Universities have a long history of collecting student feedback using surveys and other mechanisms. The last decade has witnessed a significant shift in how student feedback is systematically collected, analysed, reported, and used by governments and institutions. This shift is due to a number of factors, including changes in government policy…

This paper provides an insight into the debate about academic work as a profession. It refers to the sociology of professions and explores how academics in a pre-1992 university in England understood their work as a profession and how they interpreted their professionalism in the context of an audit culture for teaching. It reveals that academics'…

Quality audit has become the dominant means of assessing the quality of university teaching and learning. This paper addresses this international trend through the analysis of academics' perception of quality audit. It presents a new way to understand quality audit through the interpretation of how frontline academics in England perceived and…

Proponents of the concept of the audit culture in UK higher education argue that from the late 1990s onward audit functioned as a form of power control and had a profound effect on academics and their work. Such arguments continued to be made into the early 2000s. Since then, however, the level of external scrutiny surrounding UK academics'…