A Case Study of an Institutional Audit: A Social Realist Account

Abstract

Since 1994, the South African higher education system, fragmented and divided along racial lines during the years of apartheid, has been subject to a wide range of initiatives directed at bringing about the ‘transformation’ necessary for a more equitable dispensation and, ultimately, a new social order. One of the ‘levers’ being used in transformation processes is quality assurance. The paper uses a case study of an institutional audit at one historically white, élite South African university to provide a social realist account of an audit process and to analyse the likelihood of the audit contributing to institutional transformation. A conclusion is that the South African audit methodology per se is unlikely to bring about the change necessary because of its tendency to focus on the mechanistic implementation of recommendations.

Keywords:

• institutional audit
• quality assurance
• transformation

Notes

[1] Editor’s note: transformation in the South African context has political and social connotations and should not be confused with the transformation definition of quality, which is an alternative to fitness for purpose; see editorial in Volume 1, Issue 1 of Quality in Higher Education.

[2] … a Cultural System is held to be roughly co‐terminous with what Popper called Third World Knowledge. At any given time a Cultural System is constituted of the corpus of existing intelligibilia—by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone. …By definition the cultural intelligibilia form a system, for all items must be expressed in a common language (or must be translatable in principle) since this is a precondition of their being intelligible (Archer 1995, p. 179; Archer 1996, p. 104).

[3] Johnstone (2002, p. 3), influenced by Foucault, describes discourses as:

 …conventional ways of talking that both create and are created by conventional ways of thinking. These linked ways of thinking constitute ideologies… and serve to circulate power in society… [they] involve patterns of belief and habitual action as well as patterns of language. Discourses are ideas as well as ways of talking that influence and are influenced by the ideas…

[4] Imbizo is a Zulu word, meaning gathering or convocation, commonly used to describe a forum for enhancing dialogue and interaction between institutional leadership and the people.