A retrospective analysis of curricular accounting (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
Abstract Purpose -Credit, credit points, course weights, levels of learning, level descriptors, learning outcomes, and related characteristics of course catalogues, qualification frameworks, resource allocation practices, credit transfer systems and student records, transcripts and diploma supplements comprise curricular accounting, a form of accounting whose practices have become more obvious in recent times as a means to specify, record and control learning in higher education. These times have also been ones over which universities, ancient and modern, have been influenced by such policy movements as "'New' Higher Education", "'New' Public Management" and "Structural Adjustment". This study considers the interrelatedness of these two series of changes, addressing the questions of how curricular accounting has come to reflect these policy movements; and how curricular accounting has influenced or helped constitute them.
The Academic Bank of Credits: A New Pathway to Higher Education
Background: The Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) stands as an innovative tool, revolutionizing accessibility and success in higher education worldwide. Objectives: Serving as a global online repository, it securely houses students' academic credit records. Methods: Through this platform, institutions can efficiently validate course particulars, ensuring a streamlined process for storing, monitoring, and assessing student credits. Statistical Analysis: The ABC offers multifaceted benefits to students, enabling flexible study paths, incentivizing the pursuit of extra courses and activities, and eliminating the necessity for individual class applications. Findings: Thus, the ABC initiative emerges as a valuable asset, empowering students in their pursuit of higher education. This policy stands as a holistic framework intended to revolutionize the Indian education system. Applications: It notably embraces the concept of the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) to foster flexibility and credit mobility within higher education. Improvements: The new policy represents a monumental effort to revolutionize both the school and higher education systems, shaped through an extensive and collaborative consultation process.
What Managerialists Forget: Higher education credit frameworks and managerialist ideology
International Studies in Sociology of Education, 1998
This article uses data from a five-year ethnographic study of a single higher education institution to assess aspects of the ‘realism’ of managerialist approaches articulated through the credit framework in higher education in the United Kingdom. By ‘credit framework’ is meant the constellation of more or less compatible features facilitated by the assignment of credit to assessed learning, including modularity, the semester system, franchising, the accreditation of work-based learning and of prior learning. From the perspective of managerialist ideology the framework as a whole and its individual components offer a number of attractions, including greater economy, efficiency, manageability and market responsiveness in higher education institutions. Data from the site of the study and a theoretical framework derived from policy sociology are used to show that managerialist ideology oversimplifies and occludes aspects of social reality in higher education, the effect of which is to undermine many of the benefits claimed for the credit framework by managerialists.
A genealogy of knowledge as an accountable commodity
2012
This study is about how and why knowledge in the form of higher education learning has come to be accounted for using calculative practices. These practices are evident in public funding of higher education based on equivalent full-time students, student fee charging methods, credit accumulation and transfer systems, qualification frameworks, graduate profiles, levels of learning, learning outcomes, specifications of qualifications and courses/modules in credit points, assessment scores and grades, students' academic records, diploma supplements, and things of that ilk. Using a genealogical approach, the antecedents of these various paraphernalia are analysed and exemplified, mainly in a former British settler-colony/dominion setting that is now a parliamentary democracy but in which managerialistic ideas are ascendant. There, the antecedents were influenced significantly by practices of the ancient universities in the colonising country. This was in an effort to attain equivalence in standards to these institutions, but at the same time being cognisant of the colony's needs for secondary school teachers and the dominion's needs for various professionals (e.g. engineers, accountants, home-grown academics). Consequent to political, economic and social change in the post-WWII years, increased demands for educated labour, restructuring of higher education as a public policy system, broadening of the higher education curriculum, wider access to higher education, and mechanised forms of accounting also became influential. The third major twist was the imposition on and adoption by higher education institutions of various ideas associated with neo-liberalism and managerialism.
Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, 2020
Purpose This study aims to answer the research question of how a calculative regime for public universities is implemented, how and under which conditions its symbolic use emerges and what kind of unintended consequences occur over time. Design/methodology/approach The empirical material presented in the paper derives methodically from a longitudinal qualitative research approach analyzing higher education systems (HES)-reforms in Austria. To better understand the consequences of the organizational changes in line with the new legal framework, 2 series of qualitative interviews in 2011/2012 and 2016/2017 on the field level and the organizational level were conducted. Findings Identifying two enabling consequences from the tactical behaviors of resistance and symbolic use, i.e. new processes of communication and horizontal network building, allows for theory-building with a focus on the dynamics how accounting begins, then next becomes an established infrastructure, is then destabili...
The disillusion of calculative practices in academia
Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, 2020
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight and compare insights from research conducted in different disciplines on the effects of the use of calculative practices in academia. It also acts as an introduction to the special issue on “governing by numbers: audit culture and contemporary tales of universities’ accountability”. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the findings and reflections provided in academic literature on the various types of consequences stemming from the diffusion of the “audit culture” in academia. In so doing, it draws upon insights from previous literature in education, management and accounting, and other papers included in this special issue of Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management. Findings The literature review shows that a growing number of studies are focussing on the hybridization of universities, not only in terms of calculative practices (e.g. performance indicators) but also in relation to individual actors (e.g. academi...