Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Vol. 29, No. 2, June 2008, 179
193

Whose quality? Social actors in the interface of transnational and

national higher education policy
Taina Saarinen*
Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyva
skyla
, Finland
The article analyzes the construction of national reactions to a transnational
higher education policy from the point of view of the representation of social
actors in policy documents. The data are provided by the so-called Bologna
Process, particularly the development of comparable quality assurance systems,
and Finnish responses to those demands. Who is represented as active and who as
passive, as European policies are discursively translated into national policies?
How are those quality actors represented in the policy documents directed at a
transnational audience (i.e. the Bologna Process communiques, as well as national
reports on its advancement) as opposed to documents directed at a national, in
this case Finnish, audience (i.e. national policy formation documents)? What
kinds of policy fields emerge as a result of different representations of actors? This
article takes the Bologna Process as an example of the glocalisation of higher
education policy.

Introduction
This article analyzes the interface of transnational policy and national reaction, by
focusing on representations of social actors (van Leeuwen, 1995, 1996) in the socalled Bologna Process, or the process aiming at creating a European Higher
Education Area (EHEA) by 2010. The particular focus is on the quality policies of
that process, in other words, on policies which aim to establish comparable quality
assurance systems in the EHEA. The quality assurance policy of this particular
transnational policy provides a window into a complex situation of glocalisation
(Wodak, 2005), where transnational policies are being re-contextualized in different
and possibly conflicting national situations. This, in turn, provides a view of the
different social processes and social spaces emerging in the EHEA. The different
policy actors
national and transnational, academic and governmental
affect each
other and generate energy between each other. This tension becomes visible in policy
documentation; the documents are, to paraphrase Scollon (1998), the residue of the
contacts between the actors.
The Bologna Process as globalization: quality demands between national and
transnational
The Bologna Process is based on an intergovernmental agreement, with signatories
both from within the European Union and outside it. The ministers in charge of
*Email: taina.saarinen@campus.jyu.fi
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01596300801966807
http://www.informaworld.com

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T. Saarinen

higher education in France, Italy, the UK and Germany initiated the Bologna
Process by signing the Sorbonne Declaration (1998) in Paris. By the next year, the
Bologna Declaration (1999) already had 29 signatories. Lehikoinen (2005) has
described, from the viewpoint of a Finnish Ministry official (but writing in a
personal capacity at that point), quite vividly the first rather confused stages of the
Process at the Bologna meeting in 1999. The various actors participated in a
situation where it was extremely difficult to see how the Process would take shape.
Her description fits Balls (1998, p. 126) observation of policies as . . . ramshackle,
compromise, hit-and-miss affairs, that are reworked, tinkered with, nuanced and
inflected through complex processes of influence, text production, dissemination,
and, ultimately, re-creation in contexts of practice. The Sorbonne and Bologna
meetings have been followed up by biennial ministerial meetings in Prague (2001),
Berlin (2003), Bergen (2005) and London (2007), and the latest communique
(London, 2007) was signed by representatives of 46 countries.
The stated purpose of the Process is to increase the competitiveness and
attractiveness of European higher education (Bologna, 1999). Particularly since
the Berlin meeting, quality assurance and European recognition of quality assurance
systems have dominated the Process. The motivation behind European quality work
is to ease the recognition and comparison of higher education systems and degrees
for the purposes of mobility and employability.
The European Commission is a full member of the Process. Keeling (2006)
suggests that many of the Bologna initiatives are mainstreaming solutions first
developed by the Commission. This is certainly true of the quality assurance
developments of the Process. The European Network of Quality Assurance (ENQA,
since 2004 the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education),
which was founded in 2000 in a meeting organized and funded by the European
Commission, has its origins in a European Council recommendation on European
co-operation in quality assurance in higher education (98/561/EC, 1998). ENQA has
coordinated the quality assurance work of the Bologna Process, having been funded
primarily by the European Commission. The Commission is also planning to
provide start-up funding for the European Register of Quality Assurance Agencies
(Commission, 2007). The weight of the Commission is thus far greater than the
principle of subsidiarity would suggest.
It seems that a concept such as quality, in fact, receives its meaning when higher
education policy measures are applied in its name (Saarinen, 2005a; Vidovich &
Porter, 1999). Since the early- and mid-1980s, quality has become a cultural tool; a
buzz-word, attention-getter, nearly-blank screen (Scollon, 1998), a higher education
policy catchword, on which different views of the reality can be projected and from
which different social processes and practices can be (re-)constructed. The meaning
of quality is, however, ambiguous and loaded with stakeholder interests (see for
instance Harvey & Green, 1993; Vidovich, 2001). In an interesting example, Vidovich
(2001) looks at Australian higher education policy by tracking the various, contested
and chameleon-like qualities presented in policy documents. It seems that exactly
because of these multiple natures of quality
depicted by the different discourses
on it
it has gained a strong presence, not only in higher education policies.
In Finland, the national quality policy has historically been geared towards
quality as development (Saarinen, 2005a), but this view has given way to the
externally demanded and steered quality assurance procedures of the 2000s. This

