StakeholdersandQualityAssuranceinHigherEducation.pdfVIP

Stakeholders and Quality Assurance in Higher Education Liudvika Leisyte Don F. Westerheijden Elisabeth Epping Marike Faber Egbert de Weert Paper for 26th Annual CHER Conference Lausanne (CH), 2013-09-09/11 Correspondence to: d.f.westerheijden@utwente.nl StakeholdersQA-IBAR-CHER2013 | 2013-08-19 Stakeholders and Quality Assurance in Higher Education 1 Introduction The various changes in post-bureaucratic organizing, which is moving towards network approaches, coupled with the managerial agenda of corporate governance, have redefined the roles of various internal and external stakeholders in the governance of higher education institutions (Leisyte and Dee, 2012). It has been argued that university governance has been shifting from the collegial mode towards a corporatist mode (Exworthy Halford, 1999; Gumport, 2000; Winter, 2009). In the post-new public management discourse (Deem, 1998) the shared stakeholder (network) governance has been increasingly gaining ground as a form which embraces the key values of democracy prevalent for academia on the one hand, while incorporating the increasing notion of building trust in society—including and strengthening the role of stakeholders: students, alumni, industry and community representatives, alongside the managers, administrators and academics who have traditionally been involved in university governance (Jongbloed, Enders Salerno, 2008; Neave, 2002). The purpose of this chapter is thus to explore the changing role of stakeholders and the changing governance of university as a result of this, using the case of quality assurance. Specifically, we study how the implementation of the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area mediated by national contexts shape the notion of stakeholders in quality assurance at the institutional and programme levels. The chapter is or