Conference Agenda

Research motivation

The Bologna process, with its primary goal to unite universities, led to creating the range of standards, among which were quality regulations (Kehm, Huisman, & Stensaker, 2009). They gradually evolved into accreditation entities, like the European Consortium for Accreditation in Higher Education with external control functions. Engineering programmes are supposed to be more open and flexible due to high demand on the labour market in both developing and in developed nations (WEF 2016; 2017). Professional mobility of engineers was firstly supposed to be facilitated via unified standards across the countries (Reyes, 2008). Nowadays, there are some concerns about the standards being an obstacle to globalisation of the engineering profession due to a surplus of regulations (Sánchez-Chaparro, 2022). Therefore, there is a tendency to lift at least part of the regulations, which will supposingly increase the quality of engineering educational programmes (Hakeem et al, 2014; Kans, 2021). In case if regulations are removed, quality culture will be operationalised on programme level, the basis of which is a programme directors’ quality perception.

However, the dynamic micro-level of programmes is more flexible than the slower meso-level of university (Celis et al, 2022). In engineering programmes, interaction with industrial partners is one of the central points of implementation. Industry in its turn is a source of rapid changes for programmes (Jackson et al, 2022). Programme directors’’ are those who are in touch with industry and know what potential employers need, embedding these needs into curriculum design, quality assurance and other aspects (Kans, 2021). This may lead to a situation when quality frame on the programme level is not in line with the one offered by university.. The underpinned quality perception, previously shaped by existing standards and regulations, in situations of attention shift from external regulation to internal quality work, is at a risk of quality concepts to be interpreted in a naive, non-structured way. Whether it’s good or bad - is a point of further discussion. Considering this possibility, analysing the case where quality is not well-defined by regulatory bodies, we can trace the evolution of naive quality perception via bottom-up approach to see if it matches the overall conceptual understanding of quality in general.

Russia is an example of the country where the regulatory paradigm in education is blurry and excessive (Knyaginina et al, 2022), and quality work is not institutionalised per se. Analysing quality perception of Russian programme directors’ might provide some insights into how the quality landscape may look once the regulations are lifted.

Objective

The aim of the study is to grasp the program directors’ quality perception. We then intend to see if the perception models preliminary derived are in line with conventional European quality interpretation. The latter is supposed to provide some insights into whether quality work without external regulations will still be constructed in conventional ways.

Theoretical framework

The frame of conventional quality understanding we mean to use is the most recent frame, where everything published on the topic of quality interpretation in European terms before is gathered (Schindler, 2015). The concept of quality, according to (Schinlder et al, 2015) can be broken into four main types: excellence, transformation, fit for purpose and accountability.

The rapid expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic throughout the world including in Israel had unprecedented consequences for all life domains, including the higher education system. The crisis triggered by this pandemic challenged academic institutions, because within a few days they were forced to continue to operate during a physical lockdown of their campuses and transit to digital learning, with all the implications involved. (Donitsa-Schmidt & Ramot, 2021; Draxler-Weber, Packmohr & Brink,2022).

Program and department heads (PDHs), the academic leaders of these institutions, coped with the crisis trying to conduct regular activity as well as possible. Their work environment changed, and they had to deal with their own personal hardships and the students' difficulties and cope with the teaching staff's needs in the programs they managed. This confrontation exposed them to complexities they had not encountered previously.

PDHs perform one of the most essential and challenging posts in the higher education system (Tietjen-Smith, Hersman & Block, 2020). They develop social networks and manage relationships and resources connected to the program/department under their management. In this way they enable their subordinates to function in a competitive arena of academic institutions under conditions that have been described as quasi-market, to attract students and obtain research budgets (Bobe & Kober, 2015; Deem, 1998)

Heavy workloads impair the necessary match between the individual's characteristics and workplace demands and negatively affects the employee's satisfaction and effectiveness (Kirmeyer & Dougherty, 1988). A study examining how academic leaders coped with work in European universities found that faculty members and holders of senior academic positions have an administrative burden stemming from tasks unrelated to teaching or research. This engenders feelings of harm to the academic leaders' family and social life (Pace et al, 2021). However, overload of academic work also causes stress and decreases academic productivity (Janib et al, 2021).

The research questions examined how PDHs viewed various aspects of the influence of the pandemic on: distance learning, internal organizational processes, and departmental interactions with their environment, how their research was affected, and the characteristics of their planning processes during this period. The main question was: How did the PDHs of higher education institutions in Israel perceive the challenges facing them as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic?

In an increasingly competitive global economy driven by knowledge and innovation, higher education (HE) is critical to the success of a country. In recent decades, a range of social, economic and political factors have led to a dilemma for the HE system, where the cost of HE continues to rise in the face of tight public finances. In contrast, expectations of HE outcomes continue to rise. Policymakers and legislators are facing how to effectively use taxpayer funds to improve the productivity of HE and respond to escalating demands for accountability. PBF is a strategy to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of HE and has been one of the most crucial reform mechanisms in the last few decades. Many countries have begun to use PBF to allocate resources to HEIs.

In 2015, the Chinese government promulgated the ‘Double First-Class’ plan, which will play a leading role in the future of government funding for HE in China. The ‘Double First-Class' plan explicitly states that government funding for selected universities will dynamically adjust according to performance. More support will give to high-performing universities and less to low-performing ones. Senior and middle leaders' role in universities has become more complex in the face of the accountability pressures from PBF. The perceptions and application of PBF by academic leaders primarily affect the effectiveness of PBF implementation. Therefore, this study examines how university academic leaders perceive and respond to PBF in Mainland China's ‘Double First-Class’ universities.

This study used sense-making as the conceptual framework. Sense-making aims to create a holistic picture of the ambiguous event through three interrelated processes: creation, interpretation and enactment. First, ‘creation' can be seen as the process by which individual leaders generate their creative activities out of the practices of everyday activities that are constructed in response to changing realities. Secondly, school leaders rely on previous tools and materials from their work experience with past policies and apply them to new contexts. Through interaction with what they know and new demands, they create their interpretations of reform demands. Finally, 'policy enactment' describes educational reform as a process that is open to different interpretations. More specifically, policy enactment conveys 'the creative processes of interpretation, that is, the recontextualisation - through reading, writing, and talking - of the abstractions of policy ideas into contextualised practices'. This highlights school leaders’ active role in creatively shaping a particular policy into a specific set of circumstances.

This study adopts a qualitative approach based on the conceptual framework of sense-making. The specific research questions are as follows: (1) how do university academic leaders understand the requirements of the PBF? (2) how do university academic leaders make sense of their leadership roles by combining experience with the requirements of the PBF? (3)how can academic leaders in universities encourage and facilitate sense-making among academics in PBF?

Preliminary findings indicate that, firstly, regarding the understanding of PBF implemented by universities, most academic leaders consider the policy's requirements reasonable to a certain extent, as the cultivation of talents and doing scientific research are the work universities or academics should do. Secondly, regarding how academic leaders respond to PBF, they use their existing knowledge, values and social context to make trade-offs with policy messages. Finally, there are several ways in which academic leaders encourage and facilitate sense-making by academics. In formal settings, such as regular staff meetings, academic leaders may publicly recognise or reward high-performing academics or teams as a way of spurring low-performing ones. In informal settings, academic leaders may also take an active interest in academic performance and assist them.