Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org..Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity-the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measuredoffers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequences, both intended and unintended, of public measures. The article first identifies two mechanisms, self-fulfilling prophecy and commensuration, that induce reactivity and then distinguishes patterns of effects produced by reactivity. This approach demonstrates how these increasingly fateful public measures change expectations and permeate institutions, suggesting why it is important for scholars to investigate the impact of these measures more systematically.

Reactivity and reactions to regulatory transparency in medicine, psychotherapy and counselling

“…Do 'reactivity mechanisms' (Espeland and Sauder, 2007) explain how doctors and therapists interpret and react to regulatory transparency and performance measures in practice? We suggest reactivity to regulatory transparency can be explained as a self-fulfilling prophecy by including two elements: narratives shaping the interpretation and construction of social reality (Ferraro et al, 2005;Gabbay & Le May, 2010) and emotional reactions, particularly to anxiety, affecting how professionals internalise transparency (Sauder & Espeland, 2009).…”

“…Espeland and Sauder (2007) use the idea of 'reactivity mechanisms', which are 'patterns that shape how people make sense of things… how attention is distributed, and the interactive scripts people adopt ' (2007: 11), to explain reactions to transparent standards used in ranking American law schools'. They outline two reactivity mechanisms.…”

“…Firstly, drawing upon Merton's (1948) notion of 'self-fulfilling prophecy', Espeland and Sauder (2007) argue that an inaccurate definition can change behaviour to make the definition come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies functioned in their study because: (i) rankings magnified insignificant differences, which external audiences used in judging quality; (ii) past rankings shaped current evaluations, as historical rankings influenced judgements; (iii) resources were allocated based on rankings, enabling higher ranked schools to further differentiate themselves; and (iv) measurement incentivised law schools to conform to standards that maximised their ranking.…”

“…We then describe 'reactivity' and 'reactivity mechanisms' (Espeland and Sauder, 2007), which we use theoretically to explain how regulatory transparency affects professions. Next we outline our qualitative research methods, based upon interviews, and how we analyse and theorised these data.…”

“…We use the concept of 'reactivity mechanisms' (Espeland and Sauder, 2007) to explain how regulatory transparency disrupts practices through simplifying and decontextualizing them, altering practitioners' reflexivity, leading to defensive forms of practice. We make an empirical contribution by exploring the impact of transparency on doctors compared with psychotherapists and counsellors, who represent an extreme case due to their uniquely complex practice, which is particularly affected by this form of regulation.…”