Audit-market intermediaries: doing institutional work in British research-intensive universities

ABSTRACT

Our paper examines the rise of a new category of professional support staff whom we refer to as ‘audit-market intermediaries’ in the context of a rapidly changing regulatory and funding environment in British higher education. We explore the roles they play in articulating environmental changes in research-intensive universities related to the auditing of teaching via demands for quality assurance and the marketisation of higher education via the rise of the student as a fee-paying consumer. The qualitative data reveals the internal and external sources of legitimacy and power of the audit-market intermediaries as well their contestation. We show how these actors serve as mediators of audit and market forces undertaking institutional work by translating, amplifying or buffering-related pressures within the university; and point at the relevance of the specific organisational context for understanding differing patterns of their institutional work.

KEYWORDS:

• Audit-market intermediaries
• institutional work
• legitimacy and power
• situated professionals
• institutional theory

Acknowledgements

We thank participating universities and staff for their generous support during the field work. We are grateful to the participants of the EFMD Conference, 2014, and the EGOS conference, 2016, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, particularly Rosemary Deem, Andrew Pettigrew and Rick Vogel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the financial support provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [grant number 01PH08014] for this field work undertaken in the context of a project led by the International Center for Higher Education Research, University of Kassel, in collaboration with the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente.