Playing language games: higher education quality dynamics in Dutch national policies since 1985

Higher education quality is a vague, ambiguous, multiple, and essentially contested concept. Quality’s contested character involves endless disputes about its proper use which makes it problematic to handle in governmental policies. Wittgenstein’s notion of language games is used to understand how, through time, higher education quality is enacted in Dutch governmental policy texts, and how its uses are related to each other. The analysis depicts various quality games interacting with different policy contexts, which show multiple enactments of quality as a unified concept alongside more diffe... Mehr ...