Conclusion

What academic quality is and how higher education and research institutions produce it will remain a major concern in the years to come. Converging trends regarding certain aspects such as the changing conception of universities’ missions and their internal organisation and governance, can be observed to be emerging worldwide. This does not imply that diversity at the meso-and local levels is vanishing. Diversity in production processes and content of academic quality is a fact of everyday life at the grassroots level. While assessing academic quality with reference to standardised rankings seems to be the way of the future, alternative approaches to backing and judging talent and generating academic value still make sense. Organisations as local orders play a decisive role in shaping what type of quality regime is valued and processed in various universities and countries. While public opinion debates and policymakers discuss the national, even international reforms that are to be enforced and imposed on local institutions, single universities continue functioning in various manners and, as increasingly strategic, if not autonomous actors. Public policies may settle on an accepted best way to incentivise institutions to become top performers, but for it to be adopted at local levels it has to be reinterpreted locally and hybridisation will take place.