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181

development coincides with other administrative developments where the expert

position has either shifted away from the academic community towards the
administrative one (Treuthardt, Huusko & Saarinen, 2006), or where the pressures
for change come from above or from the transnational level, with the pressures for
implementation being placed at the bottom in the local level (see, for example,
Henry, Lingard, Rizvi & Taylor, 2001).
This trend towards quality assurance is one example of globalization of higher
education, or, more precisely, a situation where national policy-makers construe their
reactions to global pressures (see Vidovich, 2002). Burbules and Torres (2000) claim
that the nation state is in fact a medial institution, not powerless in the face of
globalization but constrained by trying to balance four imperatives, which are:
1. responses to transnational capital;
2. responses to global political structures and other non-governmental organizations;
3. responses to domestic pressures and demands, in order to maintain its own
political legitimacy; and
4. responses to its own internal needs and self-interests.
(Burbules & Torres, 2000, p. 10)
This article focuses on a situation where the needs and pressures of the nation state
(in this case, Finland) meet those of a global political structure (in this case, the
Bologna Process).
Representation of social actors and construction of social fields
Choices of actor representation play a significant role in the ideological construction
of political discourse (Wodak & van Leeuwen, 2002). The global demand for joint
quality assurance will always represent some actors interest, as will the reactions on
the national level. Language plays an integral part in constructing the world, and
access to the process of text production and reconstruction is limited (Ball, 1993;
Fairclough, 1992). From a discursive point of view, seeking hegemony is seeking a
way to universalize a particular meaning, in the service of achieving and maintaining
dominance of a particular social field; in this case, the field of Finnish higher
education in relation to the pressures of globalization.
Policy actors may offer rival interpretations of particular policy concepts (such
as, in the case of this study, quality), in order to support and defend their view of
reality (Bacchi, 2000, p. 53). In this context, I find the metaphor of the different levels
of the policy-making systems as tectonic plates (Bleiklie & Kogan, 2000)
particularly appealing. Representations of social actors reflect different kinds of
relationships, create friction between each other, and, ultimately, create different
policy fields or spheres.
Van Leeuwens (1996) categorization of social actors allows for a wide range of
actors to be taken into account. The social actors have roles, and the representation
of these activities and roles leads in turn to a possibility of viewing the
representations of different spheres of policy action in the documents. In this article,
the analysis of social actors and their representation is particularly limited to the
representation of inclusion versus exclusion, and passivization versus activization:

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T. Saarinen

who is presented as active, as benefiting and as excluded from the Bologna Process?
From the social point of view, not mentioning some actor or group of actors can be
ideologically at least as significant as mentioning another, if not more so (Fairclough,
1992).
The policy goals of the Bologna Process are decided in transnational settings, but
in a context where there is no institutional actor with the authoritative power to
make decisions concerning them. The nation states will, in turn, have to react to a
process where they are simultaneously the actors and targets of the policy.
Over the years, various actors have joined the original four signatories of
the Sorbonne Declaration from 1998. The European Commission now has a special
role as a voting member in the Bologna Follow-up Group. The Council of Europe,
the National Unions of Students in Europe (ESIB), the Education International (EI)
Pan-European Structure, the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher
Education (ENQA), the European University Association (EUA), the European
Association of Institutions in Higher Education (EURASHE), the European Centre
for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) and the Union of Industrial and
Employers Confederations of Europe (UNICE) are consultative members of the
Follow-up Group. All these can be seen as potential actors in the Bologna Process.
Valimaa (2005) has looked into the actors in three university reform experiments
in Finland. In his analysis he names the potential actors operating in the Finnish
higher education policy field as follows:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Ministry of Education
Higher education institutions
Academic trade unions
Student organizations
Employer organizations and private enterprises
Ministry of Finance
Political parties
Higher education researchers
Other, occasional actors

