Governing Through Standards: The Faceless Masters of Higher Education: The Bologna Process, The EU and The Open Method of Coordination Katja Brøgger

Governing through Standards: the
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The Bologna Process, the EU and the
Open Method of Coordination Katja
Brøgger
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Educational Governance Research 10
Katja Brøgger
Governing through
Standards: the
Faceless Masters of
Higher Education
The Bologna Process, the EU and the
Open Method of Coordination
Educational Governance Research
Volume 10
Series Editors
Lejf Moos, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark
Stephen Carney, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark
Editorial Advisory Board

Herbert Altrichter, University of Linz, Austria
Stephen J. Ball, Institute of Education, London, England
Y.C. Chen, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong
Neil Dempster, Griffith University, Australia
Olof Johansson, Umeå University, Sweden
Gita Steiner Khamsi, Columbia University, USA
Klaus Kasper Kofod, Aarhus University, Denmark
Jan Merok Paulsen, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science,
Oslo, Norway
James P. Spillane, Northwest University, Chicago, USA
Michael Uljens, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
Aims and Scope
This series presents recent insights in educational governance gained from research
that focuses on the interplay between educational institutions and societies and
markets. Education is not an isolated sector. Educational institutions at all levels are
embedded in and connected to international, national and local societies and
markets. One needs to understand governance relations and the changes that occur
if one is to understand the frameworks, expectations, practice, room for manoeuvre,
and the relations between professionals, public, policy makers and market place
actors.
The aim of this series is to address issues related to structures and discourses by
which authority is exercised in an accessible manner. It will present findings on a
variety of types of educational governance: public, political and administrative, as
well as private, market place and self-governance. International and multidisci-
plinary in scope, the series will cover the subject area from both a worldwide and
local perspective and will describe educational governance as it is practised in all
parts of the world and in all sectors: state, market, and NGOs.
The series:
–– Covers a broad range of topics and power domains
–– Positions itself in a field between politics and management/leadership
–– Provides a platform for the vivid field of educational governance research
–– Looks into ways in which authority is transformed within chains of educational
governance
–– Uncovers relations between state, private sector and market place influences on
education, professionals and students.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13077

Katja Brøgger
Governing through
Standards: the Faceless
Masters of Higher Education
The Bologna Process, the EU and the Open
Method of Coordination
Katja Brøgger
Danish School of Education
Aarhus University
Copenhagen, Denmark
ISSN 2365-9548 ISSN 2365-9556 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-00885-7 ISBN 978-3-030-00886-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00886-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958005
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

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Foreword
This book is a remarkable contribution to policy studies both in terms of theory and
methodology.
Theories of the policy process tend to focus on the changing role of the state for
explaining the shift from government to governance. The shift is commonly seen as
the result of new public management policies that most OECD countries introduced
in the wake of neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. In the education sector,
the shift implied a new role for the state, new ways of regulating the education sys-
tem, and new tools for generating or alleviating reform pressure. The reforms were
undertaken with the rhetoric of results-based and outcomes-based education.
The rhetoric has been particularly stark in general education. Regardless of
whether the school system was high- or low-performing, governments were under
political pressure to selectively borrow new public management policies that
encouraged non-state actors such as businesses, churches, communities, and fami-
lies to open and operate schools with funding from public resources. The liberaliza-
tion of education providers exacerbated the focus on standards, results, and
outcomes. Within a short period of time, the governments scaled back the role of the
state in education from one in which it was at the same time provider and regular to
one in which it could withdraw to being only a standard-setter and regulator. Target-
setting and benchmarking became the key governance tools. The shift from govern-
ment to governance has not only fueled a “governance by numbers” (Jenny Ozga)
but also required from governments that they engage in “network governance”
(Stephen J. Ball and C. Junemann) in which non-state actors are not only seen as
providers of goods and services but also as key partners in the policy process. The
empowerment of non-state actors in the new millennium as key policy actors has
been interpreted as a clear sign of the “disarticulation and diversification of the state
system” and the “destatalization” of the policy process (Ball and Junemann 2012)
which neoliberal reforms of the past century intended to achieve.
In higher education, the “non-state actor” is, as Brøgger asserts, a “faceless
Master.” The Open Method of Coordination of the Bologna Process is not coercive
yet stringent in terms of quality assurance standards, not punitive yet exclusionary
by annually faming or shaming its member states, and not national yet more
v
vi Foreword
influential on national higher education systems in Europe, and beyond, than

national laws or other national “hard governance” tools of the past decades. The
primary policy tool for harmonizing vastly different higher education systems, the
Open Method of Coordination (OMC), in effect propels the transnational accredita-
tion of national (higher) education systems. It does so in the name of quality assur-
ance and international student mobility. As a corollary, the question is: how has a
noncoercive, nonpunitive, transnational “faceless” Master managed to incentivize
48 member states to harmonize their system in ways that that gives them a legiti-
mate place in the “European space” (see António Nóvoa and Martin Lawn)? The
short answer is: by way of comparison, competition, and the desire to cohabit the
attractive European space. The long answer is compellingly outlined in the book.
Brøgger embarks on an ambitious project: to understand the authority of the
Open Method of Coordination in shaping the everyday working life of Danish uni-
versity administrators and faculty members. Naturally, the administrators and pro-
fessors are not helpless victims of an arrangement made elsewhere, at supranational
level or somewhere “outside” but rather actively translate and reframe what the
Bologna Process means in their own organization. Her interest in translation pro-
cesses, agency, and power relations among policy actors positions her in the com-
pany of scholars who study policy transfer, policy borrowing, and globalization.
However, different from conventional approaches, her study draws on additional
interpretive frameworks used in philosophy of science, new materialism, and femi-
nist theory, thereby expanding the traditional focus on the reasons (why) and the
process (how) of policy borrowing. More specifically, she investigates the agency of
absence (“hauntology”) and the turn to materiality (“matterology”) in order to
understand the performativity of the Bologna Process. Hers is the original intellec-
tual project of understanding the Open Method of Coordination as a powerful actor
that uses “soft governance” to advance transnational standards in higher education.
Her fascination with the OMC policy tool in itself may be seen as a research com-
mitment to identifying those features of an actual policy tool (what) that drive pol-
icy transfer, convergence, and harmonization.
The book is also methodologically noteworthy. Her method of inquiry allows for
multiple perspectives and levels of analysis. Different from other multisited ethnog-
raphies that equate “site” with a geographical “space,” Brøgger uses the discursive
space of policy negotiations between the European, national, and institutional lev-
els, as a site for participant observation. In other words, she does not view document
analysis merely as one of many “data collection methods” (along with interviews,
observations, etc.) but rather elevates policy/document analysis to its own site or
bounded (con-)text that produces meaning – interdependent and at times conflict-
ing – among the various policy actors. Methodologically, this enables her to analyze
governance technologies embedded in written texts and policy adaptations. The dif-
ferent sites are then discussed in the various chapters. In one of the chapters, for
example, she investigates the rapid pace of expansion and the deep transformation
process in higher education attributed to the Bologna Process. What peaks her inter-
est, in particular, are the self-monitoring and evaluation tools or the follow-up
mechanisms employed in the OMC. She uses the term “the infrastructure of the
Foreword vii
Bologna Process” to understand how scorecards, stocktaking reports, and templates

advance “governance by numbers” or “governance without government,” respec-
tively. At closer examination, these tools are technologies of authorization that use
comparison as the foundation for naming, shaming, and faming higher education
systems in terms of standards achievement. The endeavor of scoring very well
(green Bologna scorecard) or at least very good (light green) on curriculum stan-
dards is not only important for national policy actors but also for institutions and
individuals in higher education.
Clearly, Katja Brøgger’s account of the policy ontology of the Bologna Process
and its Open Coordination Method is interesting in its own right. Moreover, her
focus on how and why international standards “work” and which infrastructure they
establish to effectively infuse institutional policies and practices is essential for
understanding why national policy actors, some enthusiastically and others reluc-
tantly, adopt or buy into international standards.
Columbia University Gita Steiner-Khamsi

