Learning by the market: regulatory regionalism, Bologna, and accountability communities

Abstract

Over the last two decades institutions of higher education have been subject to new modes of regulatory governance. This essay applies a ‘regulatory lens’ to higher education governance with a view to understanding the sometimes contradictory relationship between the globalisation and regionalisation of higher education and the transformation of the public university. We use the Bologna Process to examine how new regional modes of higher education regulation are creating new forms of ‘publicness’ that are reshaping the scope, nature and form of public universities. The question posed is: What is the nature of the public good – and the public – in these new regulatory modes of higher education governance? Here, the concept of accountability communities is used to examine the way in which legitimacy is shaped, created and contested within these new modes of governance. Legitimacy secured through accountability communities facilitates membership of a functionally specific regulatory regime as well as the identification and location of public authority.

Keywords:

• regulatory regionalism
• accountability
• Bologna Process
• regulation
• public university
• knowledge economies

Notes

1. Geiger (2004) provides an excellent discussion of the relationship between knowledge and markets in a North American context.

2. See for example Nóvoa (2002).

3. We borrow the term ‘publicness’ from the work of Newman (2007). This work has sought to understand the reconstitution of the public domain in new strategies of welfare governance.

4. In our argument the sites and boundaries of the public domain are not fixed, but rather, emerge from relational settings that are politically constructed in relational settings, ‘contested but patterned relations among narratives, people, and institutions’ (Somers 1994, 626). Hence we ask: What is the nature of the public good – and the public – in these new regulatory modes of higher education governance?

5. Harrington and Turem (2006) explore the way in which new notions of liberal accountability through negotiated rule‐making and stakeholders work to marginalise institutions such as judicial review.

6. For a full flavour of the arguments on the knowledge economy and the new growth theory that have influenced the Lisbon Agenda, see OECD (1996).

7. This notion of ‘socialised neoliberalism’ is discussed in detail in Jayasuriya (2006).