Accounting for Socialization: Quantitative Priming, Language, and Tools in a Masters of Public Affairs Program

Abstract

Quantitative accountability has become a widespread rationale for how organizations ought to operate in the twenty-first century. However, we know little about how the people who craft and implement such policies learn this rationale. How do future policy professionals learn quantitative accountability? How do the people responsible for organizational accountability learn it, and learn to do it? To answer these questions, we draw from a two-year ethnography of a cohort of students at a highly regarded Masters of Public Affairs (MPA) program. We find that, instead of directly debating forms of organizational control such as accountability, students learn accountability indirectly through an emphasis on the quantitative techniques that facilitate accountability. MPA students are primed into a quantitative view of their future careers, acquire quantitative “language” and “tools,” and are socialized into accountability in ways that are both tacit and tangible, even as the appropriateness of accountability itself is largely unquestioned.