Professor Cris Shore

Staff details

Position

Professor of Social Anthropology

Department

Anthropology

Email

c.shore (@gold.ac.uk)

Political anthropology; Europe; Corruption; Organisations; Higher Education; Anthropology of Policy; Audit culture.

Cris joined Goldsmiths in January 2019. This was something of a return for him as he had previously worked in the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths from 1990 to 2002. Prior to returning to the UK he worked for 15 years at the University of Auckland in New Zealand where he was Head of Department and founding Director of the Europe Institute. In 2018 he moved to Sweden to take up a one-year post as Guest Professor in Public Management at the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research (SCORE) where he researched management and leadership in public organisations.

Teaching and supervision

Political anthropology, European societies, anthropology of organisations and policy, critical studies of management & governance, higher education, corruption, 'audit culture'. New Zealand, Britain.

Cris convenes a 2nd year undergraduate module called 'Ethnography of a Selected Region: Europe' and an MA module called Anthropological Research Metho

Research interests

Cris studied anthropology at Sussex University. His PhD thesis was a study of the Italian Communist Party and Eurocommunism. He has conducted fieldwork in Italy, Belgium (on EU civil servants and the cultural politics of European integration), Britain and New Zealand (on politics, university reform, and the global knowledge economy). His work spans several fields including EU institutions and policies, the state, nationalism, elites, corruption, higher education, the rise of ‘audit culture’ and the anthropology of policy. He was founding editor of the journal Anthropology in Action and a founding member and Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP), a Section of the American Anthropological Association (2016-18). With Susan Wright, he is co-editor of the Stanford University Press book series Anthropology of Policy.

Cris's work engages with issues in political anthropology, European ethnography and the study of organisations, particularly the governance and management of universities. His main research interests include power, ideology, the effects of systems of measurement and ranking on individuals and organisations, corruption, and the anthropology of policy. His research covers a range of issues of theoretical and public policy interest including the European Union, the State, elites, corruption, ‘audit culture’ and higher education reform.

Featured publications

2017: Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Universities in the Knowledge Economy. Oxford/New

2018: The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Postcolonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the U

2013: Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge, Oxford/New York: B

2011: Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, Oxford: Berghahn

1963: Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration, London: Routledge [260 pp].

Publications and research outputs

Article

Shore, Cris. 2024. Management consultants and university futures: Academic capitalism and the capture of UK public higher education. Public Money & Management, ISSN 0954-0962

Longmuir, Katriona; Park, Julie; Fitzgerald, Ruth; Legge, Michael and Shore, Cris. 2024. Hope: Valuing lives and persons with degenerative conditions — Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, 20(1), pp. 1-26. ISSN 0112-5990

Shore, Cris. 2024. The bureaucratization of ethical integrity: Research ethics committees and imaginaries of risk. Anthropology Today, 40(2), pp. 8-10. ISSN 0268-540X

Book

Shore, Cris and Wright, Susan. 2024. Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World. London: Pluto Press. ISBN 9780745336459

Book Section

Shore, Cris and Thedvall, Renita. 2023. Researching the Eurocrats. In: Mathieu Segers and Steven Van Hecke, eds. The Cambridge History of the European Union: Volume 1: European Integration Outside-In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 471-493. ISBN 9781108780865

Shore, Cris and Wright, Susan. 2021. The Kafkaesque Pursuit of ‘World Class’: Audit Culture and the Reputational Arms Race in Academia. In: Sharon Rider; Michael A. Peters; Mats Hyvönen and Tina Besley, eds. World Class Universities: A Contested Concept. Singapore: Springer, pp. 59-76. ISBN 9789811575976

Shore, Cris. 2020. Symbiotic or Parasitic? Universities, Academic Capitalism and the Global Knowledge Economy. In: Emma Heffernan; Fiona Murphy and Jonathan Skinner, eds. Collaborations: Anthropology in a Neoliberal Age. London: Routledge, pp. 23-44. ISBN 9781350002265

Edited Book

Østbø Kuldova, Tereza and Shore, Cris, eds. 2024. Compliance, Defiance, and ‘Dirty’ Luxury: New Perspectives on Anti-Corruption in Elite Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783031571398

Shore, Cris; Raudon, Sally and Williams, David V., eds. 2020. The Crown and Constitutional Reform. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9780367511647

Shore, Cris and Williams, David V., eds. 2019. The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Postcolonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108496469

Professional projects

Anthropology of the state and constitutional reform:
In 2014 he was awarded a major Royal Society of New Zealand ‘Marsden Fund’ award to carry out a three year study of ‘The Crown’ as an institution of government in postcolonial New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries. His most recent book (with David Williams) is The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Post-Colonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

University futures and the global knowledge economy:
Between 2010 – 2017 he was part of two EU funded international researcher exchange projects that explored university reform and globalisation, New Public Management, and universities in the global knowledge economy. He has continued this work and is currently researching the effects of indicators, rankings and New Public Management on the performance and subjectivity of academics.

Media engagements

Interview with Gerhardt Hoffstaedter and Fern Thompsett (UNSW) “World 101X” series

‘The Academy and Freedom to Dissent’

Conferences and talks

2018: ‘A Conspiracy of Illusion’?
Performance-Based Metrics, New Public Management and the Politics of Accountability’ The 2018 Score Lecture on Organisation

2017: Academic Capitalism, Lecture for UoA