Quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s

University perspectives

Bibliographic Data

ID11487591
AuthorsLesley Vidovich (Graduate School USA, corresponding author), Paige Porter (0000-0002-2988-4095)
Year1999
Volume14
Issue6
Pages567-586
Publication date1999-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Education Policy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0268-0939 • E-ISSN: 1464-5106
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/026809399286099
OpenAlexW2046097802
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited21

In the last decade ‘quality’ has assumed the status of one of the meta-discourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This paper focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality policy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal of Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (national) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, policy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews with key university personnel provide evidence of the ‘messy’ realities of the policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the different historical contexts of universities which were categorized as ‘traditional’, ‘alternative’ and ‘former college’ types. However, despite such variation, the ‘bigger picture’ effect of the quality policy under investigation was to enhance Australian national Government control of higher education, albeit at a ‘distance’, characteristic of the culture of performativity increasingly pervading higher education across many OECD countries. A further effect was to increase inequalities, both between and within universities

Economics · Education policy · Government (linguistics · Higher education · Management · Performativity · Policy analysis · Policy studies · Political science · Public policy · Public relations · Quality (philosophy · Quality management · Quality policy · Sociology · Global Educational Policies and Reforms · Higher Education Governance and Development · Higher Education Learning Practices · Law · Public Administration

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