Ranking Academics: Toward A Critical Politics of Academic Rankings

Critical Policy Studies
ISSN: 1946-0171 (Print) 1946-018X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcps20
Ranking academics: toward a critical politics of

academic rankings
John Welsh
To cite this article: John Welsh (2017): Ranking academics: toward a critical politics of academic
rankings, Critical Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2017.1398673
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Download by: [Gothenburg University Library] Date: 16 November 2017, At: 06:27
CRITICAL POLICY STUDIES, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2017.1398673
ARTICLE
Ranking academics: toward a critical politics of academic

rankings
John Welsh
Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Downloaded by [Gothenburg University Library] at 06:27 16 November 2017
There is a need in academic rankings research for a more critical and Apparatus of security; critical
political analysis beyond the register of normative global govern- philosophy; governmentality;
ance studies and the pervasive positivism of new public manage- higher education; league
ment that dominates the literature of social policy in the area of tables; methodology;
higher education and research. Given that academic rankings are sociology of education;
university
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 assump-
tions 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, poten-
tially critical). Building on points of departure in the third category
that are promising for a critical agenda in future analyses of rank-
ings, the piece concludes by suggesting three specific and under-
treated aspects of academic rankings promising for future critical
analysis. These aspects concern the roles of social apparatus, poli-
tical arkhê, and historical dialectic.
Introduction
Why write another article about academic rankings? The reason, quite simply, is that
there still exists a great deal to be said about them beyond the bureaucratic analyses that
dominate the literature. This is especially so given the prospective mutation of the
ranking logic from league tables into a second generation of multidimensional forms
(CHE, Multirank), and because of their continued reconfigurations of social life within
and without the academy. The form might change, but the logic, agenda, and decisive
effects of rankings as a topological apparatus remain.
We are all tired of hearing about rankings, and I am more tired than everybody else.
But the need to write about them, and the need to engage them critically, seems to
intensify in direct proportion to this sentiment. So, rather than bore the reader with the
usual introductory grist about rankings ‘spreading like a virus’ (Hazelkorn 2011, 85),
having ‘attracted wide attention recently’ (Ioannidis et al., 1), and us all having ‘to learn
CONTACT John Welsh john.welsh@helsinki.fi

© 2017 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
2 J. WELSH
to live with them’ (Bowden 2000, 58; Hazelkorn 2008), I will simply say that, with due
respect to the many thoughtful researches on them, research on academic ranking is
one of those areas which makes a critical theorist groan. If one wanted an example for
one’s fresh-faced undergraduates of how turgid social science can pave over an impor-
tant area of sociological interest, annihilating the potential for critical interrogation of
the political and social forces of transformation in our time, then this would be it.
Considering how academic ranking in particular is bound instrumentally into the
transformation of our own academic lives and laboring, one would have thought a
reaction beyond the tepid bureaucratic temperatures that dominate the discourse today
would have been more forthcoming amongst academics. But I suppose that if ranking
is, as I will argue, an apparatus of governmentality, then perhaps, with a minor
alteration, the old adage of de Maistre and Tocqueville is indeed correct . . . people get
the governmentalities they deserve.

Despite numerous calls recently to explore the political power in academic rankings
and for more critical scholarship on them (Amsler and Bolsmann 2012; Erkkilä 2013), the
extant research is seriously deficient in both respects. It is one of the great ironies of our
discipline that it has been principally in the hands of political and social scientists that
this deficiency has persisted. Instead, we have been subjected to the suffocating prevalence
of a highly bureaucratic register of analysis that seems merely to expound platitudes or
simply to play around with the workings of the machinery of the rankings apparatus. The
consequence of this is the dominance of managerialism, resigned acceptance of social and
political forces beyond the intellectual horizon of the majority of researches, and the
almost complete absence of any radical or counter-hegemonic articulations. This can be
ascribed to one overriding reason: political and social scientific research on academic
rankings has failed to appreciate what it means to be critical. I argue that research on
academic rankings, and all the activities that feed into and are coordinated by them,
requires analysis that is more critical, political, and historical. But in what follows below, I
shall be principally concerned with the question of ‘critique’ and with how rankings
research might become more ‘critical’ than it currently is not.
It therefore behooves me to clarify at the outset what exactly I might mean by ‘critical’
when it comes to academic research and scholarship, and therefore how the extant research
is insufficient in this regard. Critical thinking adheres to that aspect of the modern tradition
of critical philosophy by which the principal objective of thought and analysis is the
investigation, scrutiny, and judgment of the possibilities of knowledge before advancing
to knowledge itself. The emphasis is problematization rather than the justification of
knowledge. Therefore, my fundamental position is that for research on rankings to be
both critical and political, it must ask how we are governed, how we are to be governed, and
it must reflexively interrogate this very questioning itself? In short, it must be critical to be
political, and vice-versa; otherwise, it is merely to accept the given as necessary and so to
think and act within the parameters of ‘police science’ (Rancière 1999, 2015). The first thing
that must be said about critical research is that the word ‘critical’ is used throughout the
literature on rankings in far too normative a way to be plausibly ‘critical’. As Dowling once
remarked, ‘symptomatic analysis is able to show that critical approaches usually assumed to
be in competition with each other . . . share at the deep level an identical set of assumptions’
(Dowling 1984, 91). Too often a self-professed ‘critical approach’ (Erkkilä 2013, 3; Proulx
2007, 71; Harvey 2008; Ioannidis et al.) seems merely to demonstrate disapprobation of
CRITICAL POLICY STUDIES 3
rankings, to find problems with them, to be ‘skeptical of current ranking exercises’ (Kehm
2013, 20), and simply to dwell on their ‘possible negative effects’ in pedagogic, organiza-
tional, economic, or psychosocial terms (Erkkilä 2013, 5). Such work is happy however to
proceed within the logic of the object over which they are avowedly ‘critical’, serving
practically to reproduce the rationality of that over which they disapprove and so to
contribute to the police preservation of the social and political status quo. In this anodyne
sense, all inter-textual utterances are critical, and so any academic intervention into a
particular discourse is implicitly critical. Rarely is the word used in a manner that keeps
faith with its proper usage understood in the tradition of German critical philosophy,
whereby ‘critical’ entails certain epistemological, ontological, political, affective, personal,
and even procedural predicates and commitments. Some normatively ‘critical’ works are
promising for further development, and arguably progressive in their own way, but by
taking them to be ‘critical’, we satisfy ourselves that rigorous interrogation and scrutiny of
an immanent nature is being undertaken on the ranking phenomenon somewhere out
there, constitutive of opposition to the institutional penetration of rankings, and contrib-
utory to a politics of rankings, when it is actually hardly taking place at all.
In what follows, I shall lay out three core aspects to rankings that pervade the
literature as assumptions, and which frustrate movement toward more critical analyses
and insight into rankings. They are repeated ad nauseum throughout the vast body of
research and are blithely accepted with little controversy, contestation, or exploration.
On the basis of these core characteristics, I shall then review three literatures of the
extant research on rankings, outlining how each relates to properly critical analysis, but
how they are to varying degrees reproductive of the uncritical core characteristics to be
outlined below, and suggesting how this reproduction frustrates movement in more
critical, and therefore political, directions.
I should concede at this point that the researches I cite are more nuanced than the
categorizations into which I place them for the purposes of general exposition. I can only
justify this violence by claiming that such is necessary in order concisely to identify their
common denominator. Despite their varied nuance, the register, procedural loyalties,
epistemic assumptions, and implicitly political conclusions in these works nevertheless
remain within the paradigm I am criticizing. As such, the injustice of analytical reduction is
the price that must be paid for trenchancy and concision in argumentation.
Three dominant assumptions in ranking research

