Can accreditation help a leopard change its spots?

Abstract

Purpose -Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.Design/methodology/approach -The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes. Findings -Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.

Proposing a Definition and a Framework of Organisational Sustainability: A Review of Efforts and a Survey of Approaches to Change

“…This shows that sustainability has been incorporated into HEIs' systems in a compartmentalised way, i.e., generally focusing on one or two elements. During the last ten years, research on organisational change management in HEIs has been increasing, for example, in the areas of: the evolution of a campus sustainability network [92]; the implementation of an SD policy [93]; the role of accreditation in fostering change towards sustainability [94]; drivers and barriers for implementing SD in higher education [31,95,96]; incorporation and institutionalisation into HEIs' systems (including barriers to change and how to overcome them) [75]; the complexities of organisational change for sustainability [97]; and the link between sustainability reporting and organisational change management [18].…”

Conforming to accreditation in Iranian hospitals

“…We do not see this happening in this case study. Cooper et al (2014) also signal the important role powerful interests (in their case, academic Deans) can play in championing issues within the standards to instigate change. Rather, what we see in Iran is the perception that the standards are inappropriate.…”

“…They intend to provide an external endorsement to the organisation, thus its services and outcomes can meet prescribed thresholds. In the education sector, for example, accreditations are external quality reviews used to scrutinize institutions and education programmes with the goal of improving the quality of provision (Cooper et al, 2014;Eaton, 2006;Stensaker and Harvey, 2006;Invargson et al, 2006). The first attempts to use accreditation date back to 1910 in the United States (McIntyre et al, 2001) and soon it was replicated in other English-speaking countries, such as Canada (in 1958(in ), Australia (1974, and then in Europe (Shaw and Brooks, 1991;Giraud, 2001), Latin America (Arce, 1999), Africa (Whittaker et al, 1998) and South East Asia (Ito et al, 1998;Huang et al, 2000).…”

“…Transactional steering approaches lead to conformity but a latent resistance to and the non-acceptance of accreditation standards underpins this conformity. Cooper et al (2014) suggest that accreditations create institutional pressure for change in systems and organisations. Shaw et al (2010) also suggest that in many countries, hospital systems change in preparation for accreditation.…”

“…In many countries, accreditation programmes represent an endorsement of the quality of provision of a service and are often voluntarily pursued by organisations for this very purpose. For example, many UK Business Schools seek accreditation from the Association of Business Schools (AMBA and EQUIS) for this purpose (Cooper et al, 2014;Zammuto, 2008;Cret, 2011;Urgel, 2007). This paper, however, examines Iran's national accreditation programme for healthcare organizations which is the sole regulatory control mechanism used to promote quality and safety in hospitals across the country.…”