2021 Volume 88 Issue 3 Pages 445-454
Studies in educational reform in higher education in Japan have mostly focused on policy, with little attention paid to the individual institutions, organizations, and staff in charge of the implementation thereof. That is why some literature has called for more studies concerning local contexts, that is culture, complexity, and diversity. Little is known, however, in what respect shedding light on these aspects will help the studies grasp the changes in universities through the reform policies. This study investigates the self-reflective discussion of studies in quality assurance in Europe, aiming to gain implications on what may be dismissed in policy-focused reform studies and how perspectives on local contexts can compensate for the missing pieces.
The study findings indicate that until recently, European studies on quality assurance mainly addressed policy establishment. The two problems below have, however, gradually been changing the situation. First, although a gap between the ambitions of research on policymaking and the outcomes in individual local contexts has been revealed, there is still little evidence on why the gap is caused and how to bridge it. This is, according to some studies, partly because local actors’ actions misaligned to policy were negatively viewed as “resistance” by a considerable number of studies, which has often blinded the researchers to how institutions, organizations and staff community of universities deal with reform policy.
Second, policy-focused studies themselves have come to face criticism as contributing to the construction of the globalization discourse. Some studies have revealed the process through which so-called world models of higher education are diffused worldwide. It is simultaneously critically argued, however, that there are normative assumptions in the literature that all local actors ought to follow the officially settled structures and procedures of globalization, causing researchers unintentionally to select methodologies and cases likely to support the discourse of globalization while dismissing the local contexts.
In sum, the fact that these two problems have been posed by the researchers themselves can be interpreted as a reflective reconsideration of their positionality: their theoretical and methodological frameworks reflected the normative perspectives associated with reform policies. Elsewhere, the reflection has led several recent studies to focus on local contexts, intending to reconstruct the definition of quality from local actors’ viewpoints.
These reflections and suggestions in Europe have several commonalities with Japanese research contexts which call for attention toward the cultures, complexity and diversity of local contexts in response to the policy-biased research focus. Therefore, the European studies imply that we in Japan should also relativize our positionality, and that to heed to local contexts can enhance this relativization.
