Quality assurance and new public management: transformations in organizational structures, functions and roles in Argentine universities

MARQUINA, MÓNICA; GIMÉNEZ, GRACIELA; RODRÍGUEZ, WENCESLAO; MAZZEO, IGNACIO

Quality Assurance in Education

Emerald

Año: 2022 vol. 30 p. 352 - 369

0968-4883

The purpose of this paper is to study how quality assurance (QA) has impacted Argentina?s higher education system, how QA tasks are reflected on the organizational structure of institutions, which kind of professional profiles the new QA staff assume and to what extent university life is reconfigured from these changes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw on data from three work fields: collection and analysis of institutional data; survey applied to a stratified sample of staff who perform QA functions; and in-depth interviews with institutional QA professionals. Results show that universities have created specific areas and developed new functions and roles in QA.FindingsThe authors have observed a growing presence of dedicated personnel trained in developing these functions, positioned further down a path that had formerly distanced academics from administrative and institutional decision-makers. Unlike European universities, no evident tension was found between traditional sectors and the new professionals.Research limitations/implicationsThe limited number of responses of the quantitative data collection technique (survey) only allowed for a general and descriptive analysis. This limitation is compensated with two other methodological processes (documental analysis and in-depth interviews), that allowed to incorporate "type of university" as a variable analyse the data obtained.Practical implicationsResults can be useful for public policy to move toward new forms of monitoring internal institutional QA systems.Originality/valueThe research that supports this article aims at constructing our own categories to understand the same object that has been studied in developed countries, but in the Argentine-specific context.