Over several years,
the public sector in the United Kingdom has been subjected to a series
of “quality reforms”. Large sums of money have been spent forming monitoring
agencies and requiring workers in education and the health service to
“demonstrate quality” in their practices. This typically involves learning
to redescribe their practices in a bizarre managerial language, incorporating
its “technical terms” into documents that form an “audit trail” — a cross-referenced,
jargon-riddled paper chain to be perused by managers in their own organisations
and, in the event of official inspection, by employees of the monitoring
agencies.
This process is labelled
“accountability”. When an organisation is accountable in this sense, “quality”
is deemed to be “assured”. The specific procedures of quality assurance
change periodically. Management reserves the right to redesign forms,
restructure its approval mechanisms, update guidelines or benchmarks.
In general, the culture of perpetual linguistic innovation in contemporary
management means there will always be new jargon for professionals to
learn and incorporate into descriptions of their practices. Those of us
in the public sector find we spend ever more time demonstrating quality
and ever less time doing what we “small-c conservatives” used to think
of as our jobs.
Conspicuously absent
from the vast literature produced by government, senior management and
exponents of the so-called management theories that gave rise to the “quality
assurance” culture is anything resembling a coherent explanation, let
alone defence, of their basic premises. How does empowering management
in this way make services “accountable” to their users in any meaningful
or worthwhile sense of the word? What do students or patients (invariably,
and without argument, re-labelled “customers” or “consumers”) actually
learn about the “quality” of the services provided as a result of these
management mechanisms?
The
analogy with financial audit suggests that those who control the new quality
regimes have discovered an objective measure of “quality” that can be
read off the relevant documentation like the bottom line of a commercial
balance sheet. Indeed, favoured models of evaluation usually involve lists
of criteria to be ticked off by observers. The more empirical the exercise
can be made to appear, the better, because the approach is founded on
organisational theories that take mistrust of — or outright contempt for
— “subjective” ideas such as “professional judgement” as their starting
point. As Philip Crosby (celebrated management “guru” and a founder of
the “quality revolution” in management theory) put it in his “classic
text”, Quality Is Free: “Quality is too important to be left to
professionals, who always think they ‘know best’.” Contemporary management
theory is awash with pseudo-scientific terminology. Talk of “quality engineers”
and “industrial quality management science” coexists with somewhat more
ethereal entities such as “the continuum of quality-awareness”, and management
scientists purport to have discovered “basic quality criteria” common
to all complex organisations.
When asked about
the meaning of these “criteria” — which supposedly provide the intellectual
foundations of the “science” — authors and commentators invariably reject
rigorous analysis in favour of assaulting their audience with a barrage
of rhetoric. “Quality”, “excellence”, “autonomy”, “empowerment”, “continuous
improvement”, “dynamic learning cultures”, “ownership”, “effectiveness”,
“self-actualisation” — the vocabulary expands interminably.
To take seriously
the idea that these terms require analysis would be to admit that their
employment in defence of one’s favoured policies is a contentious exercise,
in need of detailed arguments to support the specific conclusions drawn.
Insofar as arguments and analyses are supplied, they are invariably superficial
and circular: authors may claim to have discovered certain “aspects” or
“dimensions” of quality, but these turn out to be such things as “effectiveness”
or “ownsership”. Then, without much further ado, these things are declared
to be the anticipated outcomes of the policies or structures being “defended”.
So one unclear term is “explained” with reference to several others, and
the debate is closed — with those in positions of power still able to
choose whichever operational definition of quality suits their purposes.
Take Peter Williams’s
recent article (THES January 11) on the “life of the mind”. Although
the chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency laments the superficial
nature of much of the discussion of quality to date, he does not lay the
blame for this situation where it clearly belongs: at the door of politicians
and senior management, who have made quite deliberate efforts to reduce
all discussion of serious matters to the exchange of slogans and the recitation
of their favourite buzzwords. Moreover, he goes on to “explain” (that
is, to assert without explanation) that quality assurance is not “the
enemy of academic freedom or integrity” and is “as much a route to self-assurance
as it is to public assurance”. Of course he does not explain why the preferred
route to “self-assurance” for thousands of underpaid public sector workers
should involve paying people such as himself several times their salaries
to monitor their practices.
He
similarly “explains” that quality assurance is not the opposite of quality
“enhancement”, adding “whatever that word means”. In a more rational world
this aside, coming from someone in Williams’s position, would be shocking.
First, if he does not know what “quality enhancement” means, how does
he know that it is not the opposite of quality assurance? Second, why
has the QAA been assessing academic departments in terms of an “aspect”
called “quality management and enhancement” (QME) only for its chief executive
to admit, casually, that he does not know what quality enhancement means?
QME was one of the six “aspects” of a provision assessed under the old
QAA system, and academics had to pretend they knew what it meant to satisfy
their QAA assessors. Perhaps departments that dropped points on QME should
consider an appeal?
I agree with Williams’s
assertion that universities should be about the “life of the mind”. But
it testifies to the shameful intellectual poverty of the age that such
a statement can strike anyone as anything other than a platitude. What
would a university that was not concerned with the life of the mind be
like? Give the Blairite crusade against “intellectual snobbery”, a few
more years and we may yet find out.
There is no evidence
that centralised managerial control of academics — the setting-up of systems
that dictate in advance the form that “quality” teaching should take —
is the best way to encourage creativity, innovation, integrity or any
of the things Williams purports to favour. Simply incorporating the terms
“academic integrity” and “academic freedom” into your stated “quality
criteria” does not constitute a proof that your favoured system achieves
these things. In writing in this way, Williams assumes not an academic
but a distinctively managerial methodology. It is the same mindset that
thinks (to take an example from senior management in the National Health
Service) that if you want to encourage individuality among staff, the
best thing to do is to set up a workshop, force staff to attend and give
that workshop the goal of “validating staff as individuals”. We do not
need to “validate” people as individuals to “promote” individuality any
more than we need to force academics to be free by making “academic freedom”
a “quality criterion” with the backing of a powerful central agency.
So what can the rest
of us — those who do the work in public-sector organisations — do about
all this? We have to be clear that the purpose of all of this quality
jargon is not to improve services, but rather to locate power in the hands
of those who control the “quality mechanisms” and to “deliver support”
for government policies. The definitions of quality offered to justify
this control lack intellectual foundation, and statements made in their
defence are often ad hoc and are sometimes patently inconsistent.
Academics have a
particular duty to foster critical intelligence and denounce nonsense.
Those of us supposedly dedicated to the promotion of critical thinking
have allowed the science of “opinion-management” to develop unchecked.
With no argument, we have allowed some interest groups to claim exclusive
ownership of persuasive terminology that used to be common property.
More than ever, it
is imperative that we ask of those in positions of power in public life:
what do you mean? What is it that justifies the uses they make of terminology
and the conclusions they draw? We must insist on a serious and well thought-out
answer. To subvert a key metaphor of Williams’s article, we must make
a point of not singing in tune, of not reciting the rhetoric on cue. Unions
should consider giving more support to members to refuse to take part
in quality-assurance exercises whose rationale they conscientiously question,
and some student representatives should stop talking utter rubbish on
the subject. Someone needs to tell leaders of the National Union of Students
that thinking of yourselves as consumers is neither big nor clever. Showing
solidarity with your tutors and other workers in the sector — now that
would be clever.
We must sound a discordant
note. Challenge the nonsense at every opportunity. This, it strikes me,
is the correct route to self-assurance and self-respect — and it is the
best chance the workforce has of saving all that is worthwhile in our
public services.
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