All experiments in Valimaas analysis took place before the Finnish Higher
Education Evaluation Council (FINHEEC) was founded. Since this paper deals
specifically with the FINHEECs area of evaluation of universities and polytechnics,
the FINHEEC should be added to the list of potential quality actors, or actors with
a potential interest in the quality assurance policies in Finland, both nationally and
with regard to the Bologna Process.
Analysis
The data consist of:
1. The Bologna Process declarations and communiques, signed biennially by the
ministers of education of the participating countries (Bologna, 1999; Prague,
2001; Berlin, 2003; Bergen, 2005; London, 2007);
2. Responses of the Finnish Ministry of education (MinEd) to that policy
(MinEd, 2003, 2005, 2007); and

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183

3. Essential Finnish higher education policy planning documentation presenting

policy frames for the future, such as development plans for education by the
Council of State (MinEd, 2004a), the Memorandum on Quality Assurance of
higher education (MinEd, 2004b); the audit documentation by the Finnish
National Higher Education Evaluation Council FINHEEC (FINHEEC,
2005); and the discussion paper on structural development of higher education
(MinEd, 2006).
The analysis of the texts concentrates on the introductions to the documents or the
quality assurance sections of the documents. These have been selected because they
set the tone of the document, without going into technical policy or implementation
detail. Occurrences of quality in chapter headings are more or less standardized
in the biennial drafting of the communiques and the national responses, and have
been omitted from the data, together with occurrences of names of publications and
organizations.
As mentioned earlier, the focus is on the occurrence of the word quality or the
Finnish laatu. The documents presented earlier were analyzed through the
following procedure.
First, to get an overview of the data, the uses of quality in the introductions to the
documents or in their quality assurance sections were analyzed simply by calculation
of the occurrences and their specific contexts in the text. Table 1 provides an example
of this, by showing how much and with what meaning quality appears in the Bologna
Process declarations and communiques of the five Ministerial meetings that have
taken place so far.
While the purpose of this article is by no means to make any quantitative analysis
of the data, some observations have to be made. It seems that while the overall
number of occurrences of quality has remained mostly unchanged over the years
since the first meeting in Bologna in 1999, the share of quality assurance has
increased slightly over the years, while other, more random occurrences such as
academic quality or quality standards have disappeared from the latest documentation. This supports the earlier observation (Saarinen, 2005b), based on a more
quantitative analysis, that while the usage of quality has increased, its meanings have

Table 1.

Occurrences of quality in the Bologna process declarations and communiques.

Bologna 1999 Prague 2001 Berlin 2003 Bergen 2005 London 2007

Quality assurance
Quality standards
Academic quality
Quality of higher
education
Quality (no attribute)
Quality framework
Quality of activities
Total occurrences of
quality

7
1
1
1

12

1
11

14

1
1
1

11

11

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T. Saarinen

become
apparently
more converged, as the texts have concentrated on the more
technical aspects of quality assurance systems and their implementations.
Second, the social actors in the contexts of quality were looked for and
distributed according to whether they were active (as in the institutionalized use
of The FINHEEC organizes audits of quality assurance systems, or the
personalized They will strengthen their efforts to promote effective quality
assurance systems . . . [MinEd, 2007]), or whether some actors had been suppressed,
either through passive agent deletion (as in From the universities, this requires that
the quality and efficiency of undergraduate education is improved [Berlin, 2003]) or
nominalization (Student selection is an important part of a successful study
process . . . [MinEd, 2004a]).
Table 2 presents an example of this phase of the analysis by showing two passages
from the Finnish data; first, a passage of a Finnish working group memorandum
(MinEd, 2004b) describing plans for the development of a Finnish quality assurance
system, and, second, the Finnish response (MinEd, 2005) drafted for the Bergen
meeting in May 2005, describing the same developments as in MinEd (2004b).
Analysis of Bologna Process documents
In the Bologna Process declarations and communiques, the main actors are the
national ministers or the signatories, either as the personalized we, which appears in
the Bologna Declaration (1999) and the Bergen Communique (2005) or the
institutionalized Ministers (Prague, 2001; Berlin, 2003):
Ministers recognized the vital role that quality assurance systems play in ensuring high
quality standards and in facilitating the comparability of qualifications throughout
Europe. (Prague, 2001)

Table 2.