The three core qualities of extant rankings research with which I take exception are its
ahistoricity, anti-epistemology, and coherence, and they cast academic rankings’, respec-
tively, as determinist, positivist, and instrumental. These are the keystone assumptions of the
literature on academic rankings and form the principle points of objection for the rest of my
analysis. As such, they must be born in mind at all times. So, let us lay them out in turn.
Ahistoricity: determinist assumptions

The orthodox mantra has it that rankings are ‘here to stay’ (Altbach 2006, 2; Kehm
2013, 21; Hazelkorn 2011, 81; Stensaker and Kehm 2009, xvii; Usher and Medow 2009,
17; Liu and Cheng 2005, 135; Merisotis 2002). Consequently, we are exhorted to ‘make
4 J. WELSH
the most of it’ (Altbach 2012, 31) to accept that ‘railing’ will not make them go away; we
are assured that ‘within only a few years, rankings have become an unavoidable part of
academic life, for better or worse’ (Ranking Forum of Swiss Universities 2008), and are
thus ‘part of the landscape whether we like it or not’ (Labi 2008). In fact, it is acceptance
of their putative permanence that principally characterizes the extant literature on
academic ranking and in which consists that literature’s most objectionable feature.
Fascinatingly, the doxa of ranking’s inevitability seems even to be willfully accepted by
its most pessimistic critics. Examples: ‘league tables rule’ in academia (Marginson 2009,
6); ‘rankings are also inevitable’ (Altbach 2006, 2); the ‘unstoppable rise of league tables’
is but one step in the irresistible ‘direction of audit cultures and an audit society’
(Lorenz 2012, 607). Given that contingency is essential to the political to challenge the
complacent and interested assertion that rankings are ‘here to stay’, ineluctable, irre-
sistible, and an unassailable fact of social life is an urgent priority. The goal here is then
to emphasize not rankings’ positivist ontological status but in fact their profoundly
contingent character. For out of this realization can be born a properly critical and
political response to their overbearing emergence. I want to take a dissenting view, and
in many respects a properly critical and optimistic view, which seeks to convert insight
into ‘conditions of possibility’ over despair, resignation, and the TINA refrain (There Is
No Alternative) of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009).
That is the invariant refrain to which we are all expected in the extant literature to
resign ourselves and adapt. The inevitability of rankings is presented in almost deter-
ministic terms. Given the historical social forces assumed, why have they arisen in the
particular form of ordinal league tables, why principally since the 1980s, why is there a
pressure to develop multidimensional ranking forms, why do rankings not result in the
market behavior for which they are justified, and why is the ranking form so seemingly
irresistible? These questions never seem to arise when the historical force is welded so
unquestionably to historical form.
The history of the academic ranking literature itself reflects the changing modula-
tions and tempos of social force in the accumulation regime of the mode of
production. The literature around those first wave formulations of rankings
(1980s) focused on the fairly mundane matter of numerating for the purposes of
privatization (Drew and Karpf 1981). The expanding interest in rankings after the
end of the Cold War (1990s), and amidst the hegemonic ascendency of neoliberal
ideology, began to concern itself with the question of global governance and the
need for ordered knowledge to this end. The 2000s saw a turn toward multidimen-
sionality and a drive for more complex and responsive rankings commensurate to
the growing need for market-like behaviors at the micro-level in higher education.
After 2008, a more normatively critical voice began to emerge as part of the general
disillusionment with the neoliberal paradigm but nevertheless bound into its appar-
ently inescapable logic. What is now required is a further critical step that has
greater potential to break with the gravity of this paradigm.
When Altbach states that ‘if rankings did not exist, someone would have to invent
them’ (Altbach 2012, 27), he is reinforcing a doxa that apparently denominates most
rankings research. In fact, there is an unacknowledged historical interpretation at work
here. Whilst superficially the ranking form is taken to be unchangeable and necessary,
and thus ahistorical in terms of the impossibility for social change through political
action, there is an implicit recognition in this discourse of the historical nature of its
emergence through time. However, the social forces from which it has arisen are
unstoppable and ineluctable, making of this assumption regarding rankings one that
is not only explicitly conservative but also implicitly determinist.
But surely a key contradictory tension in the rankings phenomena is made manifest in
their formal emergence and a space opens up between the forms themselves and the social
and historical forces which have occasioned their emergence (massification, telecoms
revolution, global migration, ‘globalization’, etc.; see Altbach 2012, 27, 31; Shin et al.
2011, 3; Hazelkorn 2011, 7; Hinchcliffe 2007, 56). It is a non sequitur to claim that these
particular forms are inevitable on the basis of the historical momentum of their emergence
alone, as most researchers seem to, and certainly not without adequately exploring what
these historical forces are. Furthermore, whilst rankings are realized within the power of a
certain rationality that grants them their ‘inevitability’, their form is the contingent
product of discursive conflict – politics. The task ahead then is to articulate this tensile
fissure, between historical form and historical force, and drive a wedge into it. I recom-
mend, according to this analysis, that for rankings research to be critical a historical view
must be taken of them, but one that recognizes and explores the dialectical contradictions
internalized to its form, rather than one that accepts the causal force of its emergence as a
completed process and a social fait accompli. To fail to do this is not only to fail to be
critical, but it is to be politically reactionary, perhaps even dogmatic.
In one sense, and one sense only, are rankings truly inevitable and irresistible, and
that is when they take the form of a ‘reversal of contingency into necessity’ (Zizek
2014, 146). This is where the actualization of the event retroactively creates its always
already historical necessity. As such, it is by the very preoccupations, treatments, and
mentioning of rankings themselves, and the repetition of the epistemic conditions of
their constitution, along with constant referral to the predicative assumptions and
legitimizations, that we come to make an unstoppable necessity of the ranking form.
By conceding to the terms of this terrain, we make our critical proposals and
objections not simply incorrect but impossible of ever being correct as the terms
on which they themselves seek predication are expunged from the past of the
Present. This leaves but one option to refuse the dialectical reversal of contingency
into necessity and deny the very rationality of the Present that makes of itself a
necessity from a contingent past and irrationally to reject ranking in the very essence
of its form. It is only at the moment of recognition that the potency of the trompe
d’oeil evaporates and proves itself in the moment that it ends. But given the
historicity of ranking’s emergence, how is this operation to be undertaken in a
sublative rather than reactionary manner?
Anti-epistemology: positivist assumptions

