Ranking academics: toward a critical politics of academic rankings

ABSTRACT

There is a need in academic rankings research for a more critical and political analysis beyond the register of normative global governance studies and the pervasive positivism of new public management that dominates the literature of social policy in the area of higher education and research. Given that academic rankings are powerful topological mechanisms of social transformation, critical theorists have a responsibility to engage with this extant research and to establish a politically sensitive agenda of relevant critical analysis. Thus, this article identifies three uncritical and pervasive assumptions that dominate academic rankings research, and which preclude a properly critical, and thus political, understanding of the ranking phenomenon. The powerful imbrication of these assumptions in rankings research will then be demonstrated by a review of the extant literature broken down into three broad categories of recent research (micro-methodology, sociocultural criticism, potentially critical). Building on points of departure in the third category that are promising for a critical agenda in future analyses of rankings, the piece concludes by suggesting three specific and undertreated aspects of academic rankings promising for future critical analysis. These aspects concern the roles of social apparatus, political arkhê, and historical dialectic.

KEYWORDS:

• Apparatus of security
• critical philosophy
• governmentality
• higher education
• league tables
• methodology
• sociology of education
• university

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Welsh

John Welsh is a researcher at the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki. His principal current research concentration is on the transformation and governing of academic life, primarily within traditions of critical social theory. Recently published articles can be found in Critical Sociology, Housing, Theory & Society, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society.