Representation of social actors (two Finnish extracts): example of analysis.

1. (MinEd, 2004b)
. . . In response to the objectives set [passive agent deletion] in the Berlin communique,
auditing of the quality assurance systems of universities and polytechnics will be taken into
use [passive agent deletion] in Finland. The development and pilot phase of the auditing
is realized [passive agent deletion] during 2004
2005 through the collaboration between
the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council and the higher education institutions.
The objective is that the audits will be carried out [passive agent deletion] periodically
(e.g. at 5
6 year intervals) and that all quality assurance systems of the higher education
institutions are audited [passive agent deletion] once by the year 2010.
2. (MinEd, 2005)
. . . The Ministry takes care of the quantitative evaluation of higher education institutions.
As a part of a renewed national quality assurance system, the Ministry of Education will
develop methods and criteria for the decisions on starting new programmes, ending
programmes and evaluating existing programmes in special cases.
. . . The higher education institutions bear the main responsibility for the q. of their
activities. Universities and polytechnics are currently developing q. assurance systems,
which will cover all the institutional activities: education, research and societal services.
Note. Institutionalization personalization [passive agent deletion] nominalization

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185

We commit ourselves to introducing the proposed model for peer review of quality
assurance agencies on a national basis, while respecting the commonly accepted
guidelines and criteria. (Bergen, 2005)

This is not surprising, since the ministers are the actual signers of the declarations
and communiques. The usage of Ministers, in the third person plural, is
authoritative, exclusive and in fact distances the actor from the action. The use of
we, in turn, suggests more complex relationships. It may suggest inclusion and
exclusion, and claim communality and authority at the same time (Inigo-Mora,
2004).
It seems that in the early 2000s, around the time of the Prague meeting, the
Process was at a stage where the first European euphoria was beginning to disappear
and the member countries were not quite willing to accept the quality assurance
goals without question (Saarinen, 2005b). The more authoritative tone of the period
between Prague and Berlin may reflect the need to assure the participants of the
necessity of the implementation of comparable quality assurance mechanisms.
The initial we returned to the communiques in the Bergen meeting of 2005, which
may have been used to reassure the participants of the unity of the Process goals. As
Inigo-Mora (2004) suggests, however, we also suggests an exclusive meaning of I 
my group, i.e. the ministers, and not the inclusive I  you. The use of we in the
Bologna Process documentation suggests authority and seeks to involve the reader in
the process suggested by us.
Fairclough (1992) talks about democratization of discourse, referring to
language use where there is tendency towards more informal language and where
explicit textual markers of power asymmetries have been removed. We suggests
communality, but acts in fact in this case to underline the suggestions of the I  my
group of Ministers, rather than the whole readership of the declarations.
When one looks at the actors represented by the suggested actions in the
declarations, others show up. In the Prague Communique, quality assurance systems
appears as an active actor, as in the following:
Ministers recognized the vital role that quality assurance systems play in ensuring high
quality standards and in facilitating the comparability of qualifications throughout
Europe. (Prague, 2001)

This instrumental use of quality assurance systems as actor both personalizes them
and presents them as having their own will and capacity to act on it. This kind of
representation distances and renders passive the political actors from the action: it is
as if quality assurance systems were a force of nature, something that has not been
created intentionally by policy-makers but is rather born naturally. A similar
occurrence is that of quality assurance networks being encouraged into a closer
cooperation, also in the Prague Communique (2001).
In the section below, from the Bergen Communique of 2005, ENQA is recognized
as a central actor in the process of proposing standards and guidelines. The
institutions of higher education are, however, constantly named as bearing the prime
responsibility for development of quality assurance (Berlin, 2003) and quality
(Bergen, 2005).
Furthermore, we urge higher education institutions to continue their efforts to enhance
the quality of their activities through the systematic introduction of internal mechanisms

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T. Saarinen

and their direct correlation to external quality assurance. We adopt the standards and
guidelines for quality assurance in the European Higher Education Area as proposed by
ENQA. (Bergen, 2005)