New York, NY, USA
Acknowledgments
This monograph is not the work of one person. It represents the culmination of
inspiring discussions and debates with colleagues and friends around the world. In
this sense, the monograph is the work of many dedicated people.
Above all, I wish to thank all the professors and managers who invited me to be
part of their everyday working life in higher education for almost 2 years. Following
their demanding work to negotiate reforms amid continual change represented an
invaluable insight that constituted the foundation of this monograph. Without their
generosity, openness, and effort in making their organizations transparent, this
monograph would have never seen the light of day.
I wish to extend a very special thank you to my colleagues at the Danish School
of Education, Aarhus University, in particular Professor Dorthe Staunæs for sharing
her remarkable analytical skills, Professor Sue Wright for her exceptional knowl-
edge on higher education reform, and Associate Professor Pia Bramming for sup-
porting my career. I would also like to thank colleagues from the UK and the USA,
in particular Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi at the Department of International and
Transcultural Studies at Teachers College Columbia University, New York;
Professor Rajani Naidoo at the School of Management, University of Bath; Professor
Susan Robertson at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge; and finally
Professor Anna Tsing and Professor Susan Harding at the Department of
Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I am grateful that the
Aarhus University Research Foundation and the Augustinus Foundation accommo-
dated my need for funding for research stays in the UK and the USA.
I would like to extend a warm thank you to Anne Mette Winneche Nielsen for
offering time and insightful comments along the way. In addition, I would like to
thank my family and friends for engaging in conversations about current education
reforms, their significance, and their democratic impact. In particular, I would like
to thank Aviaja and Camilla for their continuous patience and support and Amalie
for unexpected new beginnings.
June 2018 Katja Brøgger
ix
Contents
1 Introduction: It Changes Everything�� 1

Chapter Outline�� 3
Contributions�� 3
References�� 7
2 Analyzing Education Reforms�� 9
A Philosophy of Science�� 9
Analytical Approach�� 11
Hauntology: Exploring the Agency of Absence�� 11
Matterology: Exploring the Turn to Materiality�� 13
Multisited Ethnography �� 22
The Ideological Touch of the Bologna Research �� 25
Collapsing Global Bigness and Smallness into the Social�� 27
Exploring Agency in Policy Processes Through ‘Policy Borrowing’�� 31
From Diffusion to Translation�� 36
Methods and Knowledge Production�� 39
References�� 43
3 The Bologna Process: From Hard Government
to Soft Governance�� 51
The Loose Ends of the Bologna Process�� 51
Governance Without Government: Circumventing
the Subsidiarity Principle? �� 57
Governance in the Bologna-Lisbon-Mesh �� 60
Summary: From Orders to Incentives�� 63
References�� 63
4 Standardizing Europe: Standards as a Mode of Governance�� 69
Standards, Standardization and Standardizing Processes�� 69
The Onto-epistemology of Standards: Re-configuring Practice�� 73
Setting Governance in Motion �� 75
xi
xii Contents
The Policy Ontology of the Governing Mode of the Bologna Process�� 78
Summary: Governance Through the Open Method of Coordination�� 81
References�� 82
5 The Infrastructure of the Bologna Process: Standards
as Technology�� 87
Monitoring as a Standardizing Technique �� 87
The Infrastructure of the Policy Ontology: Follow-Up Mechanisms�� 89
Infrastructuring Standards�� 94
Outcome-Based Education: A New Standard for Designing
the Curriculum �� 97
Modules: A New Standard for Organizing the Curriculum �� 115
Summary: Paving the Way to Hegemony�� 130
References�� 134
6 The Alteration of Higher Education: The Performativity
of Standards�� 139
The Spectrality of the Past �� 139
Professional and Social Repositioning�� 142
Camouflage Techniques �� 146
Mimicking Compliance �� 149
Summary: Fake the Document�� 155
The Spectrality of the Future �� 157
Calculation and Acceleration of Change�� 159
Redistribution of Power and Influence�� 166
Mimicking Performance�� 168
Summary: A Borrowed Policy Is a Borrowed Desire�� 174
7 Concluding Remarks: “Who Marks the Bench?”�� 179
About the Author
Katja Brøgger PhD, is associate professor at the Danish School of Education,

Aarhus University, and is head of a Research Unit for Education Policy, Governance
and Administration. This research unit is an interdisciplinary research and teaching
community devoted to studying interactions between policy, governance, and
administration globally and nationally and how new modes of governance and
administration impact education systems and institutions. The unit values interna-
tional collaboration, supports the BA and MA in education science, and provides a
vibrant research environment for PhD students.
Brøgger is a member of the European Consortium of Political Research, COST
Action IS1307 New Materialism, the Research Committee and the Study Board for
Education Science at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. She has
previously published articles in anthologies and several key academic journals such
as the, European Educational Research Journal (“How Educational Standards Gain
Hegemonic Power and Become International: The Case of Higher Education and
the Bologna Process,” 2018), the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in
Education (“The performative power of (non)human agency assemblages of soft
governance,” 2018), the British Journal of Sociology of Education (“The rule of
mimetic desire in higher education: governing through naming, shaming and fam-
ing,” 2016), Theory and Psychology (“Standards and (self)implosion,” 2016), and
Globalisation, Societies and Education (“The ghosts of higher education reform: on
the organisational processes surrounding policy borrowing,” 2014).
Brøgger does research in education policy, governance, and administration with
a special view to the relations between transnational reform processes and higher
education institutions as well as central public administrations operating at national
level. As part of this, she takes an interest in the role of the EU, the Bologna Process,
OECD, UNESCO, and the World Bank. Her scholarly interests also encompass
inter/national education reforms, accreditation procedures, globalization studies,
Europeanization and regionalization, privatization, international education stan-
dards, and policy borrowing and lending. Theoretically, she takes inspiration in
recent performative innovations of poststructuralism such as “new materialism.”
xiii
Chapter 1
Introduction: It Changes Everything
The Bologna Process is one name – and arguably the most important name – given
to the major changes currently being made within higher education both in and
outside Europe. The Bologna Process draws close to its twentieth anniversary in
2019. During the past almost 20 years, the process has altered what it means to talk
about knowledge and educational organization and, through this, it has also changed
what is sayable, doable and probably even bodyable as an actor taking part in these
processes.
The Bologna Process aims to create a European Higher Education Area by trans-
forming the higher education architectures through initiatives and targets such as
educational harmonization, comparability, mobility, flexibility, employability, and
qualification frameworks. Elena, a professor at a higher education institution, expe-
riences all of this. In her higher education organization, a new BA ministerial order
and curriculum, shaped in accordance with the European reform processes, is cur-
rently being implemented. Elena says:
You know it’s like… Oh, how should I put it…? Well, I think we experience that … I really
don’t know how to phrase this… That our entire way of …. being a school, being col-
leagues, our relations with management, our culture is… Well of course it needs to develop
all the time; I mean it’s not like we don’t move and it’s like… but… I currently experience
that there are some fundamental things in our house… no not things but relations in our
house which are uhmm… highly problematic […]
Our working conditions and our culture seem so threatened (Interview).
The full impact of these new modes of governance on higher education in Europe
remains unknown; it is still not entirely clear where the policy movements of the
Bologna Process are leading (Huisman, Stensaker, & Kehm, 2009; Magalhães &
Amaral, 2009; Ravinet, 2008). Many of the new governing technologies have not
yet been thoroughly examined as part of the major changes of higher education
(Lawn & Grek, 2012) – or at least they have not been examined as governing tech-
nologies but simply as curricular or organizational changes. This is most likely due
to the character of these governing technologies; that they often enter higher
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