Rankings themselves, and the multiplication of research that has further inscribed them
into our academic lives, adhere more or less doggedly to the epistemology of positivism.
They are assumed simply to be reality-reflecting scientific models, faithful to a naïve
and unreflexive correspondence notion of truth, in a metaphysically positivist episte-
mology all-too-familiar from the years of Cold War social science. This means that, as
ideal social models constructed by social scientists in order to establish criteria for the
6 J. WELSH
evaluation of social conditions (Flyvbjerg 2001, 125), they are treated as reality-reflect-
ing models first and foremost.
As we shall see further down, rankings may subsequently be spoken of, in the
limpid language of normative social science, as ‘performative’, but that aspect of
them is necessarily secondary to their essence as constructed presentations of
measurement. To accept or adhere to the practice of rankings with any consistency
of principle must entail the assumption that they represent reality faithfully in
accord with a positivist correspondence notion of truth. This positivism, whilst
congenial to policemen, is devastating to critical thought or politics, for which any
absence of ontological contingency precludes its very existence. Empirical science is
not politics.
This view of rankings forces us into a duality, wherein we are permitted only to
affirm them as true or false, correct or incorrect, better or worse, and thus precludes
other kinds of judgment over their desirability or actuality. This enforcement of a lack
of choice is how ‘numerical objectification of social phenomena can function to
depoliticize potentially political issues’ (Erkkilä and Piironen 2014, 1) and replace
them with Marcuse’s ‘matter-of-factness’ that lies at the epistemological heart of police
and its instrumental reason (Marcuse 1982, 141–142). It is this assumption that
propagates the dubious and popular understanding of ‘transparency’, where otherwise
one might see just an infinite variety of opacities in the panoply of policy options laid
before us. Needless to say, challenging this implicit, yet regnant, pseudo-epistemology
in the literature will be a priority.
Political and social scientists are so preoccupied with being satisfactorily ‘scien-
tific’ in their research on ranking, obsessing over a limited and impoverished notion
of rigor, rather than with being ‘political’. In his great founding work of Regulation
Theory, Michel Aglietta noted that the thing about the ‘criteria of scientificity’ is that
‘it can only proceed normatively’ and that ‘the apparently rigorous character of the
theory should not deceive us . . . the stricter its logic, the more divorced from
reality’. It is in fact a metaphysics bordering on the theological that postulates an
‘immutable essence underlying the variability of phenomena’ (Aglietta, 13–15), a
metaphysics that assumes the contingent as a datum. This is how we can get a
supposedly ‘critical approach’ in the form of ‘a university benchmarking exercise’
(Proulx 2007, 71), which of course is not critical in any meaningfully intellectual or
political way.
To be critical or political will be to abandon the positivist pretentions to corre-
spondence truth in rankings research, not because it is in error, but because it is at
best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive to critical motion and political
analysis.
Monolithicity: instrumental assumptions