The exclusive we acts here to urge on the higher education institutions, which are, in
turn, referred to in a passive manner, as targets of policy: they are encouraged and
called upon to co-operate (Prague, 2001), urged to continue their efforts in quality
assurance (Bergen, 2005), and a definition of their responsibilities is called for
(Berlin, 2003):
Further they encouraged universities and other higher education institutions to
disseminate examples of best practice and to design scenarios for mutual acceptance
of evaluation and accreditation/certification mechanisms. Ministers called upon the
universities and other higher educations institutions, national agencies and the
European Network of Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), in cooperation
with corresponding bodies from countries which are not members of ENQA, to
collaborate in establishing a common framework of reference and to disseminate best
practice. (Prague, 2001)

There seems to be some potential for conflict here. On one hand, the independent
role of the universities is stressed by the exclusive we or the authoritative and distant
Ministers in enhancing the quality of their activities (Bergen, 2005; Berlin, 2003),
but on the other hand, the self-development of the universities is limited by the
standards and guidelines as proposed by ENQA (Bergen, 2005).
The Bologna Process declarations create a situation where the exclusive we or the
authoritative Ministers represents the desired policy goals. The higher education
institutions are represented at the receiving end of the policy, passively urged to keep
up with the suggestions drafted by the ministers in the biennial meetings. In the
Bologna Process policy sphere, the universities can have an active role as actors
within the limits set by us or the Ministers.
In the quality context, students are present either as beneficiaries of quality
assurance systems (as in Together with mutually recognized quality assurance
systems such arrangements will facilitate students access to the European labour
market . . ., Prague, 2001) or implicitly, represented by their European umbrella
organization ESIB, which only appears together with the rest of the E4, i.e. ENQA,
EURASHE and EUA. The same applies to the staff, who are present either
implicitly, when universities and other higher education institutions are mentioned,
or through the European University Association (EUA). The university staff
organization (EI) and the organization of the industry and employers (UNICE)
are totally missing from the quality discourse, although they do appear elsewhere in
the Bologna Process documentation.
Analysis of Finnish documents
As stated earlier, the Finnish documents are analyzed in two parts:
1. the documents directed at a Finnish readership, i.e. Ministry of Education
memoranda, Council of State decisions, development plans and discussion
papers and FINHEEC audit manuals; and

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187

2. the documents written for reporting purposes of the Bologna Process, and
thus for a transnational readership, i.e. the reports on the national advancement of the Bologna Process.
Generally, in documents aimed at Finnish readers (FINHEEC, 2005; MinEd,
2004a,b, 2006) the national level actors such as the Ministry of Education and the
FINHEEC tend to be presented in the passive. In the Memorandum of the quality
assurance working group (MinEd, 2004a), for instance, it is said that the suggested
audit will be taken into use in Finland. The actor is excluded (backgrounded) here,
and only referred to elsewhere in the document.
The term quality assurance is in itself a nominalization that omits both the actor
(who assures) and the beneficiary (what is being assured and for whom). The action
itself is foregrounded, and the actors and beneficiaries are consequently suppressed
or backgrounded. Again, the omission of actors seems to stress the inevitability of
the action itself.
Similarly, the development and pilot phase of the auditing were realized during
2004
2005 through the collaboration between the Finnish Higher Education
Evaluation Council and the higher education institutions (MinEd, 2004b). Here,
the actors are exceptionally mentioned by use of a postmodifying phrase between, to
introduce the FINHEEC and the higher education institutions as actors, even if
cooperation is the foregrounded key word.
The objective of the audits is that they will be carried out periodically (e.g. at fiveto six-year intervals) and that all quality assurance systems of the higher education
institutions are audited once by the year 2010 (MinEd, 2004a). Again, the actors
(Ministry of Education, the FINHEEC and the universities) are suppressed here,
although visible elsewhere in the documents.
Mostly, the actors in the Finnish documentation aimed at the Finnish reader
are hidden, although from elsewhere in the memorandum it can be deduced that the
audit system is a response to the demands of the Bologna Process and that the active
party is the FINHEEC. In the section above, the only time the FINHEEC is named
as an active actor is in collaboration with the higher education institutions. Here, the
effect of the nominalization collaborator is softened by the naming of the higher
education institutions as co-collaborators of the FINHEEC.
The Ministry of Education and the FINHEEC also appear as passive actors or
are totally missing (only referred to) elsewhere in the documentation written for the
Finnish audience. The higher education institutions are represented as having the
main responsibility (MinEd, 2004a).
The institutional ministry is only named as being actively responsible for
developing accreditation-like procedures, which have been its responsibility before:
The Ministry of Education develops methods and criteria for the decisions on starting
new programmes, ending programmes and evaluating existing programmes in special
cases. (MinEd, 2004a)

