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Undisclosed desires
(2019)
Following decades of quality management featuring in higher education settings, questions regarding its implementation, impact and outcomes remain. Indeed, leaving aside anecdotal case studies and value-laden documentaries of best practice, current research still knows very little about the implementation of quality management in teaching and learning within higher education institutions. Referring to data collected from German higher education institutions in which a quality management department or functional equivalent was present, this article theorises and provides evidence for the supposition that the implementation of quality management follows two implicit logics. Specifically, it tends either towards the logic of appropriateness or, contrastingly, towards the logic of consequentialism. This study’s results also suggest that quality managers’ socialisation is related to these logics and that it influences their views on quality management in teaching and learning.
Undisclosed desires
(2019)
Following decades of quality management featuring in higher education settings, questions regarding its implementation, impact and outcomes remain. Indeed, leaving aside anecdotal case studies and value-laden documentaries of best practice, current research still knows very little about the implementation of quality management in teaching and learning within higher education institutions. Referring to data collected from German higher education institutions in which a quality management department or functional equivalent was present, this article theorises and provides evidence for the supposition that the implementation of quality management follows two implicit logics. Specifically, it tends either towards the logic of appropriateness or, contrastingly, towards the logic of consequentialism. This study’s results also suggest that quality managers’ socialisation is related to these logics and that it influences their views on quality management in teaching and learning.
Quality management (QM) in teaching and learning has strongly “infected” the higher education sector and spread around the world. It has almost everywhere become an integral part of higher education reforms. While existing research on QM mainly focuses on the national level from a macro-perspective, its introduction at the institutional level is only rarely analyzed. The present article addresses this research gap. Coming from the perspective of organization studies, it examines the factors that were crucial for the introduction of QM at higher education institutions in Germany. As the introduction of QM can be considered to be a process of organizational change, the article refers to Kurt Lewin’s seminal concept of “unfreezing” organizations as a theoretical starting point. Methodologically, a mixed methods approach is applied by combining qualitative data derived from interviews with institutional quality managers and quantitative data gathered from a nationwide survey. The results show that the introduction of QM is initiated by either internal or external processes. Furthermore, some institutions follow a rather voluntary approach of unfreezing, while others show modes of forced unfreezing. Consequently, the way how QM was introduced has important implications for its implementation.
Der vorliegende Beitrag fasst die bisherige Forschung über die Wirkungen von Gebietsreformen zusammen und analysiert diese aus inhaltlicher und methodischer Perspektive. Basierend auf einer Auswertung von ausgewählten nationalen und europäischen Studien werden Wirkungsbefunde in drei zentralen Dimensionen dargestellt: (1) Leistungsfähigkeit, Verwaltungs- und Veranstaltungskraft, (2) Einsparungen, Skalenerträge und Wirtschaftlichkeit und (3) Partizipation und demokratische Kontrolle. Im Ergebnis kann festgestellt werden, dass die Leistungs- und Handlungsfähigkeit kommunaler Verwaltungen durch Gebietsreformen überwiegend positiv beeinflusst wird. Dagegen sind die empirischen Befunde bezüglich Wirtschaftlichkeit, Einsparungen und Skalenerträge sowie zur Partizipation und demokratischen Kontrolle nicht eindeutig.