K. Brøgger, Governing through Standards: the Faceless Masters of Higher
Education, Educational Governance Research 10,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00886-4_1
2 1 Introduction: It Changes Everything
education undetected as governance. It can be difficult to establish from where the

new technologies originate, since they often come in the shape of new education
standards. But these standards prove to have strong performative effects: As they
travel, they transform the social worlds they encounter on their way, they change
that which they seek to govern and they are themselves transformed in the process.
This is why Elena experiences that the transformations of the higher education
architecture change everything; their way of being education, being colleagues,
their relations with management and their culture.
The Bologna Process is known for its expansion and its swift and far-reaching
transformations of higher education architectures. Since 1999 the Bologna Process
has moved from a declaration of intent to an extensive mobilization of 48 countries.
But how come that the process gained this kind of momentum; how is it that those
48 countries were mobilized without passing any laws? And how does the process
impact or include everyday working life in higher education? The macro narratives
on the process seem to miss the importance of agency, for example local enact-
ments, in the negotiations of reform processes and policy effects. In many ways, this
book became an explorative policy ethnography on the governing mode of the
Bologna Process and how to grasp the connections to everyday working life (and
how to conceptualize these connections) as part of current international education
reform. For this reason, and driven by an academic curiosity to understand some-
thing so crucial to a globalized professional living in higher education, the mono-
graph ultimately became an investigation that moved across several sites and
academic disciplines and thus reconfigured the field as such.
The Bologna Process is currently the main European reform process driving the
transformation of higher education. I attempt to explain the speed and size of expan-
sion of this process and how it is possible to connect the extensive transnational
reform processes with everyday working life in higher education – something that
seems widely unaccounted for. As this study will show, the Bologna Process seems
to work as a subtle means to circumvent the subsidiarity principle of the European
Union (EU) and make possible European governance of education despite the fact
that education falls outside EU’s legislative reach. However, since the governing of
education has transformed to a complex peer pressure incentive based economy in
which steering is being operationalized through monitoring techniques we are often
unable to detect from where the governance is being executed. Since this particular
governance is being operationalized through standards, such as the qualifications
framework, it tends to become almost invisible. Meanwhile, this book pushes this
agenda even further and argues that the standards, through which the Bologna
Process is governed, no longer seem to serve as tools for regulators. The standards
that were once tools for human organizational, national or international regulators
now seem to have become non-human regulators themselves. These faceless mas-
ters of higher education present a profound challenge since they indicate that educa-
tion has become a matter of European administration.
Contributions 3
Chapter Outline
The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 provides the reader with an intro-
duction to the monograph and outlines the contributions of the monograph. Chapter
2 presents the underlying theoretical perspectives, methodological and analytical
strategies and methods. The chapter also positions the monograph within research
on the Bologna Process, globalization studies and the policy borrowing and lending
approach. In this way, Chap. 2 constitutes one interconnected and coherent account
of the research positioning of this monograph and displays how the monograph
reaches across several academic disciplines. The following Chaps. (3, 4, 5 and 6)
present the ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of the four case sites that constitute
the policy ethnography of this monograph. Chapter 3 centers on the shift from gov-
ernment to governance in Europe through an exploration of how the Bologna prin-
ciples were part of an early EU agenda on European growth and how the Bologna
Process and the EU Lisbon Agenda have become virtually indistinguishable.
Chapter 4 examines how standards and standardization became key to set in motion
the new form of soft governance in Europe. Chapter 5 examines the infrastructure
of the Bologna Process, that is the mechanisms and instruments that generated the
speed of expansion and swift transformation of higher education architectures that
now seems to characterize the Bologna Process. Chapter 6 explores the ways in
which the ‘peer-pressure ontology’ of the Bologna Process, including its infrastruc-
ture, is sustained by glossing over, and thus making invisible, the everyday organi-
zational working life for professors and managers in higher education. The final
Chap. 7 concludes that the Open Method of Coordination becomes the oeuvre
through which (inter)national measuring and comparative tools propel education
governance. The Open Method of Coordination institutes the new mode of soft
governance in which all agents become standardizers themselves. The bench is not
marked from the outside. All the actors involved in the Bologna Process mark the
bench. The chapter highlights the unintended and often contingent effects of the
new modes of governance, and how the new education standards emerge as the face-
less masters of higher education.
Contributions
This monograph contributes to critical research on the governing of higher educa-

tion by offering an empirical and theoretical account of the mode of governance that
characterizes the Bologna Process. The study is designed around the recurring argu-
ment that the standards through which the Bologna Process is governed no longer
serve as tools for what were once human organizational, national or international,
regulators. The standards have become regulators themselves – the faceless masters
of higher education. The empirical study, on which this monograph is based, is

