In a paper presented to this year’s EAIR Forum in Innsbruck prof. Lee Harvey from the Higher Education Academy of the UK and Bjørn Stensaker from NIFU STEP discuss how the concept of quality culture can be understood. Their critical discussion of the concept traces the roots of “quality culture”, the links to policy and governance of the sector, and introduces a more theoretical perspective for relating “quality culture” to the processes of teaching and learning.