Governing by Numbers and Human Capital in Education Policy Beyond Neoliberalism - Social Democratic Governance Practices in Public Higher Education

This book addresses governing by numbers and human capital policy in higher education by asking how higher education is quantified, how the quantitative information is used in educational governance, and how the information is perceived by students, teachers, managers, and policymakers, and affects decision-making. It also thematically discusses how human capital theory affects the quantification practices and, thereby, their effects. Based on these analyses, the book asks whether governing by numbers and human capital in education policy are necessarily neoliberal practices, and thus questions the theory of global convergence in educational governance.
The book provides a thorough analysis of the quantification of graduate outcomes based on the philosophical framework of Agential Realism, thus offering a novel analytical approach to the study of data and indicators in educational governance. The book draws on a comprehensive ethnographic case study from Danish higher education, and relates the findings from this case study to empirical cases in other countries and international research in the field. The book brings together literature from various fields, including political science, accounting, education, and sociology of quantification, in order to provide a comprehensive account of how quantification practices affect education.



 

Miriam Madsen, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Administration of Public Education at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. She is leading the Nordic exploratory network Governing educational pasts, presents, and futures with data, funded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) and including 18 scholars from Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Estonia. She is furthermore running the postdoctoral project The performative effects of budgets in higher education: A cultural-studies account of how education ideas and designs are built into budget numbers, funded by The Independent Research Fund, Denmark. As part of this project, she is affiliated with London School of Economics and Political Science as a Visiting Scholar. Her research revolves around quantification in higher education governance and administration, including studies on performance measurement, quality assurance, budgeting and accounting, and higher education policy, with a special focus on the effects of quantification practices on educational design and modes of governance. The studies are inspired by New Materialist philosophy, bringing a novel perspective on the study of quantification practices to the research field. This novelty has already lead to several important journal publications.