Reflexivity and Responsibility: Organisational Self-Imagery, Ideas of Quality and Accountability Structures in European Higher Education Institutions

Over the past 15 years, the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) have become the signpost for the development of national quality assurance regimes, and as such, many countries rely on them as a template for institutional review and accreditation. At the same time, the newest (2015) edition of the ESG attributes the primary responsibility for the quality of higher education provision to higher education institutions themselves. They also define principles and tools of quality assurance, which are designed to be applicable across diverse contexts. Furthermore, institutions have also taken part on their own right in the development of these guidelines at the European level, and have consequently emerged as policy actors in a network governance setting. Institutions therefore often find themselves compelled to negotiate between top-down pressures of compliance and increasing institutional autonomy in designing their own internal quality processes. To date, little scholarly attention has been devoted to how individual institutions embrace and translate ideas of quality assurance, which they then adopt into their internal organisational practices. The present research proposes to fill this gap by orienting the attention to everyday practices of reflexivity (through self-monitoring, self-governance and self-representation) and responsibility in the university as an organisation. At the centre of the inquiry lies the question of the practical adoption of competing and sometimes even contrasting ideas surrounding quality in formalized processes versus the development of organisational capabilities of self-monitoring and self-evaluation. The paper presents a comparative study in organisational sociology, based on in-depth ethnographic research conducted at two higher education institutions in Sweden and Hungary, during periods of transition into new internal and external systems of quality assurance (2016-2018). It offers valuable insights into emerging practices of institutional reflexivity against the backdrop of divergent structures of accountability.