Accreditation as Governance, Ritual, or Resistance: Global Quality Assurance, Institutional Power, and the Political Economy of Academic Prestige

This chapter offers a critical analysis of accreditation as a complex and multifaceted issue in global higher education, where it is understood not merely as technical quality assurance but also as governance, ritual, and resistance. Building on recent research, the chapter frames accreditation in relation to global higher education governance, emphasizing it as a mode of soft regulation that shapes institutional behavior, legitimacy, and access to academic capital. It also discusses how accreditation works symbolically as a ritual that boosts organizational legitimacy and contributes to institutional isomorphism through the spread of standardized norms and performance indicators. Meanwhile, the chapter highlights accreditation as a site of struggle where local institutional agency comes to the fore through strategic decoupling, reframing standards, and articulating competing narratives using academic discourses and situated quality. By bringing together analyses of accreditation, global rankings, managerialism, and inequality, the chapter exposes the political economy that informs current quality assurance systems. The final discussion proposes reflexive and participatory trajectories for accreditation systems and suggests that transformative quality assurance is about balancing accountability with diversity, academic freedom, and societal relevance in a more stratified global higher education landscape.