Rankings are assumed to be an unambiguously external imposition on the university as
a strategic policy-tool by neoliberal reformers. Rankings are like ‘a dictator imposing its
own game on research and teaching’ (Münch 2013, 216) and present as a ‘super-
imposition of extrinsic values’ (Berndtson 2013, 192), or even as an ‘imposition of
bureaucratic frameworks’ (Nixon 2013, 98). This is that aspect of rankings that make
them ‘performative’, and a more or less delimited instrument of ‘global governance

studies’ (Salmi and Saroyan 2007; King 2009; Hazelkorn 2011). This is the assumption
that sees ‘rankings as policy instruments of global governance’ (Erkkilä 2013, 3) and
that emerged in response to transformations in the global landscape of higher education
and research over recent decades engendering a new ‘overtly geo-political language’
across university milieux (Hazelkorn 2013, 14).
It is also the ‘ubiquitous hype about the “knowledge society”, often a byword for
“knowledge capitalism” (Sünker 2006), and the strengthened association between
higher education and national competitiveness’ (Erkkilä and Piironen 2013, 125), to
be found in new public management. It places rankings as one of the ‘financial and
administrative technologies’ of neoliberal government (Marginson 2009, 3), making of
it an instrument of the state. It is a discourse fixated on the twin pillars of transparency
and performativity (Usher 2009, 88), the former concerning consumer choice and the
‘need to benchmark’ (Altbach 2012, 31), whilst the latter relates to various ‘government
performance funding initiatives’ (Dill 2006, 1), such as the RAE and REF in Britain or
Exzellenz Initiativ in Germany, which are based to a great extent on the rankings
phenomenon and the qualification and indexing that is constitutive of it. The political
raison d’état Foucault observed in the official establishment of ‘knowledge’ (savoirs) can
clearly be seen in the way in which rankings are discussed as essential to national
economies (Foucault 2002). These assumptions, priorities, and imperatives have been
recently rolled out again in the Stern report, based upon the latest REF assessment
round in the United Kingdom, where one can read Lord Stern’s simultaneously
reassuring and admonishing conclusions that entirely endorse the logic of ranking
and reinforce the ‘imperative to govern’ that motivates their continued existence.
The UK is at the forefront of world research and has the most productive science base in
the G7, ranking first amongst comparable major research nations for Field Weighted
Citations Impact. Its great strengths in research are a special asset and comparative
advantage and are crucial to the future of the UK in a rapidly changing and sometimes
turbulent world. (Stern et al. 2016, §120)
Whether as conscious instrument of social policy, or as unconscious instrumental

rationality entailed in modern bureaucratic organization, the ranking policy tool is
assumed in monolithic and coherent terms. Rankings are thus considered part of a
general reform ‘imposed on [academics] from the outside’ and ‘on the academic
community as a whole’ (Kauppi 2013, 173, 176). It is a thing to be deployed or be
chosen, to be assessed and rendered into numerical indices.
The first objection here is that the limiting treatment of rankings merely as a policy
instrument utterly fails even to recognize the implications of ranking as a social
reconfiguration of human relations and the ontological/epistemological effects of rank-
ing on the quality of human life beyond the trite and quantifiable. The second more
apposite objection is that by considering ranking as a coherent instrument to be
deployed upon an object, even its critics are drawn into a reification, whereby the
reflexive and dialectical quality to the ranking logic is missed, the hybridity of its
practical forms passed over, and a simplistic institutional coherence regarding the
university in relation to rankings and capitalist society more generally results.
Rankings are then assumed to be a policy strategy imposed from without the academic
8 J. WELSH
setting, rather than as an immanent dialectical response within academia to increasing

pressure from profoundly social forces of transformation. The consequences for aca-
demics are that they can wash their hands of responsibility and turn a blind eye to their
own complicity in the spread and reproduction of rankings. The politics in rankings is
taped over, but it is a dominant assumption that must be opened up to contingency and
consideration of hybridity in form, if we want to entertain critical and political research
on rankings as a social phenomenon.
In contrast, a greater sensitivity to the hybridized realization of ranking phenomena
in different academic cultures and their diverse intertwining with the social fabric of
academic life from context to context are marginalized by treating ranking as a coherent
and discrete policy imposition. Taking the ranking phenomena sensu latissimo, greater
consideration of how ranking-oriented behaviors manifest differentially in, for example,
the German Humboldtian university of Bildung, the national-bureaucratic Nordic

university, the commercialized American university, or the elitist English collegiate
university, will require the discourse to depart from this view of rankings as simply
an implemented policy rather than a dialectically emergent and contextual technique of
social transformation.
These three thematic assumptions – Ahistoricity, positivist scientism, and instru-
mental coherence – do not exist in discrete isolation in the extant research of academic
rankings but are woven together in sundry ways depending on the intellectual agenda,
epistemological loyalties, procedural proclivities of a given researcher. I argue that this
extant corpus of rankings research can be broken down into three groups, each
decreasingly beholden to the three dominant assumptions, but each of increasingly
marginal position in the discourse. The purpose in laying out this breakdown is to
indicate the points of departure in the literature that are promising for more critical
directions of analysis, as well as to establish clearly those portions of the extant research
against which any such critical re-orientation must position itself.
Literature 1: the micro-methodologists
The distribution of knowledge is only socially efficacious to the extent that it is also a (re)
distribution of positions. To gauge the distance between the two distributions, one must
therefore have an additional science. Ever since Plato, this royal science has had a name.
That name is political science (Rancière 2014, 68).
The research contributory to the first literature is that of the micro-methodologists. This
research is decidedly positivist and is concerned with detailed analyses of the statistical
and quantitative methodological aspects of how the data for rankings are collated and
presented as information for social scientific ends. These ends however are not
addressed within the assumptions of the research itself, aside from reference to sub-
stitutive bromides like ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ (Hazelkorn 2011), which, at best, are
only ever bracketed and rarely scrutinized. This category contains all those ‘biblio-
metric’ research papers, filled with formulae and Greek letters, as highly numerate as
they are often illiterate, and that are legion in the pages of journals like Research in
Higher Education (Drew and Karpf 1981; Rinia et al 1998; Meredith 2004). This kind of
research, plausibly ‘science’ but unequivocally not ‘political’, merely tinkers with the
micro-functioning of ranking methodologies, so as merely to ‘identify better practices’
(Usher and Savino 2007, 5) and apply ‘corrections’ to ‘inappropriate design’ (Van Raan
2005, 135). What is politically significant about this literature is not just that it operates
to a positivist mode but also within a positivist ontology. Taken together, this meta-
physical positivist paradigm manifests as total. As such, micro-methodological criticism
tends to share a rather limited set of thematic complaints over rankings, of which the
principals are:
(1) Data availability: There is insufficient availability of data for rankings to be