designed, as a multisited policy ethnography exploring the translation of the
Bologna standards in higher education. Empirically the study focuses on core policy
documents from the early 1990s to 2015 (in particular memoranda, strategies,
reports and communiqués presented by the EU, the Bologna Process and the Danish
Ministry of Higher Education and Science) and strategic development among man-
agers and an implementation process for a new educational ministerial order and
curriculum, shaped in accordance with the European reform processes at a univer-
sity and a university college in Denmark.
The monograph reveals the close connections between the Bologna Process and
the EU regarding regulative and monitoring techniques such as standardizations and
comparisons, which are carried out through the so-called ‘Open Method of
Coordination’. The study suggests that the Bologna principles were part of an early
EU agenda on European growth that pre-dates the Bologna Declaration in 1999 and
thus that the Bologna Process works as a subtle means to circumvent the EU’s sub-
sidiarity principle, making it possible to accomplish a European governance of
higher education despite the absence of legal competence.
The monograph further argues that the spread and continuous development and
production of higher education standards in Europe depends on the infrastructure of
the Bologna Process, which consists of an explosion of standardizing devices and
monitoring practices. The materiality of the infrastructure, such as multicolored
scorecards that compare national performance data, is affectively wired through
naming-shaming-faming mechanisms that calibrate and incentivize member states
to mimic each other and desire ‘better performance’ and, as such co-opt themselves
into peer-pressure. Through these material-affective processes, governance without
government is produced. Member states are made to co-opt themselves into the
process through the extensive use of benchmarking and best practice exercises and
through this process member states – including experts and peers – become efficient
standardizers themselves and actively participate in the production and monitoring
of standardized performance requirements.
Following the spread of two education standards – the modularization and the
outcome-orientation of the curriculum – the study argues that standardization used
as a regulative technology designed to govern at a distance reaches deep into the
ontological matter of everyday working life in higher education organizations.
The study takes inspiration in a policy borrowing and lending approach to inter-
national reform and through an investigation of the translating processes of the new
standards, the monograph includes and expands on the social dimension and the
agency dimension of reform processes. Standards make social stratifications and the
study reveals how the standards are involved with the creation, shaping and (re)
configuring of the realities of higher education. The monograph argues that these
standards alter that which they seek to govern because they change professors and
managers’ social and professional worlds and because they themselves bend and
transform when they are bundled up with work practices. Therefore, the monograph
further concludes, that even though a standardizing process has taken place, this
does not necessarily entail that such a process has contributed uniformity. Rather
Contributions 5
the study reveals how the infrastructure of the Bologna Process seems to conceal
those agencies that resist or counter-perform, that is how managers and professors
translations of the new standards are based on mimetic camouflage strategies
designed to ‘make it look as if’ in order to keep up good appearance when con-
fronted with the expectations from managers or ministries. The monograph suggests
that the Bologna Process is being undermined from within by those who are being
affected the most.
This book engages with two interrelated ambitions: (1) an empirical and theo-
retical ambition to contribute to the object of my research – international higher
education reform, and (2) a theoretical ambition to grasp and conceptualize interna-
tional education reform as a phenomenon that extends across times and spaces and
changes social geography of higher education. Concerning the empirical and theo-
retical ambition to contribute to the research on international higher education
reform, I develop three theoretical concepts designed to explore the empirical mate-
rial in ways that are complex sensitive. I crafted and brought the concepts into exis-
tence through an exchange between inspiration from performativity philosophy, the
turn to materiality and the ethnographic field work. For this reason, the concepts
will be developed, presented and operationalized analytically as part of the ethno-
graphic examinations and analyses in Chaps. 3, 4, 5 and 6. This approach allowed
me to contribute to research on international higher education reform with the
insights and suggestions for analysis and interpretation described below.
I develop a concept of ‘policy ontology’. This ontology of the governing mode of
the Bologna process signifies the ‘quality’ or the condition and constitution of the
ways in which the Bologna Process works. This notion of ‘policy ontology’ has
helped me contribute to research on the Bologna Process by exposing the close con-
nections between the Bologna Process and the EU regarding regulative techniques
such as standardization and monitoring techniques such as comparisons. The mono-
graph suggests that the Bologna principles were part of an early EU agenda on
European growth that predates the Bologna Declaration in 1999. The study further
indicates that in this way, the Bologna Process works as a subtle means to bypass
the subsidiarity principle of the EU, making it possible to accomplish a European
governance of higher education despite the fact that education falls outside EU’s
legislative reach. This research ambition is displayed in Chaps. 3 and 4.
In addition to the policy ontology, I develop a concept of a material-affective
infrastructure of the policy ontology. In particular, the infrastructure denotes the
tools and instruments through which the Bologna mode of governance is set in
motion. Or, in other words, it denotes the ways in which the ontology of the Bologna
Process materializes. The materiality of the infrastructure consists of scorecards,
graphs and numbers comparing performance data. These technologies seem to be
affectively wired through naming-shaming-faming mechanisms that incentivize
member states to mimic each other and desire ‘better performance’. This notion of
the policy ontology’s ‘material-affective infrastructure’ has helped me understand
how the Bologna standards gain hegemonic power by being circulated through the
follow-up mechanisms of the Bologna Process. This concept also allowed me to
analyze how the infrastructure glosses over and makes invisible the ways in which
the new standards changed the social and professional life among professors and
managers in higher education. This research ambition is displayed in Chap. 5.
In order to deepen the understanding of the changes that the new education stan-
dards seem to generate, I develop a performative concept on standards as a regula-
tive technology. This means that in my work with standards, I center on the ways in
which standards are involved with the creation, shaping and (re)configuring of the
education-worlds – that they alter that which they seek to govern but also that they
themselves transform as part of the processes. This performative notion of standards
as a regulative technology allowed me to understand that standards constitute a
major part of the policy ontology of the Bologna Process since education standards,
such as the modular outcomes-based curricula, are designed to ‘govern at a dis-
tance’ (and across nation states). This conceptualization of standards also allowed
me to access the changes of social and professional life at higher education institu-
tions that were brought about by these standards. This research ambition is pre-
sented throughout Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6. The focus on the transformations of the
working lives in higher education organizations is explored in Chap. 6 in particular.
Finally, the exchange between the fieldwork and the theoretical concepts permitted
an analysis of how the Bologna mode of governance is fueled by a material-affective
economy through which education actors are made to co-opt themselves into the
process and thus actively co-produce and sustain the policy ontology and its infra-
structure. The monograph suggests that this implies that the involved actors become
standardizers themselves and thus all actively ‘mark the bench’ in the sense of set-
ting the standards by circulating them.
Concerning the theoretical ambition to grasp and conceptualize international
education reform as a phenomenon that extends across times and spaces and changes
social geography and the quality of social intra-actions in higher education, despite
or beyond territorial geography, I take inspiration from the turn to materiality. The
exploration of the reform as a phenomenon constituted by distributed agencies
across different temporalities, such as past and future, and thus a phenomenon
crafted through a phenomenological play between absence and presence calls for
new conceptualizations. The performative and material turn revitalizes ontological
matters and allows a research focus on how something materializes or manifests
itself and what kind of significance and performative effects it produces. This
research ambition is part of the underlying analytical and interpretative approach
throughout the monograph. I aim to highlight this ambition by developing a concept
of ‘matterology’ and by adjusting a concept of ‘hauntology’ coined by Derrida.
Matterology and hauntology are deeply entangled in a phenomenological play
between presence and absence. Whereas hauntology is a teaching about the agency
of absence and what-is-not-there, matterology is a teaching about the agency of
what materializes and manifests and of what-is-there. Matterology involves the
crafting of ontologies through practices and hauntology denotes what haunts these
practices and thus makes them fragile. This play includes a distributed notion of
agency – that even ‘absence’, such as the past and the future, can be regarded as
busy sites of agency. The monograph suggests that there is no ‘presence’ of current
higher education that is not marked by re-configurings of the past or eroded by re-
configurings of the future.
References 7
References
Huisman, J., Stensaker, B., & Kehm, B. M. (2009). Bologna, quo vadis. In B. M. Kehm, J. Huisman,
& B. Stensaker (Eds.), The European higher education area: Perspectives on a moving target.
Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Lawn, M., & Grek, S. (2012). Europeanizing education. Governing a new policy space. Oxford,
UK: Symposium Books.
Magalhães, A., & Amaral, A. (2009). Mapping out discourses on higher education governance.
In J. Huisman (Ed.), International perspectives on the governance of higher education.
Alternative frameworks for coordination. New York: Routledge.
Ravinet, P. (2008). From voluntary participation to monitored coordination: Why European coun-
tries feel increasingly bound by their commitment to the Bologna process. European Journal
of Education, 43(3), 353–367.
Chapter 2
Analyzing Education Reforms
A Philosophy of Science
This monograph, including its methodology and analysis, is actively making use of
both philosophy and ethnography. The study is placed within what I call the turn to
materiality, also simply named ‘new materialism’. I view this position as a recent
innovation within poststructuralist philosophy. I consider poststructuralist philoso-
phy as grounded in a certain movement within French philosophy from the 1960s
and onwards. This movement is inspired by philosophers such as Nietzsche, for
instance his critique of metaphysics and Truth as nothing but a mobile army of
metaphors and metonymies (Nietzsche, 1873 [1973]: 314)) – and Heidegger, in
particular his major work from 1927 Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit)
(Heidegger, 1927 [2001]).
New materialism is based on a poststructuralist understanding of the historic
character of knowledge production as such – the notion that knowledge, concepts
and ideas are historical. Or put differently, it is based on a concept on ‘situated
knowledges’ so beautifully coined by Donna Haraway (Haraway, 1988: 592). The
concept of situated knowledges do not merely entail the historical character of
knowledge but also that the object of knowledge is itself an actor and agent – not a
screen or a resource but “the world kicking” back, as Barad would phrase it (Barad,
1996: 188; Barad, 2007: 215). This also applies to studying the Bologna Process
with its various actors and agents – a dynamic and constantly moving target kicking
back. According to Haraway, situating ourselves “allows us to become answerable
for what we learn how to see” (Haraway, 1988: 583). Of course, location is always
limited. The politics and epistemology of location is about avoiding unlocatable
knowledge claims (Haraway, 1988: 583–584). However, this does not mean that one
cannot grasp generic phenomena as part of research. It simply means that the ways
in which one views and thus analyzes and interprets are entangled with how one has
learned to see. By re-conceptualizing phenomena and reality, Barad expresses this
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 9

