Ambiguity,Conflict and Institutional Review

The main challenges in the institutional review process are conceptual and ethical and derive from the organisational and political context of the evaluation. Higher education institutions belong to a distinctive class of organisations whose predominant characteristics are ambiguity and conflict. The evaluation process is also subject to ambiguities and conflicts, and when applied formally to a university or its departments, which are highly politicised, becomes itself a highly political activity in that the process and outcomes inevitably affect the power relationships in the organisation. A set of conceptual and ethical guidelines for institutional evaluation are proposed which attempt to reflect these characteristics. The guidelines emphasise plurality in values and perspectives; the dispersion of power; and the need for the early negotiations about the purposes and control of the evaluation, the kinds of information to be collected, and the access to it.