reliable, and so more techniques for acquiring data must be devised (Harvey
2008, 190; Van Dyke 2005, 111; Proulx 2007, 78). Widespread resort to the
‘reputation’ variable in particular has been singled out by micro-methodologists

for its failure to plug this gap satisfactorily (Usher and Savino 2006, 26; Proulx
2007, 78). In the typically naïve classical empiricism behind these criticisms, data
exist independently of our cognition or perception, simply awaiting discovery
without explanation or mediation. The question of how data are fashioned from
the phenomenal chaos never arises. This is the positivism attacked by Roy
Bhaskar, wherein ‘knowledge and the world may be viewed as surfaces whose
points are in isomorphic correspondence’ or phenomenally ‘fused’ (2008:, 24).
(2) Credibility of indicator choice (Proulx 2007, 77; Dill 2006; Van Vught and
Westerhejden, 2010, 18; Stensaker and Kehm (2009, xii–xiii): Too much arbitrary
and whimsical inclusion and weighting of variables with no necessary justifica-
tion (Boyer 2004), such as Nobel prize-winners (ARWU) (Altbach, 2006, 3). This
criticism also applies to the common assumption of journal article publication as
an adequate means of assessing contribution and ‘impact’ in all fields and
disciplines (Van Raan 2005, 134). Alternatively, and more systematically, this
also refers to the instrumental insertion of tendentious circularities like ‘reputa-
tion’ into survey questions (Marginson 2009, 9; Dill and Soo 2005, 511, 512).
(3) Statistical distortion (Multidimensional Rankings, 2010, 18): This includes the
volatile and dramatic movements up and down league tables from just a slight
increase/decrease in overall or particular variable score, resulting too often in
‘statistical fluke’ outcomes (Usher and Savino 2006:, 3). For example, position in
ordinal league tables tends to vary considerably from methodology to methodol-
ogy, and within the parameters of a given methodology year on year. This seems
to be the case less when it comes to movement across the border of the ‘premier
division’ (Marginson 2009, 10).
(4) Insufficient complexity: The greater complexity of higher education systems is
insufficiently modeled and presented by ordinal league tables that treat institu-
tions uniformly, in contravention of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, as though
they were teams in a football league (Van Raan 2005; Multidimensional Rankings
2010, 19).
(5) Multicollinearity: This refers to ‘the degree to which changes in the value of one
or more of the ranking criteria are related to, and are affected by, changes in one
or more of the other ranking criteria’ (Webster 2001, 236). It results in mislead-
ing ‘feedback effects’, such as the correlation of institutional reputation with
10 J. WELSH
alumni contributions (240), and which ‘reinforce existing positive and negative
stereotypes’ contrary to justifiably rigorous method.
(6) Circularity: Rankings are recognized to be ‘instrumental’, in the sense that
methodologists unwittingly select the values and variables to suit their own
ends or tastes in compilation.
(7) Gaming: The conscious manipulation of data or statistical methods for self-
interested purposes on the part of individuals and institutions (Bastedo and
Bowman 2011, 6; Sauder and Fine 2008; Stevens 2007; Ehrenberg 2002;).
Naturally, the central preoccupation of this category of research is with issues of

