Drawing upon earlier studies of reforms and institutional changes in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to trace how the understanding of accountability has changed over the past twenty years and how it is understood to have impacted on higher education institutions. We do so by reviewing more than 350 papers and by asking three questions: Who answers to whom? For what are they answering? And how to assess those accountability arrangements? With these three questions as guides, our results indicate that higher education institutions have been undergoing processes of what we term accountabilization. These results contribute to the scholarship on higher education governance by conceptualizing the processes of accountabilization.

本文基于对高等教育改革和体制变革的早期研究，旨在追踪过去二十年来对问责制的理解是如何变化的，以及如何理解对问责制的影响。为此，我们审阅了350多篇论文，并提出了三个问题：谁回答谁？他们在回答什么？以及如何评估这些问责制安排？以这三个问题为指导，我们的结果表明，高等教育机构一直在进行所谓的问责制工作。这些结果通过将问责制过程概念化，为有关高等教育管理的奖学金做出了贡献。