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Ideology and Audit Culture: Standardized Service Quality Surveys in Academic Libraries
- portal: Libraries and the Academy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 17, Number 1, January 2017
- pp. 91-110
- 10.1353/pla.2017.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
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abstract:
This article examines the relationship between the standardized service quality survey LibQUAL+ and the rise of audit culture. Recent scholarship examining assessment and accountability systems and the ideological principles driving their implementation in higher education raises concerns about the impact these systems have on teaching, learning, research, faculty autonomy, and the meaning and value of university education. Situating the growing popularity of LibQUAL+ within the sociopolitical context of pressures universities face to adopt private-sector management practices, the author argues that many criticisms made about systems of accountability imposed on higher education are equally applicable to LibQUAL+.