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qualityresearchinternational.com
A critical analysis of quality culture
Lee Harvey
Professor, Copenhagen Business School
http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com
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Introduction
• QA is ubiquitous
– Growing professionalisation of external QA.
– Not matched by the development of robust
and effective internal quality procedures.
• Academic staff continue to be sceptical of
quality systems; external and internal.
– systems that generate reports but do not
engage with the heart of academic endeavour
• Role of quality culture
– Panacea for problems of IQA
– Or something completely different?
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IQA and Quality Culture
• Differentiate quality culture as the latest
buzzword, adopted unreflectively within
institutions, from quality culture as an
organising principle (a way of life) that
empowers all stakeholders within higher
education.
• Quality culture is poorly understood
– often implicitly construed as embodying a
system of internal quality monitoring.
• Argue that having an internal quality
system ≠ a quality culture.
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IQA system:
• bureaucratic, mechanistic device with a
set of procedures, manuals, guidelines
and imposed requirements.
– At worst, these are controlling or require
compliance.
– At best, they invoke accountability in an
attempt to encourage improvement.
• shape depends on purposes
– rhetoric is improvement, but inflexible
– regarded as ‘internal-external’ requirements
that demand compliance rather than
encourage engagement.
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IQA system
Why?
• Because most internal processes do not
exhibit the characteristics of a lived
culture, rather they reflect the rules and
expectations of an ‘audit culture’.
• They are fundamentally distrustful and
responses are usually constrained by an
externally-imposed framework of thinking
embodied in backward-looking forms and
templates to be completed.
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Culture
• Numerous definitions
• Meaning changed over time
– Elite; ‘culture’
– Democratic; cultures (subcultures)
• However,
– culture is shared, learned and symbolic
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Culture: caveats
• Critique of homogeneous evolving elitist
concept.
• Retains a sense of creative endeavours.
• Dialectical synthesis of the ‘producer’-‘reader’.
• Democratic form is about a learned way of life.
• Culture is symbolic as much as it is material.
• Culture and ideology are related.
• A dialectical relationship between culture and
economy, not a deterministic one.
• Culture as transcending the human actors or
as possessed uniquely by people.
• Subcultures can be sites of resistance.
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Culture: complexity
• Important to acknowledge complexity.
• Focusing on the concept of ‘culture’ rather
than the on mechanism for developing
quality assurance procedures.
• Complexity is ignored because QC is
being used as a manipulative tool
– an end product, preferably codified as a set of
procedures to ensure ‘accountability’ or to
encourage improvement
– leads to alienation: imposed, unwelcome
– a long way from the notion of culture as a way
of life.
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Accountability and improvement
• QC tied up in debates about role of QA.
• Problem of reconciliation of accountability
and improvement.
BUT
• If accountability is fundamentally about
ensuring compliance to financial and
policy requirements and regulations, then
the notion of a conflict between that and
improvement is illusory.
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Accountability and improvement
• Absurd that developing critical reflective
learners should be constrained by
accountability procedures that purport to
be about quality.
• Improvement does not occur as the result
of regulation
• It occurs through critical engagement.
• Accountability and improvement are
distinct not related dimensions of quality.
• QA has created an illusory tension by
pretending that intrinsic quality is linked
to the process of monitoring quality.
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Caveats in practice
•
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Cultural imperialism: transferability.
QC not predefined, creatively developed.
QC not mechanical, dialectical, lived reality.
Democratic, knowledge generator.
QC way of seeing, not checking outputs.
Not a tool but an ideological construct.
Cannot divorce from context: critical
deconstruction of the purpose.
• QC owned by the people who live it.
• Effective QC is ideologically compatible with
the lived experience; is rendered invisible not
the site of resistance.
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QC and Transformative Learning (TL)
• QC as context for transformative learning
• TL more than student-centred learning
• TL involves engagement and critical
reflection
• Deconstruction and reconstruction as
ongoing (H&K) not ‘paradigmatic’ (M)
– “TL is an approach that…treats students as
intellectual performers rather than as
compliant audience…an active process of
coming to understand. It attempts to
empower students not just as ‘customers’ in
the education process but for life.”
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Conclusion
• QC is not a process or set of procedures
that can be imported and imposed
• Is there a way to encourage QC?
– disengage the development of a QC from sets
of assurance procedures.
– no simple checklist of actions to create a QC.
– developing a QC is synonymous with
developing a self-critical and reflective
community of practitioners. This does not
occur by imposing compliance requirements
(except in the perverse way of uniting the
community against the requirements).
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Conclusion
(continued)
• A TL approach
– demands a critical dialectical approach on the
part of the teacher as well as the student
– requires a reconceptualisation of the
pedagogic process
– involves an ideological critique of the purpose
of learning and of the evaluation of quality.
• A quality culture
– embodies professional reflection as a learning
community (of all the participants)
– is intrinsic to a way of life, a way of thinking
and a way of coming to understand
– cannot be codified in a manual!
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Thank you
lh.ll@cbs,.dk
www.qualityresearchinternational.com/glossary
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