This Open Access book analyses the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education. It investigates the origins, logics, and mechanisms of evaluation and quality assurance reforms and their dynamic interactions with institutional, national and European policy contexts. The chapters report findings from extensive empirical studies that offer detailed insight into the work of governing in higher education, by giving voice to actors at various levels and positions including the ministry, national agency and University employees. Central themes include the influence of European policy, changing system designs, media relations and quality assurance enactments in University institutions. The book also explores the ways in which an emerging professional cadre, labelled qualocrats, enacts and mediates evaluation and quality assurance policy and practice. Taken together, the expanding evaluation machinery in Swedish higher education highlights the pivotal role of knowledge as a governing resource, and points to special features of evaluation as a particular form of practice that makes knowledge work for governing.

In recent decades, governing practices in education have become highly contradictory: deregulation and decentralisation are accompanied by re-regulation and increased centralisation, contributing to considerable governing tensions in and across different national systems and within the emergent European education policy space. On the one hand there is the persistence of performance monitoring through target-setting, indicators and benchmarks, and on the other, the promotion of self-evaluation and light touch regulation that express a softer governance turn, and promote self-regulation as the best basis for constant improvement.

Drawing on research undertaken into three national systems, this edited volume explores the attempts to manage these tensions in Europe through the development of inspection as a governing practice. Inspectorates and inspectors offer key locations for the exploration of governing tensions, positioned as they are between the international, the national, and the local and institutional, and with responsibility for both regulation and development. All three national systems offer contrasting approaches to inspection, all of which have changed considerably in recent years. "

Governing by Inspection" positions inspection in the framework of changing education policy and politics, and in a period of intensive policy development and exchange in Europe. It will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, political science and social policy."

This Open Access book analyses the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education. It investigates the origins, logics, and mechanisms of evaluation and quality assurance reforms and their dynamic interactions with institutional, national and European policy contexts. The chapters report findings from extensive empirical studies that offer detailed insight into the work of governing in higher education, by giving voice to actors at various levels and positions including the ministry, national agency and University employees. Central themes include the influence of European policy, changing system designs, media relations and quality assurance enactments in University institutions. The book also explores the ways in which an emerging professional cadre, labelled qualocrats, enacts and mediates evaluation and quality assurance policy and practice. Taken together, the expanding evaluation machinery in Swedish higher education highlights the pivotal role of knowledge as a governing resource, and points to special features of evaluation as a particular form of practice that makes knowledge work for governing.