considerable artistry through which officials navigate this landscape and express their professional values, reworking the metrics to fit their own subjectivities and thereby making sense of their roles in the organisation. The article suggests that metrics and targets are clay to be manipulated as much as cages to imprison. It considers how institutional actors use metrics as part of their organisational sense-making and self-expression.