The same applies to the discussion paper on structural development (MinEd, 2006),
where, for instance, accreditation of new degrees will take into account the quality of
the said programme
a totally new practice in Finnish higher education (Saarinen &
Ala-Vahala, 2006). It can only be assumed that the active actor in this process would

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T. Saarinen

be the Ministry of Education, who is responsible for new programmes, although no

actor is named in the document:
In the university sector, accreditation procedures for new degree programmes will be
applied [passive, unnamed] from 2008 onwards, which takes into account quality and
demand for education. (MinEd, 2006; the authors translation)

When, however, documentation which is intended for the transnational audience is

analyzed, the picture is different. In the Finnish follow-up reports on the Bologna
Process (MinEd, 2003, 2005), the national level actors, the Ministry of Education and
the FINHEEC, are named and in the active tense. For instance, in the Finnish
reports from 2005 (MinEd, 2005), the FINHEEC is clearly named as the primary
actor in the audits:
In order to respond to the objectives set in the Berlin Communique, FINHEEC will
start to audit the quality assurance systems of universities and polytechnics. (MinEd,
2005)

In the documentation in pursuance of the Bologna Process (MinEd, 2003, 2005), the
Ministry of Education and the FINHEEC are named as the responsible parties for
developing the criteria for quality assurance and for evaluating the quality of higher
education institutions, and legislation is named as the background motivator for
evaluation:
. . . Thus, the Ministry takes care of the quantitative evaluation of higher education
institutions.
. . . The Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council (FINHEEC) is responsible for
evaluating the quality of education and other activities in higher education institutions.
(MinEd, 2005)

The higher education institutions, in turn, are represented as bearing responsibility

for the quality of their activities. This is stated in the report for the London meeting
(MinEd, 2007) as a traditional state of affairs, rather than something assigned at that
moment by the Ministry or the FINHEEC:
In Finland, universities and polytechnics have traditionally been responsible for the
quality of their work. (MinEd, 2007)

It appears, however, that on most occasions there is a need for the Ministry and the
FINHEEC to show a strong political power in re the Bologna Process, and
simultaneously a need to tone that power down in the national documentation. The
Ministry and the FINHEEC assist, develop, and at most work in co-operation with
the universities and other higher education institutions. An exception here is
the memorandum on structural development of higher education (MinEd, 2006),
where neither the Ministry nor FINHEEC nor the higher education institutions are
represented as the powerful actors. Rather, the need for quality assurance is
motivated by external (f)actors, mostly those of the economy:
Arranging student, administration and support services for a larger student body is
more effective and of better quality than organizing those services in smaller units.
(MinEd, 2006)

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189

Despite the number of potential actors in the Finnish quality assurance policies, the
representations of policy actors circle around the Ministry, the FINHEEC and the
higher education institutions. Even students, if they are mentioned at all, appear as
passive beneficiaries of the actions, and the staff appear to be completely absent as
an actor in the quality policy.
Conclusion
The Bologna Process documentation foregrounds the Ministers (authoritative,
exclusive, as in the Prague and Berlin Communiques) and we (used authoritatively,
as in the Prague and Berlin Communiques). Higher education institutions and their
staff and students are first invisible and appear only gradually as active actors. It also
appears that while cooperation and mutual trust are stressed, the participants in that
action are suppressed. Quality assurance mechanisms or networks appear as actors.
This representation, in turn, pacifies or excludes other policy actors and makes the
introduction and implementation of quality assurance systems inevitable.
In the Finnish documentation addressed to the national audience, the role of the
Ministry of Education and the FINHEEC is toned down and suppressed, or even
made passive. In return, the role of the higher education institutions is made more
active
in keeping with the Finnish tradition (Saarinen, 2005a). This would also
serve, perhaps, to make the higher education institutions appear more responsible for
their action. In the Finnish reports in pursuance of the Bologna Process, however,
the active role of the Ministry and the FINHEEC is stressed over that of the higher
education institutions. Again, higher education institutions are presented as passive
targets of Bologna Process policy.
Table 3 draws together the analysis. It seems that at least global quality assurance
policies are recontextualized nationally by the foregrounding of the Ministries and
other national level bodies, and either the backgrounding or exclusion of the other
potential actors (most notably students and staff). In the Finnish context, it would
seem that the Ministry of Education has the power to position itself differently in
various contexts, i.e. weak in re the national scene and strong in re the transnational
or Bologna Process scene. Other potential actors (higher education institutions,
students) are made invisible in the national level documents written for the Bologna
Process purposes, but visible and more active in the national texts written for a
national audience.
Table 3. The major potential actors and their representations in the documents in the context
of quality.
Potential actors
Minister/Ministries
Higher education institutions
Academic trade unions/academic staff
Student organizations/students
Employer organizations and private
enterprises

