Doing things with numbers: The Danish National Audit Office and the governing of university teaching

Like the Supreme Audit Institutions of many other OECD countries, the Danish National Audit Office has stepped up its performance auditing of public administrations and agencies in order to ensure that they provide value for money. But how do performance audits contribute to making state institutions change their conduct? Based on the case of the Danish National Audit Office's auditing of the quality of teaching at Danish universities, this paper seeks to show, first, that the quantification and, by the same token, simplification of the practices subjected to performance auditing are key to understand how SAIs render complex activities amenable to assessment. Secondly, the paper seeks to show how the quantification of the quality of university teaching contributed to make academic staff and universities, groups that have a large room of professional autonomy, viewing, assessing and, ultimately, govern their teaching activities differently.