Ourania Filippakou

The Idea of Quality in Higher Education: A Conceptual Approach.

The paper suggests that the idea of quality in higher education is ideologically constructed and conducted. In a spiral of mutual reinforcements, quality regimes naturalise experience, while the theories of that practice legitimise the naturalness of ‘quality’. I shall suggest that quality regimes provide too narrow readings of higher education. The central concepts, which I propose to use – discourse and power – emphasise the connectedness of ideology and quality in higher education. In particular, I suggest that the ideological character of the idea of quality in higher education is evident in discourses – which themselves are interlinked in networks. These discourses and networks are backed up by power and this helps to sustain their ideological character. Thus, this paper attempts two things: to outline a conceptual framework concerning the ideological character of the idea of quality in higher education and to draw attention to the organisation of that ideological formation.

The world‐class league tables and the sustaining of international reputations in higher education

The purpose of this exploratory article is to broaden our understanding of institutional reputation. It argues that it is vital to understand how prestigious institutions of higher education evaluate the basis of their own reputations. While accepting the importance of institutional research outputs, which are so critical to the current ‘world‐class’ ranking lists, it puts forward alternative criteria that elite institutions are likely to embrace, and suggests ways in which their significance could be researched. There have been two main academic approaches to the ranking lists: the first explores their methodological weaknesses and suggests ways in which they could be improved; the second offers a moral condemnation – they are invariably poorly constructed, have negative policy connotations and their use should be restricted. This article takes a different approach: we need to know what institutions believe is the basis of their own reputations, and what changes they are prepared to pursue in order to sustain it.

The Changing Structure of British Higher Education: How diverse is it?

With the passage of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act the British system of higher education formally moved from a binary to a unitary structure. However, ever since successive governments have argued for a diversified model of higher education within which institutions should pursue contrasting goals. This article offers an interpretation of the key ingredients of institutional diversification and constructs alternative structural models of higher education. It proceeds by exploring the changing structure of British higher education since the creation of the unitary model. The argument is that there has been a steady emergence of flexible sectors, which both converge and diversify. However, there is a danger that the 2011 White Paper, rather than sustaining flexible sectors, could intensify the nascent shift in the direction of stratification marked by increasing differentiation between sectors as they converge internally.

The troubling concept of class: reflecting on our ‘failure’ to encourage sociology students to re-cognise their classed locations using autobiographical methods

Abstract This paper provides a narrative of the four authors’ commitment to auto/biographical methods as teachers and researchers in ‘new’ universities. As they went about their work, they observed that, whereas students engage with the gendered, sexualised and racialised processes when negotiating their identities, they are reluctant or unable to conceptualise ‘class-ifying’ processes as key determinants of their life chances. This general inability puzzled the authors, given the students’ predominantly working-class backgrounds. Through application of their own stories, the authors explore the sociological significance of this pedagogical ‘failure’ to account for the troubling concept of class not only in the classroom but also in contemporary society.

The evolution of the quality agenda in higher education: the politics of legitimation

ABSTRACT Taking the evolution of the quality agenda in the UK as its centrepiece, this article analyses the politics of legitimation accompanying the emergence of quality assurance and the contribution of quality enhancement to the power play therein. This article argues that over the last 25 years the quality agenda has been used as a proxy – a state steering mechanism – to fulfil political ends and that two trends mark that history: the rise of the regulatory state and the development of quasi-markets. The article also places these issues into the contexts of globalisation and the emergence of regions of quality assurance around the world. However, what shapes the article is not this argument per se, but trying critically to reflect on the quality agenda as a political position, and see the ways in which the epistemology of higher education is embedded in the politics of both national reforms and international political relations.

Policymaking and the politics of change in higher education: The new 1960s universities in the UK, then and now

Through an analysis of the foundation of the so-called ‘new universities’ in the UK, this article offers an interpretation of the change process in higher education. The argument is that although change is driven by economic and social forces, it is the political interpretation of these forces that steers the change process and, therefore, determines the shape of new institutional structures and how they are supposed to perform their tasks. The article contrasts the original steering of the change process by state and quasi-state institutions with the more recent emergence of state-regulated market pressure as the force for change in higher education.

Expanding the English Medical Schools: The Politics of Knowledge Control.

Since 1997 there have been two concerted attempts to expand the number of medical school students in England: by increasing the size of existing medical schools, and by creating new medical schools. These initiatives have been a direct result of government policy, although policy implementation was delegated to the state apparatus. They also led to a struggle between higher education interests and the General Medical Council for knowledge control. The aim of this article is to offer an analytical framework for this conflict, and to draw attention to consequent shifts in university governance and the epistemological framing of higher education.

Academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities as a new paradigm of ‘Development’

Abstract The interest of higher education researchers in entrepreneurialism in European universities began in the late 1990s with the appearance of two path-breaking books: Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie on Academic Capitalism and Burton Clark on Creating Entrepreneurial Universities. Since that time ‘entrepreneurial’ has become a popular term to describe what many people, politicians in particular, believe is necessary for university survival, and indeed economic survival, as the new paradigm of development. Drawing mostly from a three-year comparative study undertaken as part of the European Framework social science research programme, this article explores whether this new paradigm of ‘development’ is a contingent result of the huge expansion of higher education in the previous quarter century or whether it is primarily the result of ideological changes which have led to the current global dominance of neo-liberalism. The view we have attempted to put forward is the latter. The article deploys ideas and research from governmentality theory to suggest some limitations of the use of empirical data in current higher education policy research and some ways of thinking differently about entrepreneurialism and Clarks ‘pathways of transformation’ to the universities he studied. The article offers a short example of the useful work that social theory can do in relation to policy agendas like university entrepreneurialism which often lie unproblematized within higher policy and practice.