Accreditation of has spread to the public health care services of most OECD countries over the last few decades with a view to hold medical professions accountable to the quality of their work. Implementation of accreditation is economically costly and has often been met with widespread resistance by the medical professions subjected to it. This should make us wonder why accreditation is implemented in the public sector. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to explain this development. This paper presents and discusses a series of analytical frameworks that could be used to grasp accreditation and its introduction in the public sectors. It is argued that most existing analytical frameworks do not fare very well in grasping the advent of accreditation. The paper then discusses Michael Power’s theory of audit explosion and Foucault’s analytics of government and argues that together they provide a critical and sophisticated understanding of accreditation as a particular neoliberal technology of government. It is argued that the introduction of accreditation may be understood on the background of the emergence of a quality management assemblage in public health care made up by new visibilities and standards of quality, neoliberal ways of problematizing and governing professional autonomy in the public sector, and promises of higher quality and democratic accountability.
