Brian Poole

Quality, Semantics and the Two Cultures.

Purpose – The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to engage with the definition of quality as “excellence” and to show why this could be regarded as unhelpful and misleading; and, second, to suggest some factors which contribute to a “cultural divide” between quality assurance specialists in universities and their colleagues who are full‐time academics. In both cases the paper seeks to raise and explore these issues because their resolution may suggest ways forward for quality assurance in higher education.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is generally based on consideration and critical evaluation of published work relevant to the two issues mentioned previously. However, other forms of evidence are drawn into the argument. Notably, lexical data from the British National Corpus are examined in order to substantiate points about the semantics of the word “quality”.Findings – The paper finds, on the grounds of both lexical semantics and consideration of scholarly literature on quality assurance in...

The rather elusive concept of ‘doctorateness’: a reaction to Wellington

This paper summarises and then critiques some of the key arguments and conclusions provided by Wellington who argues that it would be sensible to give up the search for the ‘inner essence’ of ‘doctorateness’ (a term referring to a common quality of doctoral candidates or of their written dissertations). It is argued here that progress towards description of doctorateness has in fact already been made, and it is proposed that this can be built on by promoting further discussion focusing on issues such as whether doctorateness should be seen as residing in doctoral theses, doctoral candidates, or both; and by recognising the polysemous nature of concepts like ‘originality’ and ‘new knowledge’ which often arise in university documentation relating to work at doctoral level.