A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

The term ‘benchmarking’ was first adapted to business practices in 1979 by
the then almost-bankrupt Xerox. Through the systematic and collaborative
comparison of performance with its competitors, Xerox’s aim was to evaluate
itself, to identify its strengths and weaknesses and adapt to constantly changing
market conditions. Benchmarking approaches have been gradually
adopted by many businesses in the context of the quality assurance and
quality enhancement movements, facing the need to ensure productivity and
effectiveness in the face of increasing competition.
Benchmarking has a special place among these movements, but first there
are other major routes towards quality and improved performance.
As a ‘health warning’, it should be emphasised that the situation is not stableon
the contrary, ideas are developed, new names and abbreviations are
introduced regularly and widely-shared views change. Potential practitioners
are therefore advised not to take the following as eternal truths cast in stone.
The aim here is not to discuss thoroughly all the models available in the quality
movement. To remain brief and to the point, high-lights of some aspects
of some major types of quality assurance models have been presented that
may make them interesting for quality management in higher education
institutions.
Total Quality Management (TQM)
Total Quality Management, abbreviated to TQM, was “the dominant theoretical
and empirical paradigm for quality management” (Schroeder, Linderman,
Liedtke, & Choo, 2008). Yet, TQM is not a single quality assurance model, but
rather a broad movement with many varieties (e.g. Conti, 1993; Deming, 1993;
Juran & Gryna, 1988). For our purposes, it will be enough to distinguish a
hard and a soft version. Common to all varieties of TQM is the belief that
managing quality will lead to large scale improvements in the organisation
and its performance. While some of the TQM claims may have been
overstatements, it builds on sound principles, applicable in public higher
education institutions (Dill, 1999).
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