‘scientific rigor’, but defined solely in terms of objectivity and quantification.
‘Subjective assessments’ are relevant only to the degree to which they can be ‘trans-
formed into objective characteristics’ (Artushina and Troyan 2007, 84). In this kind of
ranking research, the overriding question is simply that of arriving at a ‘superior
indicator of university excellence in terms of objectivity and comprehensiveness’ (Li,
Shankar, and Ki Tang 2011, 927), yet at no point will ‘excellence’, ‘objectivity’, or
‘superior’ be problematized, explored, or justified in themselves. Conversely, proble-
matic ‘subjectivity’ is of a kind that is merely understood as ‘dependence of the
outcomes [of peer-review] on the choice of individual committee members’ (Van
Raan 2005, 135), that is it is simply conflated with interested opinion and ‘bias’. Most
recently, one can read in the Stern Report how the principal concern with rankings lies
not in the contribution to governing derived from their very being, but in their
‘systematic bias in favour of. . ..’ (Stern et al. 2016, §42). The criticisms of the extant
literature have been integrated into the logic of government, but the imperative to
govern through ‘qualculation’ and numeration is not challenged.
For the micro-methodologists, the scope of their critique of rankings stops at the door
of the ranking compiler (THE, QS, ARWU, Leiden, CHE, USNWR, etc.), who usually are
considered by the former to be too ‘whimsical’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘incompetent’, and lacking
rigor in methodological procedures, choice of variables, assignation of significance, etc.
(Harvey 2008, 190; Van der Wende 2008, 56). For Meredith (2004, 445), problems arise
from ‘arbitrary changes in rank’ that are ‘due to misleading data or poor methodology’.
Lee Harvey’s primary concern is that ‘indicator selection is rigorous’ (2008, 190) and
seems content to rest at that. The implication of these studies undertaken by the micro-
methodologists is therefore that academic scientists, such as themselves, ought to have
their hands on the tiller to correct the false courses resulting hitherto from the partial and
interested subjectivities of the compilers of rankings and their ‘greedy’ as well as ‘non-
expert use of bibliometric indicators’ (Van Raan 2005, 133–134).
The first problem to rear up in this micro-methodological literature, which seems
to comprise the largest single category of research on academic rankings, is in its
symptomatic ‘methodological fetishism’ (Wright Mills 1970), which has dogged
academic social science at least since the advent of the Cold War. This epistemic
mode has become a defining feature of the currently ‘dominant streak in social
science’ (Flyvbjerg 2001, 168; Jameson 2007, 95, 101) and suffocates our ability to
break paradigmatically out of ‘persistent pathologies’ (Hay 2011), which might
otherwise allow us to conceive of other ways of being (or even seeing) in the
world. Little wonder that both the contingency and historicity of ranking, the two
aspects that make of it a political rather than scientific phenomenon, are clearly
marginalized. There is a seeming dearth of reflexivity or epistemological introspec-
tion amongst the micro-methodologists, and not without social implications as
profound as they are dark.
Highly scientific researchers, such as Li, Shankar, and Ki Tang (2011), busy them-
selves with ‘factors at the micro or institutional level that are driving the success of
[American] universities’, and yet they seem somewhat naïve regarding world-historic
social forces, the problem of cause and effect in social explanation, and the epistemo-
logical dubiousness of terms like ‘success’. None of these intellectual questions are
addressed, bracketed, or even seem to be known about. But then, this is not the proper
function of this bureaucratic undertaking . . . contributing to the police power is. This is
how we can end up with an article in which the domination of university league tables
by American institutions – the world’s richest institutions in the world’s most powerful
state – is treated as ‘an intriguing question’ (Li, Shankar, and Ki Tang 2011, 923), when
such a question is not only not intriguing, but obvious. In fact, it is the wrong question
if we want sincerely and fearlessly to speak ‘truth to power’ in the pursuit of parrhesia
(Foucault 2001), rather than merely to bend its force in our favor. It is no surprise that
micro-methodologists in China and Southeast Asia tend to recommend the Chinese
ARWU (Li, Shankar, and Ki Tang 2011), British micro-methodologists the THE or QS,
and Continental European micro-methodologists the German CHE or the EU’s
Multirank (Van Vught and Ziegele. U-Multirank: Final Report (2011); Van Vught
and Westerheijden (2010) ‘Multidimensional Ranking’).
Even if we were all to share the micro-methodologist’s blue-eyed mission to ‘improve
ranking systems for the benefit of higher education as a whole’ (Liu and Cheng 2005,
135), it is hard to see how this might be accomplished given that the social, political,
and cultural aims and purposes for rankings, and the activities they purport to measure
and assess, are never adequately considered.
Literature 2: sociocultural criticism

For the second category – that of the sociocultural critics – research does place rankings
within the wider society and culture, and they consequently are preoccupied with ‘the
role of context in understanding’ the ranking phenomena (Erkkilä 2013, 17). These
researchers question the purpose of rankings and consider the ends for which they are
constructed, directing their efforts to those ‘measures that closely approximate or are
clearly linked to valued societal outcomes’ (Dill 2006, 7). More often than not, they
either abandon the positivist complacencies of the micro-methodologists or at least
exhibit a skeptical awareness regarding their positivist claims. However, they remain
stubbornly empiricist in the substance of their mostly lukewarm criticisms of the micro-
methodologists. That said, there is a fairly large chorus of critical voices that object to
the social and intellectual implications of the ranking mechanism and its various
positivist predicates and formulations (see Erkkilä and Piironen 2013).
Whilst skeptical of the more numerically severe quantifications of the ranking
phenomena (Kehm 2013, 22), this body of literature is generally resigned and fatalistic
about the ranking phenomenon and its socioeconomic and psychosocial effects. As
rankings are ‘here to stay’, the general response is that we ‘had better make the best of
12 J. WELSH
it’ (Svensson et al. 2010, 2) and thus agree to work with ranking but in more
methodologically sophisticated and socially sensitive ways. In the humanities and social
sciences, this intellectual ballast has proven decisive, and it is to these agnostics that my
critical analysis is principally addressed. The main themes of criticism conjured by the
sociocultural critics are therefore as follows:
(1) English language: Rankings privilege primarily Anglophonic institutions and

individuals and therefore represent a form of cultural imperialism (Altbach,
2006, 3; Harvey 2008, 190; Marginson 2009, 8; Kehm 2013, 22). The recommen-
dation of the critics is to devise assessment policies and ranking forms capable of
evening out this disparity.
(2) Institutional size: Large institutions are advantaged in the rankings at the
expense of smaller more specialist institutions (liberal arts colleges, engineering

