University management perspective of quality: A review of Nigerian universities

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to take a step back from the general debate surrounding the creation of a precise definition of quality in the context of university education. The paper investigates what principal officers in Nigeria universities perceived as quality from a rationale perspective rather than replicating the approach in a rationale environment. Rather, this paper investigates the reality as experienced by the principal officers who are involved in the day-to-day administration of their university. In view of this approach, a critical realist philosophy was adopted to help understand principal officers’ view of the debate. Thus, the study involved 29 principal officers in 6 universities. All the respondents had key roles in formulating, administering, and implementing issues relating to quality. The study findings reveal that many of the principal officers find it difficult to define quality though they assume they can recognise quality when they see it; however, observation of the 29 respondents who took part in the study revealed that these principal officers had a strong background in quantitative philosophy, thus giving them the assumption that quality must be measured and making it difficult to investigate or identify causal and missing mechanisms regarding the components of what to measure.

Keywords: Quality, quality management, university, principal officer.