Escaping Numbers? Intimate Accounting, Informed Publics and the Uncertain Assemblages of Authority and Non-Authority

Recent decades have seen a significant rise in the use of numeric evidence in education policy and governance. Using the case of the Education Revolution in Australia, this paper explores the processes by which both 'distant accounting' and 'intimate accounting' were made possible by new national assessments and a public website which published comparative information about schools' performance on these assessments. Building on concepts proposed by Kristin Asdal (2011) on intimate actions in accounting, the paper elaborates how Australian regulating authorities created new intimacies by compelling schools to reveal details they might have preferred to keep private. Parents, and the public in general, came to be seen as deserving of such intimate information, and as capable of using such information appropriately. The resulting 'informed publics' then played a significant role in the productions of authority and non-authority. Various efforts unfolded to challenge the authority of numbers and to escape being governed by them, by subverting the efforts of quantification and refusing the numbers that were produced. Tracing the story of the Education Revolution affords an opportunity to elaborate the processes of 'accounting intimacy' suggested by Asdal (2011) and to examine the relationship between 'the production of non-authority' that she described, the production of 'non-calculation' suggested by Callon and Law (2005), and the concept of 'informed publics' conceptualised by Callon et al. (2009). The paper proposes that 'distant' and 'intimate' forms of accounting are not mutually exclusive, but can operate simultaneously and even reinforce each other, and it describes how this was achieved in the Education Revolution.