What deans say about quality: A natural experiment in French higher education

Abstract

Quality in higher education is deemed important by many stakeholders, but as a field of research and practice, it has not advanced very far in its roughly 30-year history. This study begins with an overview of that brief history through a first era of borrowed total quality management (TQM) ideas, to a second era of ISO standards, and on into the emergence of an era for theory-building developed specifically for quality in the context of higher education. The article then presents a detailed case in which a quality management mandate in France was implemented for all higher education entities offering practical training programs. The mandate created a natural experiment with the potential for findings to be generalized beyond the single study. Academic deans from all major disciplines were interviewed to gather their perceptions of quality. Theme analysis revealed commonalities that inspired a set of testable propositions for theory development and further research.

Keywords:

• dean
• efficiency
• higher education
• ISO standards
• perception
• quality management

Acknowledgments

Our warmest thanks go to our friend and colleague Marc Bonnet, professor at ISEOR/IAE Lyon (France), for allowing us to collaborate on this article.

Disclosure statement

We have no conflicts of interest to disclose and this research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arnaud Eve

Mr. Arnaud Eve has a doctorate in management science. He is a lecturer at the Institute of Business Administration of the University of Rouen Normandy (France), in management control, and a researcher at Normandy Innovation Management Enterprise Consumption (NIMEC) research laboratory. He mainly teaches management control and quality management. He is head of the Master Degree Management of Sanitary and Medico-Social Organizations. He works on control of organizations by management standards, and especially by the quality management standard ISO 9001. He has published several papers on the topic. His publications are available at Researchgate.

Anne Maurand-Valet

Anne Maurand-Valet is a researcher at the Montpellier Research in Management laboratory and a lecturer at Avignon University. She is head of the Business and Marketing Department at Avignon. The subject of her doctoral research was management tools, in particular the ISO 9001 standard. She was interested in the role of mediator played by the quality manager in the acceptance and perpetuation of the ISO 9001 standard in the organization. Following the analyses carried out, she developed a reflection on the approach in terms of process in organizations and its consequences, but also a more methodological reflection on the criteria of distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods.

Yue Cai Hillon

Yue Cai Hillon is a professor of management at Western Carolina University. She holds a doctorate in strategy from New Mexico State University and has advanced training in management consulting, practical experience that helps her students learn strategic decision-making as a skill-based process. All of her courses are built around value-added projects with regional businesses and nonprofit organizations, learning that offers students highly relevant career preparation while contributing to regional economic and community development efforts.

Mark E. Hillon

Mark E. Hillon holds a doctorate in strategy from New Mexico State University and a doctorate in management science from ISEOR/Jean Moulin University, a cotutelle supervised by David M. Boje and Henri Savall. He is a critical management scholar-consultant.