Quality assurance as managerial governance: organizational translation and market pressures in Chilean and Colombian universities

Purpose – Quality assurance (QA), once considered a means of evaluation and measurement, has become integral to reputational and managerial issues in universities. This paper aims to examine how four universities in Chile and Colombia internalize quality assurance in response to managerial and market needs. Design/methodology/approach – This study adopts a comparative qualitative case study design. The authors reviewed institutional documents and interviewed 33 senior managers from two Chilean and two Colombian universities. Findings – The translation of quality assurance is increasingly constrained by shared managerial rules, assumptions and practices. The analysis shows that, despite discursive differences in public and private universities, operational practices converge around strategic planning, performance monitoring and indicator-based evaluation. Research limitations/implications – The study focuses on the perspectives of senior managers and excludes the views of middle managers, faculty and students. Practical implications – Introducing QA schemes with greater flexibility regarding the unique context of different universities, fostering frameworks that recognize institutional diversity and social missions, and creating spaces for open discussion of performance metrics. Social implications – Development of QA as an instrument of reflexive governance that reconciles accountability with research and education as public goods that generate public benefits. Originality/value – This paper shows how quality assurance has evolved from an evaluative tool into a mechanism of market-driven university governance. It explains this by drawing on academic capitalism, specifically the market and market-like behavior of universities to obtain external resources, as well as the concepts of organizational isomorphism and translation theory.