Views from Below: Academics coping with quality

This paper reports on an investigation, ongoing since the early 1990s, and now in its second phase, of how academics have sought to make sense of the 'quality revolution' which has been such a dominant feature of UK higher education in the last decade or so. The paper begins by considering the turbulence and uncertainty which has become characteristic of today's higher education systems, and which has provided the context in which academics have been required to adjust to invasive quality monitoring arrangements. The paper goes on to consider whether quality monitoring has led to improvement, or whether it has produced somewhat sterile and ritualistic 'game-playing', with 'performances' and 'impression management' carefully designed to fulfil the requirements of quality assurance and monitoring processes. By plotting the 'career' of the notion of quality through the 1990s to the present, and by applying a deconstructionist test, some of the lessons learned over that period are identified. Drawing on interview data and results from each phase of the research, including recent focus group interviews, the paper makes a distinction between the dominant 'formal' meanings of quality which were prevalent in the early 1990s, and the 'situated' perceptions of quality revealed by 'close-up' study of academics working with quality systems on a day-to-day basis. Categorisations of various types of behavioural response to quality policy by academic staff are presented, and academics' perceptions of prospects for coping with the emerging QAA framework for quality and standards are also considered. The paper concludes by reasserting the merits of fine-grained, close-up study of academics engaged with higher education policy.