A critical realist study of quality management in Nigerian Universities

This critical realist study is an investigation of the experiences of principal officers during the research was necessitated by a general lack of knowledge about how quality  management implementation occurs in the Nigerian university context. The thesis main  research question was how have Nigerian universities been responding to quality  management implementation’. The thesis uses a critical realist paradigm and adopts a  qualitative approach to unveil the causes of events. This study rejects the positivist preoccupations with prediction, quantification and  measurement used by earlier researchers to determine quality management in  developed countries and to replicate the approach in a country like Nigeria. The study  adopts a critical realist approach, since critical realism gives primacy to the social and  personal identity of human values of emancipation rather than material concerns, which  are subject to measurement. The study uses semi-structured interviews to discover  causal and missing mechanisms from twenty-nine principal officers in six universities.  Thematic Analysis was adopted to analyse the themes that emerged from the empirical  findings, and used to analyse the causal mismatch between the theory and the reality  observed. The approach was used to clarify the blame attributed to the implementation  of quality management and government policies rather than philosophical  inappropriateness. The approach provides a starting point for querying any  unexamined ideology operating in various universities in Nigeria. The findings reveal  that many competing voices are operating in different parts of the sector. This has  effects on the structure, causing the mechanism to function wrongly, with a lack of a  common platform to understand government policies and quality management. Finally, the thesis’s contribution to knowledge includes the using critical realist  approach to review relevant literature related to quality management. Its  Methodological contribution is through the use of a critical realist approach to produce  a social and personal identity of principal officers involved and re-descriptive narrative  account of events that have been hitherto unexplored locally and internationally