Accounting for Excellence: Transforming Universities into Organizational Actors

Abstract

Throughout the world universities are increasingly engaged in activities that commit them to pursue excellence and account for progress toward excellence. Much of this accounting involves formalizing faculty assessments and standardizing university assessments. These assessments emerged in the United States earlier than Western Europe, but they are now worldwide. A crucial dynamic that facilitates this development is the transformation of universities from historically grounded and nationally specific institutions to organizational actors influenced by universalistic rationalizing models. As organizational actors, universities are expected to have goal and plans to attain them, as well as mechanisms for evaluating their progress. Universities are expected to act as if they can learn from other universities and from expertise on how to improve. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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