Translating quality criteria in university accreditation
Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change
ISSN: 1832-5912
Article publication date: 11 April 2023
Issue publication date: 31 October 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how Danish higher education institutions (HEIs) navigate the demands and expectations of accreditation procedures, and how the limited freedom posed by accreditation schemes is used by HEIs by way of translation.
Design/methodology/approach
Through document studies of policy documents and the institutional self-assessment reports, the paper follows the concept of quality from the international level to the Danish national level, and onwards into the individual HEIs, where the authors examine how notions of quality are constructed through the translation of national regulation, guidelines and procedures of accreditation into the self-narratives of the self-assessment reports.
Findings
The authors find that the national guidelines for accreditation represents a complex translation of supranational guidelines by minimizing certain aspects and enhancing others. This national translation is then analyzed as the frame for the institutional translations where the analysis reveals how HEIs exercise a great deal of agency, within a quite narrow frame constituted by regulations and guidelines.
Originality/value
By using the Olivers (1991) typology of organizational responses, the authors discuss how the HEIs not only imitate and abide to institutionalized norms and concepts of quality but also reformulate, edit, omit and enhance certain elements of quality. The authors demonstrate that when accreditation meets the HEIs, it is clearly the national agendas that are most pervasive and offer the most relevant vocabulary for the HEIs.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education under Grant [7118-00001B].
Citation
Degn, L., Madsen, M. and Brøgger, K. (2023), "Translating quality criteria in university accreditation", Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 588-602. https://doi.org/10.1108/JAOC-02-2022-0030
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited