An integral approach to quality culture

In summary, the perceived mismatch between the system and cultural aspect of quality assurance has been an incentive to address the question ‘which organizational culture is most appropriate for a higher educational institution (HEI)’ today?’. This question can also recognized in the working definition for quality culture as formulated by the Flemish Bologna Expert Team: “Quality culture is an organizational culture which contributes to the development of effective and efficient care for quality” (Berings, Beerten, Hulpiau & Verhesschen, 2011). In this working definition the relative new and somewhat turbid concept of quality culture is connected to the more elaborated, theoretically and empirically, concept of organizational culture. Our approach to quality culture is inspired by the paradigm of Competing Values as introduced by Quinn (1988) and their definition of organizational culture. Cameron and Quinn (1999) have summarized the essence and functions of organizational culture as follows: “Organizational culture refers to the taken-for-granted values, underlying assumptions, expectations, collective memories, and definitions present in an organization. It reflects the prevailing ideology that people carry inside their heads. It conveys a sense of identity to employees, provides unwritten rules and, often, unspoken guidelines for how to get along in the organization, and enhances the stability of the social system that they experience.” (p. 14). Introducing the concept of organization culture in the definition of quality culture is not enough to have an answer to our core question. In other words the working definition as formulated by the Flemish Bologna Expert Team implies no answer to our core question but rather reflect the challenge; the challenge of looking for an answer, rather than the answer, to the question which organizational culture is most appropriate to realize high levels of quality in an HEI. This challenge can concretized fundamentally in two ways.status: publishe