For Better or Worse: Quality Management in University Education Organization in Denmark

Contemporary political and managerial agendas of quality assurance as well as new organizational structures have changed university education in many ways (see e.g.Paldam, 2015). On the one hand, university education changes through increased demands for standardisation e.g. the Bologna process (Michavila & Martinez, 2018; Salmi, 2015) and the quality agenda in Higher Education (Harvey & Williams, 2010a, 2010b). On the other hand, university education is inherently complex both in terms of the faculty of knowledge to be taught and in terms of how to do it (Harvey & Newton, 2004; Musselin, 2007). In this paper, we will explore how this apparent paradoxical situation between complexity and standardisation in university education affects the organization of university education. Our investigation will follow the transverse implementation of university accreditation in six Danish universities. We pay special attention to how the task of university education is (re)formulated and coordinated. This paper is part of a larger project investigating the consequences of increased standardization of university education in the form of institutional accreditation on the understanding and organizational practice of educational quality.