Macro narratives on transnational education reform lock us into atemporal and ahistorical analyses and seem to miss the importance of agency in the interpretation and negotiation of policy processes (Dale & Robertson, 2012; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Rosenau, 2008; Shore & Wright, 1997; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). In order to grasp the agency dimension of the Bologna Process, this paper argues that it is important to re-conceptualize globalization and agency. Gaining inspiration from Barad, the paper suggests relinquishing globalization as a geometrical concern of size – the macro – and a geographical concern of domain – the territorial claims – and supplementing it with topological concerns such as connectivity and reach, allowing us to view global and local as intra-actively produced through one another (Barad, 2007). The global becomes a dimension of social geography rather than a space in its own right or a territorial domain (Scholte, 2008). This means that global connections made in the Bologna Process qualitatively change the ‘where’ of social and professional life and the ways in which social intra-acting is organized (Scholte, 2008). Drawing on Barad’s notion of distributed agency, this paper explores how the Bologna Process alters professional working life in higher education institutions through human (managers) and non-human (Bologna Stocktaking Scorecards) agents. The scorecards’ extended use of visuals to display big data has the capacity to transgress nation states and establish transnational policy processes since it no longer depends on text. The scorecards are affectively wired. They seem to mobilize and recruit certain affects (Wetherell, 2012). The color coding works as an alert system that calibrates the signatory states to peer pressure by modulating the affective register of shame (Massumi, 2005). The fear of shame makes the governance feasible because it ignites a mimetic, competitive desire for ‘better performance’ (Girard, 1966). The intra-action of scorecards, shame and desire prove to be powerful agencies and part of the secret of how 47 nations are mobilized and governed without passing any laws.

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