Finland
(inwards)

Finland
(outwards)

Bologna
Process

Mostly passive
Mostly active
Excluded
Mostly passive

Mostly active
Mostly passive
Mostly excluded
Passive

Active
Mostly passive
Excluded
Mostly passive

Excluded

Passive

Mostly excluded

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T. Saarinen

More and more transnational pressure has been loaded on education policy,
including higher education policy, with the demands for transparency of educational
systems. Before the beginning of the twenty-first century, all attempts to harmonize
European systems of higher education were strongly resisted by nation states.
(Ollikainen, 1999; Corbett, 2005). This situation has now been challenged by the
Bologna Process, which can be said to act as a safety-valve for the pressures for
convergence within the European Union. This, however, is not a sufficient
explanation for the developments of the Bologna Process.
The role of the European Commission is significant and increasing, not only in
European higher education policy in general (Keeling, 2006), but in European
quality assurance policies in particular. The Commission has played a steady,
significant part both in the founding and the current activities of ENQA, and
continues to do so. Dale (2006) has discussed the open method of coordination in the
European Union decision-making policies from the point of view of the employment
and education sectors. He concludes that the success (or failure?) of the European
Union processes is based on a construction of a consensual best practice (Dale,
2006, pp. 46
47). It would seem that this is also the case with regard to the quality
assurance policies: in addition to the national policies, a further, European, level of
consensus construction is needed, and the Bologna Process is the arena for the
European Union quality assurance policies.
After some initial suspicion, Finland has been rather keen to adopt the reforms
required in the degree structure segment of the Process
not least because the
reforms were on their way already before the Bologna Declaration (Ahola &
Mesikammen, 2003). With quality assurance policies, the situation has been
different. Before the Berlin meeting of 2003, the official stance of Finnish higher
education policy seemed to be that the Bologna Process made no significant
demands on the Finnish quality assurance system (Saarinen, 2005a). Since Berlin,
the Finnish quality system has clearly taken a new discursive turn. Development can
be seen as a discourse of the academic community, whereas the new system of audit
fits into the discourse of the policy-makers and governance (Saarinen, 2005a;
Valimaa & Westerheijden, 1995; Vidovich, 2001). The universities, which have
traditionally been the project of the nation state (Valimaa, 2005), have to recontextualize themselves in a global context of externally constructed quality
assurance demands.
The asymmetry in the representations of actors, depending on whom the
document was written to, is quite natural in the sense that it reflects the interests
of different groups of actors and the assumed interests of readers. But it may also
imply the construction of different kinds of, or even clashing of, quality worlds in
different contexts. All these worlds are real in the sense that they represent some
historical and political development that differs from the next one (Saarinen &
Valimaa, 2006): and as the policy situations differ, so do the policy constructs, which
might lead to friction between the policies, and consequently into problems at some
point during the national implementation of the Bologna Process quality policy
goals. From the point of view of higher education policy research, the most
interesting questions can be found where this friction surfaces. The study should, in
fact, be continued with a more ethnographic approach, by an analysis of the
situations where policy-makers, administrators and academics engage with these
discourses (Wright, 2005).

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

191

At the national policy level, the quality assurance system may seem totally
different from the global constructs of the Bologna Process, depending on the
national policy context and the particular national policy characteristics. The
Bologna Process emerges not as one process, but as many, where the name Bologna
Process acts as a common denominator for several social processes and discourses.
The needs of the nation state are displayed differently in different policy arenas. This
is not a question of how well the global policy models are implemented in the
national policies, but how the international influences are translated into the
national situations. In each policy field, the actors will ultimately promote their own
view of quality and the policy actions that follow from that view. At the interface
between national and transnational, the ministries and the ministers are the
dominant quality actors.

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