Chapter Six gave a taste of the outright hostility towards quality assurance expressed by some public sector professionals. Although this is by no means shared by everyone working in schools, hospitals, universities and police forces, one does not need to conduct a survey to know that these initiatives are not universally liked, and cause at the very least irritation among those who have to prepare for inspections or write up internal quality reports. This, however, raises the question of whether anyone has expressed these objections more systematically or in a way that might persuade senior civil servants and politicians to question the value of quality assurance. This chapter looks at the intellectual criticisms raised by academics who have written about this issue from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

The chapter starts by looking at the recent critiques published in the United Kingdom by Michael Power (1997) and Onora O’Neill (2002), which have received a reasonable level of attention in the media through arguing that quality assurance is ritualistic and damages trust in professionals. It then looks at some critical traditions in sociology and draws out ideas and arguments that are relevant to quality assurance. It considers the Marxist field of labour process studies that was influential during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Foucauldian governmentality tradition that has, arguably, replaced Marxism as the natural vehicle for critical politics. It also considers the wider argument made by the critical systems theorist Jürgen Habermas (1973, 1987) during the 1970s on the problems created by over-regulation in the modern world, and similar ideas developed by Niklas Luhmann (1985, 1995) on the limits of law. Finally, it considers the persuasiveness of the criticisms, and the extent to which they escape the difficulty of appearing to defend the traditional privileges of professionals.