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.
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