Postmodernism and Quality

In this article, it is argued that postmodernism has created the ambience in which universities are being stripped of their traditional autonomy by external demands for quality assurance. The Introduction asks why demands for quality assurance in Western higher education are being made in the 1990s. The analysis begins by outlining the way in which the Lyotardian postmodernist rubric of performativity is consistent with recent trends in international higher education. The following section relates the rise of performativity to the decline of the modernist metanarrative of rationalism. The extent of the crisis in universities caused by the decline of this legitimating metanarrative is then briefly explored.