schools, grands ecoles, etc.) (Liu and Cheng 2005, 133).
(3) Institutional setting: The multi-faculty research university is advantaged over
other institutions that emphasize teaching, such as liberal arts colleges, business
schools, technical colleges, arts colleges, etc. or that specialize in intensive
research, like the French CNRS or the German Max Planck Institutes (Erkkilä
2013, 11). Furthermore, all too often is research quality conflated with quality of
teaching and degree programs (Dill 2006, 6).
(4) Internationalization: The inclusion of this indicator measures the proportions
of faculty and/or the student body in a given institution that are foreign
nationals. States that have a relatively high ratio of small size to global flows
and transactions are advantaged (Marginson 2009, 9). In this case, the UK city-
state compares favorably with the continental USA, and for which reason might
we find a conspicuous preponderance of the ‘internationalization’ variable in
UK-based rankings (THE, QS).
(5) Hard science: Institutions that specialize, exclusively or partially, in physical or
natural sciences are advantaged in current ranking forms, as well as in other quanti-
tative and bibliometric assessment forms, due to the more easily marketable or
quantifiable nature of their ‘research output’ (Mustajoki 2013; Holmes 2006).
Institutions specializing in the humanities or social sciences are conversely disadvan-
taged. Thus, we have Imperial College London always doing better than the LSE.
(6) Cultural values (Altbach, 2006. 3; Proulx 2007, 73, 75; Lang and Zha 2004; Dill
2006, 6): Given the plurality of cultural and national contexts, this criticism can
be summed up by saying that ‘universities have different missions and goals’
(Altbach, 2006, 2), and at a higher level of organization ‘not all nations or
systems share the same values and beliefs about what constitutes “quality” in
tertiary institutions, and ranking systems should not be devised to force such
comparisons’ (International Ranking Expert Group: Principle 5). This is a rejec-
tion of the homogenization tendency (Diver, 2005), or ‘one-size-fits-all’ typology
(Proulx 2007, 76). For instance, the greater market orientation of North
American universities contrasts with the arguably more Humboldtian norms of
the Northern/Central European Rechtsstaat. Such differing social priorities can-
not be so easily compared through such a crude mechanism of equivalence as the
league table.
(7) Transparency (Altbach, 2006, 3): Institutions and academics are to be ‘accoun-
table’ for the resources allotted to them by society, and so, they should provide
‘evidence about the results they achieve’ (Stensaker and Kehm 2009, vii). The
transparency discourse is accepted unproblematically as a valid social epistemo-
logical argument for further penetration of techniques of quantified calculation
and measurement (xviii).
As can be seen, even though mildly critical of rankings, the epistemological legitimacy
of ranking methodology is never seriously challenged here and they are ontologically
accepted as reality-reflecting phenomena as befits the hegemonic empiricist paradigm of
academic social science. This means that the epistemological critique of this literature
cannot become much more sophisticated than its general fixation on ‘bias’ (Dill 2006, 5;
Holmes 2006). In sum, the problem with rankings to most sociocultural critics ‘con-
cerns the practice, not the principle’ (Altbach, 2006, 2). In this way, those on the
threshold of both micro-methodology and sociocultural criticism, like Anthony Van
Raan, can still maintain that ‘bibliometric indicators have great potential’, but only on
condition that the methodological technique is ‘sufficiently advanced and sophisticated’
(Van Raan 2005, 135). Likewise, whilst Philip Altbach might be disapproving of the
positivist claim that ‘numbers are assumed to be a proxy for quality’, the concession
nevertheless follows that ‘they are to a significant extent’ (Altbach, 2006, 2). This reveals
the shared epistemological denominator for both the socioculturally sensitive critic and
the devotee of micro-methodological positivism: their acceptance of the epistemic
parameters of police.
The difference is usually no more than a shift from a self-professed ‘quantitative’ to a
‘qualitative’ procedure. Consequently, this kind of research endeavors, like the micro-
methodologists, to ‘improve’ rankings, though now with the eye of the bourgeois refor-
mer rather than that of the garage mechanic. While it is the case that ‘they [the Micro-
Methodologists] often measure the wrong things, and they use flawed metrics to do the
measurements’, the legitimate use of measurement and ranking itself is approved, as long
as it is ‘analyzed properly’ (Stensaker and Kehm 2009, vii). Such criticisms of method are
brought to bear without questioning the bases of ranking itself, even if the sociocultural
critics often prefer a form of assessment and organization more nuanced, worldly, and
sometimes more discursive, than the unpalatable seriality of the ordinal league table.
Rather than rejection, deconstruction, or transcendence, the ‘challenge’ is then ‘to ensure
that they [rankings] provide accurate and relevant assessments, and measure the right
things’ (Altbach, 2006, 2), and to steer analysis toward the ‘nuances, problems, uses – and
misuses’ of rankings (Altbach 2012. 27??). In short, the sociocultural critics are to be
humanist and socially scientific advisors to the numbers bods.
The main thrust of the advice produced in this literature is to move academic
analyses on rankings beyond the ‘holistic rank ordering of institutions in league tables’
(Marginson 2009, 13), of the kind familiar from the main compilations, and to place
these micro-ranking phenomena into a broader and more fractured terrain where
ranking is properly grasped within an emergent reconfiguration of social relations. If
ranking is to remain ‘relevant’, and of course we all hope and nightly pray that it does,
this apparently will require efforts to break down the no longer ‘feasible’ institutional
horizon of rankings, and instead ‘to compare world universities on comparable
14 J. WELSH
disciplinary fields’ (Proulx 2007, 76). This kind of movement means two key changes in
academic rankings: multidimensionality and user-orientation. League tables will be
replaced by a multiplying and dizzying array of assessable objects beyond the institu-
tional level, with the latter being expanded or shattered into departments, states,
disciplines, regions, even individuals, to be placed into some kind of ordered relation
predicated on whatever assessed criteria. Simultaneously, the proximate compilation of
data will be made no longer by king-making compilation organizations, nor even by
micro-methodological experts, but by the ‘user’ itself (students, parents, state financiers,
job applicants), who, after punching in their preferences to responsive software pro-
grams and giving the handle a swift crank, will receive the offerings of the algorithm.
The German CHE ranking and the EU’s Multirank are the favorites of this research
literature and their recommendation is an instantly recognizable badge of membership
amongst the sociocultural critics. Though free of the serial form of the league table, the
CHE and Multirank rankings are nevertheless rankings. They are just as much a
systemic set of relations regulating the disposition of objects in social reality, given a
quantitative expression, established according to defined criteria, and brought into
being to satisfy the imperative of human government. To this extent, U-Multirank is
a ranking, but a new generation of ranking. As such, it is how these relations between
subjects and objects are conceived, constituted, and justified that is essential for under-
standing the social rationalities that inhere to rankings, and the conceptual claims they
make.
Despite the apparent benefits of this new and more plural and versatile form of
ranking, and aside from the corresponding objections made by the ‘distinctive bene-
ficiaries’ and ‘conflicting interests’ whom it threatens (Marginson 2009, 13; Altbach
2006, 3), it still runs contrary to a critical and political analysis of ranking. For this, we
must reverse Altbach’s position and find fault not in the practice of ranking but in the
principle. This is an epistemological leap that neither the micro-methodologists nor the
sociocultural critics can make.
Literature 3: critical potential

