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Rising Above Institutional Constraints? The Quest of German Accreditation Agencies for Autonomy and Professional Legitimacy

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Abstract

European quality assurance has a complicated history that must be viewed as taking place on two levels: first, in a national effort to deregulate the public sector and to make universities accountable for their teaching performance; and second, a supranational endeavor to accomplish European integration in the field of higher education. Similarly, the web of institutional constraints and opportunity structures in which accreditation agencies are embedded spans two policy levels, the national and the European. In this paper, we examine how German accreditation agencies achieve some level of autonomy in a highly entrenched institutional environment. The paper is based on a qualitative study comprising archival data and over 70 semi-structured interviews. Drawing on the insights of neo-institutional theory, we argue that quality assurance agencies seek political leverage at the European level in order to strengthen their standing in the higher education systems of their own countries.

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Notes

  1. “Extreme,” here, is used as Gerring defines it: “If most cases are positive along a given dimension, then a negative case constitutes an extreme case. (…) It is the rareness of the value that makes a case valuable, in this context” (Gerring 2007: 102).

  2. By devolution, we understand the delegation of power to entities that are legally separate from the state, which often have a contractual relationship with the ministries on which they depend.

  3. Germany does not fit for several reasons: first, it has been comparatively slow (Schröter 2007) to adopt new public management reform. Second, agencification has a long tradition in the German federal political culture and therefore draws on a set of assumptions and practices that differ from those underlying current reform initiatives. Third – and most important – agencification lacks a coherent and comprehensive policy framework, meaning that it comprises a wide variety of agency-“species” (Bach and Jann 2010).

  4. Stakeholder

    Number of interviews

    German quality assurance agencies

    Accreditation agencies (15) evaluation agencies (16)

    German governmental bodies (ministries, KMK)

    (13)

    German stakeholder organizations

    (9)

    European institutions and stakeholder organizations

    (12)

  5. This unusual arrangement is due to the circuitous way in which regional evaluation systems were created, as well as to the creation, in 1998, of a nation-wide accreditation market that used the same working mechanisms as those used for evaluation (Serrano-Velarde 2008).

  6. The German accreditation market counts ten certified accreditation agencies:

    ACQUIN (*2001): Akkreditierungs-, Certifizierungs- und Qualitätssicherungs-Institut

    AHPGS (*2001): Akkreditierungsagentur für Studiengänge im Bereich  Gesundheit und Soziales

    AKAST (*2008): Agentur für Qualitätssicherung und Akkreditierung kanonischer Studiengänge

    AQA (*2009): Österreichische Qualitätssicherungsagentur

    AQAS (*2002): Agentur für Qualitätssicherung durch Akkreditierung von Studiengängen

    ASIIN (*2002): Akkreditierungsagentur für Studiengänge der Ingenieurwissenschaften, der Informatik, der Naturwissenschaften und der Mathematik

    Evalag (*2009): Evaluationsagentur Baden-Württemberg 

    FIBAA (*2002): Foundation for International Business Administration Accreditation

    OAQ (*2009): Organ für Akkreditierung und Qualitätssicherung der Schweizerischen Hochschulen

    ZevA (*2000): Zentrale Evaluations- und Akkreditierungsagentur Hannover

    * year of certification by the German Accreditation Council.

  7. The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder, or KMK, is the Länder’s common policy-making body.

  8. Quality assurance is a politically charged issue in most European countries. In his qualitative study on trust relations and audits in British academia, Hoecht concluded that many of his interviewees “felt that they were less trusted and more controlled than they had been in the past, although they did not perceive this control as being voluntarily exercised by their immediate academic managers” (Hoecht 2006: 556).

  9. In 2011, the political success of the informal ENQA network led to the founding of an international organization classified as a nonprofit under Belgian law (ENQA 2011). The ENQA currently has its headquarters in Brussels and has three full-time employees on its payroll.

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  1. Max-Weber-Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University, Bergheimer Str. 58, 69115, Heidelberg, Germany

    Kathia Serrano-Velarde

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Serrano-Velarde, K. Rising Above Institutional Constraints? The Quest of German Accreditation Agencies for Autonomy and Professional Legitimacy. Minerva 52, 97–118 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-014-9245-2

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