Excellence, Quality And The Diversity Of Higher Education Systems

Abstract

Excellence is one of the many usable concepts in the area of higher education that are precise enough to evoke a number of positive and sometimes negative emotions, yet vague enough to offer fertile ground for theoretical development as well as empirical research. This chapter argues that there has been a movement in the last thirty years during which the concepts of excellence and its close kin, quality, have changed meaning and content. While they used to refer to an individual quality, or a virtue if one prefers, expressed by the (outstanding) quality of an academic's work, they have increasingly come to refer to two different organizational characteristics.