Governing by numbers or democratizing measurement : The policy and practices of quality management in universities

Quality management frequently appeals to performance indicators (PI) without questioning their constructed and contextual dimension and the reduction of the social complexity they induce. Practices and discourses in this field tend to swing between two antinomic registers: strenghtening of a managerial approach by the authorities and new participatory expectations by stakeholders.
Quality-oriented approaches and performance measurement advocates a quantitative practice based on a top-down, standardised approach focused on statistical knowledge and advocating a desire of transparency and increasing efficiency. The indicator-based measurement also endorses a legitimacy and accountability function (Zittoun 2009). Quantification of social phenomenon leads to a double reductionism : PI reduce social complexity to a single figure, and contribute at the same time to a normative twist of public action when pushing forward the search for performance and efficiency as main objective of policies while downplaying other less measurable social or environmental dimensions (Salais, 2010). In the last decade, public governance focused so much on numbers and benchmarking that the digits and indicators seem to structure the whole decision making process instead of being a simple adjuvant to it (Dahler-Larsen 2012, Ogien 2009).
Simutaneously, local actors have to translate in local practices the policy indicators that where defined by experts far away from local concerns. This top down approach puts the autonomy of local professionals under pressure (Chauvière 2007). These tensions could be resolved by defining new modes of coordination between experts and the knowledge of stakeholders. Beyond the criticism of “governing by numbers” the hypothesis is to test the emergence of new families of context rich operational indicators, supporting local participation (Didier et al 2013).
This paper proposes to analyze these tensions in the case of the development of quality management processes in universities in Belgium and show how the development of quantification mechanisms resisted participatory processes in the definition of indicators and statistical models (Fallon & Leclercq 2013). It will question how can stakeholders be involved in the definitions of measures, contribution to the framing of the convention of what is locally important and what is not.