‘Globalizing’ academics? Ranking and appropriation in the transformations of the world-system

ABSTRACT

In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as ‘inevitable’ and ‘here to stay’. Instead, rankings are treated as historically transformative ‘tracings’ over the accumulation of capital in the world-system, and thus offer a contingent strategic response to three historical shifts in global political economy: ‘financialization’, displacement of the Core, and an shift to surplus ‘appropriation’ in the core. By understanding these transformative shifts as elements of an historic ‘inversion’ of the global frontier of capitalization, the argument: (1) connects global rankings to neoliberal capitalism; (2) challenges the utopian view of rankings as instruments of marketization; and most specifically (3) opens up a space between frontiers of appropriation and commodification proper, indicating how rankings exist in a historically transient and politically dialectical space of hybrid outcomes, imperfect commodifications, and indirect subjections, that are bound to the contradictions of accumulation in contemporary world history.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical theory
• historical materialism
• political history
• sociology of education
• universities
• world-systems theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jacqueline Ross (SPAIS, University of Bristol), for her very useful insights and suggestions in the revision of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

John Welsh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7136-1001

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Welsh

John Welsh is a researcher at the University of Helsinki, working principally in the areas of global political economy, world history, and political philosophy. Current projects focus on contemporary transformations in the governing of academic life, as well as on the emergence of global cities in a world-system of ecological crisis and political reconfiguration. Recent and relevant publications can be found in Constellations, Critical Policy Studies, Contemporary Politics, International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, Capital & Class, and the European Journal of Social Theory.