K. Brøgger, Governing through Standards: the Faceless Masters of Higher
Education, Educational Governance Research 10,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00886-4_2
10 2 Analyzing Education Reforms
in an even more radical sense. Through post-anthropocentric readings of Bohr,

Barad argues that there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the observer
and the agencies of observation (Barad, 2007: 114, 331). Barad re-conceptualizes
referentiality claiming that the referent should not be perceived as an observation-
independent object but instead as a phenomenon (Barad, 2007: 118ff). In this way,
she transforms the relation between researcher and object. What is real is not an
independent object. What is real is the phenomenon and what emerges in the intra-
action between the researcher and something observed constitutes a phenomenon
(Barad, 2007: 128, 205–206). As such, Barad follows Haraway’s ambition and dis-
mantles the classical metaphysical assumption of agency as an attribute of the sub-
ject; agency is now radically distributed and what emerges as a phenomenon is
closely connected to the agencies of observation (I will explain this in detail later).
Or, to put it differently, there is an ontological inseparability between objects and
the agencies of observation – between how one sees and how one learned to see.
How I learned to see in relation to this monograph is deeply rooted in poststructural-
ist tradition (which I will elaborate further throughout this chapter) and ethno-
graphic method (which is elaborated below).
How I learned to see is informed by an experience of a certain role and potential
for ethnographic method. Whilst conducting my fieldwork, I observed many meet-
ings between professors struggling to translate current reforms. Before or after these
meetings, the professors often spoke casually about the subject, but often these con-
versations were not included in the official minutes. On one occasion, after a very
long casual conversation about how the professors experienced the implementation
process of a new curriculum, one of the professors claimed that she often referred to
this type of ‘casual’ conversation as ‘section zero’ on the meeting agenda. The con-
cept ‘section zero’ indicated that the conversation never appeared on the official
agenda or in the final minutes. On this occasion, ‘section zero’ took up the majority
of the meeting because the professors were profoundly frustrated with and confused
by the new reform; they discussed the new reform and its implementation by local
management at great length. For me, the concept ‘section zero’ soon became the key
to understanding the added value of ethnographic method. Ethnography is all about
‘section zero’ – about gaining access to the material that is never officially recorded
in documents but has the ability to shed light on how to understand everyday work-
ing life and working practices. This proved to be the case during my fieldwork.
Whether I was observing managers or professors, ‘section zero’ was always that
part of the conversation that helped me understand the dynamics of the ongoing
processes, because it was the part of a conversation in which people negotiated and
agreed on their handling of current reforms. In this way, ethnography became a kind
of ‘ethnography of absence’ – an access to what seems invisible since it is never
officially recorded anywhere; an access to what is not there – what is not present in
the artifacts of the organization in an immediate phenomenological sense. However,
as I will show later in this monograph, absences can and will materialize eventually.
The ethnography – including my views, analyzes and interpretations – cannot be
detached from how I learned to see; they are entangled. In this sense, the philosophi-
cal tradition from which I gain inspiration and its fine-tuned focus on what is
Analytical Approach 11
‘ missing,’ left out or glossed over is part of the reason why ethnography becomes an
ethnography of absence. Both my philosophical and ethnographic interests are
tuned to the constitutive effects of what is supposedly absent (made invisible)
(Derrida, 1967a, 1967b, 1972). This connects to what I later call ‘agentic absence’;
that what is seemingly absent – for example, actions among professors and manag-
ers that are glossed over by the dynamics of the reform or non-present (and thus
‘absent’) temporalities, such as past and future – reveals itself as a busy site of
agency and as a major part of the phenomenon of international higher education
reform.
Analytical Approach
The following sections constitute the underlying methodological and analytical

approaches and strategies in the monograph. I developed these approaches using my
inspiration in new materialism and performativity philosophy as a point of depar-
ture. In the first section Hauntology: exploring the agency of absence, I adopt a
methodological approach that emphasizes the agency of absence. I then translate
this approach into and expand on the analytical-strategic concept ‘hauntology’. In
the second section, Matterology: exploring the turn to materiality I emphasize the
revitalizing of ontology and materiality in the social sciences. I then translate this
into and expand on the analytical-strategic concept of ‘matterology’. I develop these
concepts as a mutual fertilization of the dynamics between presence and absence,
emergence and disappearance; the fragile phenomenology of the mobile and shift-
ing ontologies which will be elaborated throughout the monograph.
I use the concept of matterology in an analytical-strategic manner, in particular
to display how the ontology of the Bologna Process materializes through the follow-
up mechanisms of the reform. This will be presented in Chap. 5. I use the concept
of hauntology to display what is being glossed over by the Bologna ontology and its
infrastructure and thus what is returning to haunt this ontology. This will be pre-
sented in Chap. 6.
Hauntology: Exploring the Agency of Absence
I consider Derrida’s thinking a fundamental backdrop for the turn to materiality.

