Higher Education Accreditation and Organizational Change

Most of the research related to the accreditation process in higher education institutions focuses on the historical perspective of the quality movement, the meaning of quality in higher education, the results of external evaluation, and the current debate about the nature of the accreditation process. There is an absence of research identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the accreditation process. This book, therefore, provides a new approach from the point of view of Organizational Development (OD) theory. Based on this analysis, two areas set the resulting framework: 1) different perspectives about quality, and 2) accreditation process as an organizational challenge. Each organizational area includes one or several domains, and each domain includes related sets of dimensions among other ideas. This analysis, focused in a leading federal engineering university in Argentina, should help shed some light on this current trend in Latin America and Europe. The results could be used as a reference for further studies for other federal and private schools as well as for accreditation practitioners and higher education policy makers.