Why Rankings Appear Natural (But Aren’t)

Abstract

Rankings have dramatically proliferated over the past several decades. An often-overlooked impact of this proliferation is that it has facilitated the institutionalization of an imaginary of the modern world as a stratified order, whose actors are imagined as continuously striving to perform better than others. To better understand this impact, we need to take a closer look at rankings’ premises and the way these resonate with the broader institutional environment of which rankings are a part.

Mission Accomplished? Reflecting on 60 Years ofBusiness & Society

“…Altmetric data as of April 2022 shows that Business & Society articles tracked on Altmetric received over 12,900 social media mentions, 235 mentions in news and blogs, 62 mentions in policy documents, and 16 mentions in sources such as Wikipedia and videos. Examining those articles that have the highest number of Altmetric mentions provides us with some evidence regarding the journal’s broader impact: Top-ranked contributions are van der Kolk’s (2022) article on performance measurement, Griffin et al’s (2021) article on stakeholder engagement after a exogenous shock, Mitnick’s (2000) article on the metrics of measurement of CSR, Brankovic’s (2021) article on rankings, Scully et al’s (2018) study on the mobilization of wealthy activists; Grosvold et al’s (2016) study on women on corporate boards, Caruana et al’s (2021) article on modern slavery in business, and (perhaps not surprisingly) Carroll’s (1999) article on the construct of CSR, which is also the highest cited article of the journal.…”

(Im)possible change

“…Particularly key to consider in this regard is audit culture, which can be defined as a nexus of practices in which there is an orientation to continuous external assessment in the form of quality assurance exercises and teaching or research assessment frameworks (Strathern, 2000). Such mechanisms are typically presented in the form of rankings, purportedly neutral but, when examined more closely, clearly driven by neoliberal ideology, most notably in the way they presume that inter-institutional competition is the natural status quo for academia, or for any other field of action (Brankovic, 2022). A significant effect of rankings from a global perspective is that they shift perceptions and definitions of quality in academia by foregrounding specific quantitative measurements (in publication, for instance, impact factor, citation score, see Kulczycki, 2023) and concurrently backgrounding the many localised ways in which academics work to achieve "quality", solidifying traditional disciplinary boundaries in the process (Pardo-Guerra, 2022).…”

Numbers Speak for Themselves, or Do They? On Performance Measurement and Its Implications

“…This competition turns all of us into “achievement-subjects” who may in time become so overly focused on striving to overtake those we are compared with (cf. Brankovic, 2021), that this could easily come at the expense of our individual and collective well-being (Han, 2015), leave alone detract us from doing what we should be doing to solve problems, a point that I turn to next.…”