This is because Derrida’s early work does not institute a philosophy that centers
solely on the role of language. Bear in mind that Derrida emphasizes language as
writing, graphics, carvings, traces, inscriptions and signs (Derrida, 1967a, 1967b,
1972) – all of which are material phenomena.
Derrida’s fundamental critique of metaphysics propels a critique of language as
representative; that is, language as mirroring and reflecting thought. Derrida argues
in favor of language as constitutive and thereby seeks to dissolve the idea that
l anguage, the sign, is merely a representational technique and that, behind the sign,
an untouched and independent original presence can be discovered (Derrida, 1967b:
21–23; 1992a). Instead, the sign takes the place of the present – it works as “the
present in its absence, or the absent presence” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012: 18). The
presence which Derrida continuously calls into question also means ‘present time.’
By performing the profound deconstruction of presence, he also performs a decon-
struction of the idea of the present (time). What he attacks is the idea of pure present
(time) unmarked by the past or eroded by the future (Derrida, 1972: 13; 2002: 61).
Or, in other words, he claims that what is being made present very much depends on
what is being made absent (Law, 2003b: 7; 2004: 83). I will expand on this in Chap.
6 in this monograph, which explores how past and future play a constitutive role in
propelling the actions of professors and managers and (in Chaps. 5 and 6) how the
ontology of the Bologna Process stabilizes itself by making the professors and man-
agers’ translations of the reform invisible and thus absent in the ‘successful imple-
mentation narratives.’ Barad continues Derrida’s critique of linear time in both her
major work Meeting the Universe Halfway from 2007 and her article on Derrida’s
concept on hauntology from 2010 Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological
Relations of Inheritance Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-
Come. In these works, Barad elaborates on time as something performed and
crafted:
The point is that the past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply
what will unfold; the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through
the iterative practices of spacetimemattering. (Barad, 2007: 315; 2010: 260)
Barad believes that past and future are continuously reconfigured, which amounts to
claiming that agency also belongs to the past and the future. Past and future are
iteratively produced and reconfigured through ongoing intra-actions (Barad, 2007:
376). Neither the past nor the future is ever closed (Barad, 2007: 383; Juelskjær &
Schwennesen, 2012). Time is phenomenal. Temporality is produced through intra-
actions in the making of phenomena and is thus iteratively re-configured (Barad,
2007: 179). Past and future do not exist as determinate givens, as universals, outside
phenomena (Barad, 2010: 261). Barad continues the rupture of linear time:
Entanglements bring us face to face with the fact that what seems far off in space and time
may be as close or closer than the pulse of here and now that appears to beat from a center
that lies beneath the skin. The past is never finished once and for all and out of sight may be
out of touch but not necessarily out of reach. (Barad, 2007: 394)
Derrida and Barad introduce the notion of a constitutive absence; that ghosts have
agency – that the past and the future are busy sites of agency (also see St. Pierre
(2000: 260)).
Derrida’s deconstructive thinking helps me account for the agency of absence –
that absence is an absent presence. The term absent presence was coined by Mazzei,
who uses this Derrida-inspired concept in an attempt to theorize silence in data
analysis: “Lurking in the shadows, the specters haunt in the absent presence of the
unseen, the unheard, the not read.” (Mazzei, 2007: 27). Derrida provides me with a
productive way of thinking about something that proved to be constitutive in the
many translations of the reforms and standards I researched; namely, something that
was seemingly absent in the artifacts of the organization in a concrete phenomeno-
logical sense, yet still seemed present. This methodological approach, which I call
‘agentic absence’, opens up the possibility of exploring the constitutive effects of
what is seemingly absent – in this case, how the past and future (‘absent’ temporali-
ties) propel the actions of both professors and managers. I call the analytical-
strategic tool that I use to perform this hauntology – a concept developed by Derrida.
Throughout his work, Derrida continues to develop an understanding of constitu-
tive absence. In the Specters of Marx from 1994, he finally coins this philosophical
interest in ‘ghosts’ hauntology – a teaching on what is haunting. The philosophical
neologism of hauntology expresses a way of thinking that enables an understanding
of the ways in which the reform processes are haunted by what is seemingly absent.
Hauntology is a near homophone to ontology in French. Whereas ontology is the
teaching on what exists, a teaching on the Da-sein, the being-there, hauntology is a
teaching on what is not being-there (Derrida, 1994: 202). In a way, hauntology is a
supplement to ontology. One of Derrida’s philosophical points is that the constitu-
tive power tends to be embedded in the supplement, ‘the rest’, the margins or what
is seemingly ‘absent’. Ghosts are half-lives. They are an undetectable passage
between loci and time, and they are able to collapse past and present. According to
Derrida, there is no Da-sein of the specter. But neither is there Da-sein without the
uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of some specter. In a way, ghosts are ‘absence’ with
agency (Brøgger, 2013, 2014). What is absent will always ‘disturb’. It is beyond
being but it appears and it haunts. The ghost is a revenant; it returns, “it ghosts,” it
“specters,” as Derrida writes (Derrida, 1994: 10, 166). The concept of hauntology
highlights the spectrality of the past and the future; the ways in which the reform
processes are haunted by what is seemingly absent and that the organizational
changes are propelled by something re-turning from absence. I will elaborate on this
idea in Chap. 6 as part of my analysis of how professors and managers in higher
education organizations translate the new reforms.
Matterology: Exploring the Turn to Materiality
Recent thinkers – Karen Barad in particular – have argued that discourses have
material consequences (Barad, 2007; Hekman, 2010: 90; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012:
110).1 As well as this, they have argued that ‘matter’ has agency. According to sev-
eral researchers, this recent movement within the social sciences can be viewed as
an intensified demand for more materialist modes of analysis across disciplines
such as anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology (Coole & Frost,
2010: 2; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). Within political theory, White suggests
1
Part of these sections that provide an overview of the turn to materiality has previously been
published in (Brøgger, 2018): The Performative Power of (Non)human Agency Assemblages of
Soft Governance in International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education: https://www.tand-
fonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09518398.2018.1449985
that this movement is about introducing the possibility of weak ontologies, which
promote an interpretive-existential terrain, as opposed to strong ontologies, which
claim that ‘this is the way the world is’ (White, 2000: 6–8). However, for many
social scientists, the turn towards ‘how matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 2007) is
shaped by a critique of what they understand as the linguistic turn.
Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the
interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even
materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representa-
tion. […] Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important
sense in which the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter. (Barad, 2007:
132)
Barad’s trenchant statement is representative of the critique that many social science
researchers have put forward in recent years – a critique of what may be summed up
as the linguistic turn. As early as 1991, Haraway expressed the critique of a ‘radical
social constructionist program’ and suggested balancing between the historical con-
tingency of knowledge and faithful accounts of the real world (Haraway, 1991: 185,
187). To a large extent, the shift towards materiality can be seen as a philosophical
development within post-structuralism – though perhaps Latour is the exception,
given his fierce critique of post-structuralism (or more precisely, his critique of
social constructionism) and his keen interest in the movement from text to things
(Latour, 1987):
Are you not fed up at finding yourself locked into language alone, or imprisoned in social
representation alone, as so many social scientists would like you to be? (Latour, 1993: 90)
Both the critique put forward by Barad and Latour seems to strongly imply that the
privilege of language has worked as a prison in which any notion of materiality was
denied access. However, this extensive critique of the so-called linguistic turn,
which is put forward by many social scientists, appears to be grounded in the idea
that translations of poststructuralist philosophy into other disciplines – for example,
the social sciences – tend to privilege language. However, these readings of post-
structuralism represent a slightly mistaken re-configuring of the philosophical past.
When examining the work of the 1960s French philosophers such as Foucault,
Derrida and Deleuze, it becomes clear that they did not neglect the notion of mate-
riality (also see (Ahmed, 2010: note 1; Brøgger, 2018; Hekman, 2008: 101)).
Realism or sensualism – “empiricism” – are modifications of logocentrism […] In short, the
signifier “matter” appears to me problematic only at the moment when its reinscription can-
not avoid making of it a new fundamental principle which, by means of a theoretical regres-
sion, would be reconstituted into a “transcendental signified” […] It can always come to
reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate referent […] or it becomes
an “objective reality”. (Derrida, 1982: 64–65)
According to Derrida, realism or materialism only become problematic if they are

