Higher Education Accreditation and Organizational Change

Most of the research related to the accreditationprocess in higher education institutions focuses onthe historical perspective of the quality movement,the meaning of quality in higher education, theresults of external evaluation, and the currentdebate about the nature of the accreditation process. There is an absence of research identifying thestrengths and weaknesses of the accreditationprocess. This book, therefore, provides a newapproach from the point of view of OrganizationalDevelopment (OD) theory. Based on this analysis, twoareas set the resulting framework: 1) differentperspectives about quality, and 2) accreditationprocess as an organizational challenge. Eachorganizational area includes one or several domains,and each domain includes related sets of dimensionsamong other ideas. This analysis, focused in aleading federal engineering university in Argentina,should help shed some light on this current trend inLatin America and Europe. The results could be usedas a referencefor further studies for other federaland private schools as well as for accreditationpractitioners and higher education policy makers.