Quality Street: encountering higher education’s accountabilities

AbstractThis article offers a new approach to quality, focusing on the dimensions that gather around it. The mismatched goals of controlling and improving higher education continue to trouble the conceptual clarity of accountability. Quality in higher education emerges as something agreed upon (to varying efficacy) through accountability measures, rather than dictated or scheduled. A concept of purchase (the connectedness of accountability with quality) informs discussion. Following an overview of what quality means logically and in the operational context of high rates of access to and participation in higher education, the argument proceeds to a schema of complementary types, or personages, of accountability (transactional, political, bureaucratic, institutional and disciplinary). Throughout, the desire to be viewed well and self-awareness interplay, rendering the various approaches to quality assurance presences to be acknowledged in their own right.