privileged as the only points of departure; in other words, if it is claimed that matter
is alone and constitutes an objective reality. The signifier ‘matters’ – in the double
sense of ‘having materiality and carrying significance’ – but it should not be turned
into a new fundamental principle, a ‘transcendental signified’ in Derrida’s
terminology (see also (Cheah, 2010)). For Derrida, this suggests that one should
shake ‘matter’ loose from the limiting binary opposition within which it has been
caught:
The concept of matter must be marked twice […] outside the oppositions in which it has
been caught (matter/spirit, matter/ideality, matter/form, etc.). (Derrida, 1982: 65)
Rather than introducing materiality as something new, the turn to materiality may
offer a way to shake ‘matter’ loose as Derrida suggests; a way to work with materi-
ality without turning it into ‘objective reality’ – very much in line with Derrida’s
own interest in signs in a material sense as graphics, traces, inscriptions, and
carvings.
The critique of the privileging of mind over matter manifests itself differently in
various branches of the social sciences (Brøgger, 2018). These manifestations range
from science and technology studies (Haraway, 1991; Latour, 2005b) through femi-
nist philosophical accounts (Ahmed, 2010; Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Barad, 1996,
2001, 2003, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin,
2012; Haraway, 1991; Hekman, 2008, 2010; White, 2000), anthropological accounts
of posthumanist, multispecies ethnography or material practices (Mol, 2002; Tsing,
2012) to socio-material elaborations (Fenwick & Edwards, 2011).
In addition to this, the critique of mind over matter can also be seen in the so-
called ‘affective turn’ (Clough & Halley, 2007). It can be argued that the phrase ‘the
affective turn’ may be misleading as it refers to many different turns (Staunæs,
2016: 4). Meanwhile, I chose to use this somewhat reductionist phrase in this article
and refrain from engaging in the debates currently unfolding among scholars of this
turn. Put simply, this turn expands on and theorizes the everyday English term
‘affect’ and ‘affecting,’ which usually connote ‘impact’ in general. The affective
turn sophisticates this meaning by enhancing the ‘affective’ dimension (what is usu-
ally understood as the ‘emotional’ dimension in everyday language) of this ‘impact’.
The affective turn re-instates the body as a legitimate research phenomenon in the
social sciences and, among other things, explores how affective practices appear in
social life (Wetherell, 2012). In this monograph, I refer selectively to the affective
turn in order to emphasize certain mechanisms and effects of the reform, such as the
ways in which the infrastructure of the Bologna Process institutes certain affective
practices; for example, a mimetic desire that accompanies the spread of education
standards (I will expand on this in Chaps. 5 and 6). Although I take inspiration from
the affective turn – which allows me to include affective and, as such, material prac-
tices in my analysis – I refrain from subscribing to the part of this tradition that
centers on pre-individual bodily forces (Clough, 2008; Clough & Halley, 2007;
Massumi, 2002).2 I wish to follow theoretical trajectories in which materiality and
2
These theoretical considerations may well provide answers to questions within psychology (for
example) by unsettling a traditional psychological subject. However, they also seem to reinvent
philosophy as metaphysics. Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy dating back to
ancient philosophy. To put it simply it is a part of philosophy which is concerned with that which
transcends that world or worlds which is/are accessible to human and human perception. For
example the establishing of philosophical ‘first principles’ for human perception or the establish-
situatedness is integral to affectivity. These material-bodily dimensions will form

part of my analysis in Chaps. 5 and 6, for example in my analysis of the material-
affective infrastructure of the Bologna Process.
Many different concepts have been developed in order to capture the shift towards
a renewed status of materiality, including post-humanism, multispecies ethnogra-
phy, material practices, performativity, new materialism, feminist materialism and
materialist feminism. In this study, I refer to this shift as ‘the turn to materiality’
within poststructuralist thinking. In my opinion, the most vital philosophical mani-
festation of this turn is the performativity-inspired innovation of poststructuralism,
which analytically equates ontology with epistemology. This turn towards ‘perfor-
mativity philosophy’ can be seen within feminist philosophy (Barad, 1996, 2001,
2003, 2007; Butler, 1993, 2010), cultural studies (though Thrift often calls this per-
formative interest ‘non-representational theory’) (Callon, 2010; Nash, 2000; Thrift,
2000b, 2007), science and technology studies (Callon, 2010; Latour, 2005a; Mol,
2002) and organization and management studies, in which it is often referred to as
‘the practice turn’ (Jarzabkowski, 2005; Johnson, Melin, & Whittington, 2003;
Nicolini, Gherardi, & Yanow, 2003; Orlikowski, 2007; Regnér, 2008; Schatzki,
2006; Schatzki, Cetina, & Savigny, 2001; Whittington, 2006). These examples do
not serve as an exhaustive topology; however, they may provide the reader with an
impression of interrelated theoretical developments across the social scientific field.
I will include and expand on several of these positions throughout this study.
The turn to materiality emphasizes how phenomena come into being, how they
are enacted. It is not about things or subjects as they are, but how things and subjects
emerge and how they create each other. Within the turn to materiality, agentic force
is not an attribute of humans. It is not something that someone or something has.
Rather it is radically distributed (something unfolding between human and non-
human agents, as will be displayed in Chaps. 5 and 6) and concerns the incessant
creation of realities, ongoing practices understood as embodied, situated actions
(Alaimo & Hekman, 2008: 7). In many ways, this turn is propelled by Butler’s
understanding of performativity. Perhaps the most accurate definition of Butler’s
understanding of performativity can be found in her 1993 work Bodies that Matter.
In this work, Butler is inspired by Derrida’s reading of Austin’s speech act theory.
Butler frames performativity as a “reiterative and citational practice by which dis-
course produces the effects that it names” (Butler, 1993: 2). This means that particu-
lar practices, ways of doing things, do not represent an objective reality (for instance
a natural gender) rather the iterative practices such as the assignment of a particular
ing of principles transcendending the human perception are considered metaphysics. Following
Heidegger and Derrida, metaphysics can be summed up as the ambition to ‘reach behind,’ over-
come and leave behind in order to reach originality or a first principle. As already mentioned:
striving to discover what is behind the curtain, the veil, the sign is metaphysics in action. The
Kantian ‘Ding an Sich’ is a classique example, the Deleuzian concept of the ‘vitual’ (as a reservoir
of indeterminate energy) another, modern (and no doubt innovative and subversive) example.
Contrary to Foucault and Derrida, Deleuze wished to develop a metaphysics adequate to modern
science, that is a metaphysics capable of establishing transcendental conditions of possibility for
modern science (Deleuze, 1997; Smith, 2012; Villani, 1999).
gender at birth, gendered clothing of a person, and gendered upbringing of a person

