Title: Power, Enlightenment and Quality Evaluation
Abstract: Within European countries and across them, forms of quality assurance have multiple purposes and are being driven forward by different interest groups. The academic community, the state and the market are the dominant forces at work, with forms of quality assurance being oriented separately towards judgments on quality (a summative function) and quality improvement (a formative function). A major fault line distinguishing the different purposes at work is that between enlightenment and surveillance. Any one form of quality evaluation can be assessed against this dimension: is it essentially a means for the faculty to understand itself better and so be enabled to transform its own activities by and for itself? In such a situation, we are in the presence of a form of enlightenment. Or is it a means by which the state can know better and thereby control more effectively what goes on in the institutions increasingly drawn together into a higher education system? In this latter situation, we are in the presence of a means of state surveillance. Partly as a proxy for state steerage but also a force in its own right, the market represents a separate fault line. However, in Europe at least, consumer satisfaction remains for now a weaker, if strengthening, form of leverage in quality evaluation and in the discussion that follows, it will take a residual place behind the state-academe axis. Each form of quality evaluation offers a particular reflection of the forces at work: the collegium, the state and the market. Nonetheless, within this melange of differential power and purposes and the resulting multitude of forms of quality evaluation, a dominant trend can be detected. The greater weight of developments reflects a drive on the part of the state to secure higher levels of control and surveillance over higher education. Firstly, a technicist approach to quality evaluation is adopted, most notably through the growing use of performance indicators. Secondly, this technicism is coupled with an attempt to deploy evaluation as a means of steering the higher education system more in the direction of the labour market. This is a double instrumentalism which reduces the possibility of evaluation having hermeneutic or dialogic value within the academy and which could enable the academic members of the higher education system to become more genuinely a professional community. This, at any rate, is the thesis to be argued for here.
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 50
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