creates phenomena such as ‘woman’. Butler regards the discursive practices as reg-
ulatory practices that produce the bodies that they address and thereby govern
(Brøgger, 2018). This definition has had a powerful ‘effective history’ and Barad’s
onto-epistemological widening of the concept is shaped around and in continuation
of this perception. As I describe below, Barad’s processing of the potential of per-
formativity means that performativity not only describes processes that produce
ontological effects by bringing into being certain realities (as Butler states; see
(Butler, 2010: 147)); it also encompasses the agentic force of both human and non-
human agents – in other words, in onto-epistemological processes, the realizations
of the world cannot be distinguished from the ontologies of the world (Barad, 2007;
Brøgger, 2018). Later in this monograph, these philosophical considerations will
provide access to the ways in which standards (for example) are involved with the
creation and (re)configuring of the realities of higher education.
Barad argues that the move towards performative alternatives to representation-
alism shifts the focus from correspondence between description and reality to prac-
tices and doings (Barad, 2007: 28). Barad seeks to dismantle the subject-object
dichotomy and to introduce an onto-epistemological framework in an attempt to
leave behind the privileging of epistemology in poststructuralist thinking and ontol-
ogy in traditional physics. Barad is inspired by quantum physics, especially Bohr,
philosophy, especially Foucault and Derrida, and queer studies, especially Haraway
and Butler. She positions her onto-epistemological framework as a so-called agen-
tial realism (Barad, 2007: 44).
Agential realism is not about the representation of an independent reality, but
about the real consequences of intra-action with the world (Barad, 1996: 188). In
traditional metaphysics, epistemology and ontology are considered separate and
binary oppositions; this position is maintained from classical positivism to critical
realism. In Barad’s thinking, there is only onto-epistemology. It is impossible to
meaningfully distinguish epistemology from ontology. Barad connects classical
metaphysics with the ideas that inter-acting between separate entities can occur.
However, Barad’s point is that what occurs is intra-activity from within, since it is
impossible to separate ‘onto’ from ‘episto’. Moreover, there are no distinctions
between ‘inside and outside’ in Barad’s thinking; differences emerge within phe-
nomena. Barad seeks to leave behind a representational logic and to replace it with
a performative notion of practices; that different practices matter and that the world
simply materializes differently through different practices (Barad, 2007: 89).
The philosophical impact of Barad’s approach is profound and immediately
affects the relation between interpreter and the interpreted. However, Barad moves
one step further. By re-conceptualizing the understanding of phenomena, including
a specific interpretation of ‘apparatus,’ she escapes the often trivialized discussions
on the status of reality – probably best explained by the Kantian notion of the fric-
tion between the ‘Ding an Sich’ (the thing in itself) and the ‘Ding für Sich’ (the
thing for itself) that propel a stubborn epistemological distinction in Western phi-
losophy between the thing in itself, which I cannot know or access and the thing for
itself (the world as it presents itself), which I can access because it lies within reach
of my epistemological capacity. This distinction leaves the ‘Ding an Sich’ to haunt

philosophy as a metaphysical regulative ideal for subsequent philosophers to han-
dle. Barad escapes the Kantian pitfall of matter as passive and inaccessible to human
perception, since she operates with a performative notion of matter; she simply
assigns matter an active status – matter kicks back! (Barad, 2003, 2010).
Barad’s re-conceptualization of phenomena is based on post-humanist – post-
anthropocentric – readings of Bohr (Barad, 2007: 331). Barad argues that there is no
unambiguous way to differentiate between the observer and the agencies of obser-
vation (Barad, 2007: 114). Barad reconceptualizes referentiality claiming that the
referent should not be perceived as an observation-independent object but as a phe-
nomenon (Barad, 2007: 118ff).
My reading is that the measured properties refer to phenomena, remembering that the cru-
cial identifying feature of phenomena is that they include “all relevant features of the exper-
imental arrangement”. To put the point in a more modern context, according to Bohr’s
general epistemological framework, referentiality must be reconceptualized. The referent is
not an observation-independent object but a phenomenon. (Barad, 2007: 120)
Properties measured in specific ways, Barad states, constitute phenomena and can-
not be reduced to either an abstract object or an abstract measuring instrument.
Phenomena are the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies; the intra-
acting agencies are always already entangled (Barad, 2007: 139, 308, 333). Part of
this is already mentioned in the first chapter on the ‘politics of location’ since it
relates to the ways in which approaches, analysis and interpretations are entangled
with how one has learned to see: that the situatedness of the researcher is part of the
(research) phenomenon. There is no outside perspective. Both subject and object
emerge through intra-actions:
A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an “object” and the “measuring agencies”; the
object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that
produces them. (Barad, 2007: 128)
There is no external viewpoint from which to observe phenomena. There is no

God’s eye view of the world (Haraway, 1988). Performing a measurement is “peek-
ing” inside a phenomenon and the measuring agencies are part of the ‘investigation’
(Barad, 2007: 345, 347). The arrangement of the intra-acting agencies – the appara-
tus – constitutes specific boundary-drawing, material practices. These practices
enact agential cuts, which can be described as momentary arrests of the constant
production of referentiality; they enact (momentary) resolutions within the phe-
nomenon: “Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once
and for all.” (Barad, 2007: 179). These cuts are part of our knowledge-making prac-
tices and as such they are part of the constant production of differences. Gaining
inspiration from Haraway (Haraway, 1992), Barad calls the effects these differences
have on the world diffractions. Barad develops the notion of diffraction based on the
physical phenomenon; for instance, how water waves are diffracted – how they are
bent and spread – when they encounter an obstruction. Waves bend and spread dif-
ferently than they would otherwise do due to the obstacle that they encounter.
According to Haraway, diffraction patterns do not map where differences appear,
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Governing Through Standards: The Faceless Masters of Higher Education: The Bologna Process, The EU and The Open Method of Coordination Katja Brøgger

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Governing through Standards: the

Faceless Masters of Higher Education:

Assembling and Governing the Higher Education

Cross-Border Higher Education and Quality Assurance:

The Governing Evaluation Knowledge Nexus Swedish Higher

Everything for Sale The Marketisation of UK Higher

Coulson and Richardson’s Chemical Engineering, Fourth

Higher Education Institutions in the EU: Between

The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation

Higher Education and the Practice of Hope Jeanne Marie

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i­nfluential on national higher education systems in Europe, and beyond, than

Bologna Process” to understand how scorecards, stocktaking reports, and templates

Columbia University Gita Steiner-Khamsi

June 2018 Katja Brøgger

1 Introduction: It Changes Everything������������������������������������������������������ 1

Katja Brøgger PhD, is associate professor at the Danish School of Education,

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 1

education undetected as governance. It can be difficult to establish from where the

This monograph contributes to critical research on the governing of higher educa-

of higher education. The empirical study, on which this monograph is based, is

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 9

in an even more radical sense. Through post-anthropocentric readings of Bohr,

The following sections constitute the underlying methodological and analytical

Hauntology: Exploring the Agency of Absence

I consider Derrida’s thinking a fundamental backdrop for the turn to materiality.

Matterology: Exploring the Turn to Materiality

According to Derrida, realism or materialism only become problematic if they are

situatedness is integral to affectivity. These material-bodily dimensions will form

gender at birth, gendered clothing of a person, and gendered upbringing of a person

of my epistemological capacity. This distinction leaves the ‘Ding an Sich’ to haunt

There is no external viewpoint from which to observe phenomena. There is no

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

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influential on national higher education systems in Europe, and beyond, than

Columbia University Gita Steiner-Khamsi

1 Introduction: It Changes Everything�� 1

Hauntology: Exploring the Agency of Absence

Matterology: Exploring the Turn to Materiality