As points-of-departure, I shall build on a number of recent works that hint toward a
more critical agenda on rankings and their effects on higher education and society, thus
beginning the process of breaking out of the dominant discourse on rankings. So
contrary to the bulk of the literature discussed so far, there are a number of studies
and researches on the ranking phenomenon that have clear merit for future research of
a properly critical and rightly political character. There is a small number of works on
rankings that have opened up critical directions in ranking research and that now
require elaboration and deepening. For Simon Marginson ‘rankings reflect prestige and
power’, they ‘reproduce prestige and power’, and they ‘entrench the potency of the
existing hierarchy’ (Marginson 2009, 13). But we really need to go a little further than
this, if we want more intellectually articulated points of departure for new critical
analyses. Three critical theoretical strands of this literature that stand out for their
contributory potential toward new political directions relate to doxa, instrumental
rationality, and disciplinarity.
(1) Doxa – Building on Bourdieu’s work on space, classification, social stratification,

power, social capital, prestige forms, symbols, and mechanisms of status produc-
tion, Kauppi and Erkkila (2011) have alluded to the social doxa in rankings as part
of an ‘ontological trap’ of quantification, where ‘actors involved in higher educa-
tion assessment are gripped by a specific logic of knowledge production’, based
primarily on numbers. This is an important point of departure for critiquing the
rationalities of social reproduction in ranking forms and the instrumentalist
tendencies in rankings. It also urges the necessity to question the social legitimacy
of rankings (Kauppi 2010; Kauppi and Rask Madsen 2008). It is from such work
that we can talk of a reality-forming ‘ontological trap’, in contrast to the reality-
reflecting claims made of rankings, that characterizes so much of the positivist
paradigm in its construction of global rankings and in our use of them socially.
This is the case specifically as regards the instrumental relationship between the
epistemological bases for rankings and their resultant ontological effects.
The ontological trap refers to the fact that once a consensus over the major
characteristics of reality is achieved, it will be very difficult to question this reality
and its social structures of domination. The symbolic and institutional structura-
tion covers ontological and epistemological layers that are mutually dependent.
The knowledge produced and reproduced about reality thus determines what will
be considered as forming the elemental structures of this same reality (Kauppi and
Erkkila 2011, 315). We can therefore see how ‘the problems with positivism lead to
deeper issues’, and how ‘if such questions remain unanswered it is possible that the
prevailing intellectual climate will regard them as essentially unaskable’ (O’Connor
2004, 7). There crystallizes a kind of doxa, which is in fact what is happening when
we hear claims over the ‘inevitability’ of university ranking ascendency.
(2) Instrumental reason – Whilst allusion to the ‘instrumental’ selection of values

and variables on the part of methodologists to suit their own ends in compilation
is quite valid as an analytical objection, the critique of ‘instrumental rationality’
means more than just the application of Goodhart’s Law – the problem of
‘measuring an organizational quality’ in quantitative terms that ‘inevitably
changes how people think about that quality’ (Bastedo and Bowman 2011, 9;
Münch 2013, 201). Along with the micro-methodologists’ scorn for the ‘gaming’
of ranks (Hazelkorn 2008; Dill and Soo 2005), this merely reinforces the equili-
bristic prejudices of positivist-empiricism and limits our critique to that of
scientific ‘bias’ or ‘impartiality’ (Van Vught and Westerheijden 2010, 10–11).
The cult of measurement endures. Sauder and Espeland refer to ‘reactivity’ in the
rankings phenomenon (Espeland and Sauder 2007, 29–32), where rankings ‘do
not mirror reality but produce it’ in a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Espeland and
Sauder 2007, 11–12). Others allude to the instrumental circularity of ‘reputation’
(Marginson 2009, 9; Dill and Soo 2005, 511, 512).
But this line of criticism must be taken a step further for a critical analysis to be
forthcoming. More theoretically, articulate critique must be elaborated that
situates the ‘instrumentality’ of academic rankings within the instrumental
16 J. WELSH
rationality inherent to modern forms of social organization. Building on

Frankfurt Critical Theory’s initial insights, I claim that there is a need to move
beyond a critique of quantification alone, and into a more specific analysis of
numeration. It is not the violent distillation of discrete and coherent objects from
extended matter by the conceptualization of experience with which we are now
concerned. It is rather the special character of the relations established between
these objects through particular strategies and apparatuses of numeration that
concern us, for this is where we can understand more thoroughly the political
forces implicated in the ordering of academic life in accord with a specific logic
of governing.
(3) Disciplinarity – Disciplinary power is paraphrased as ‘the process by which

social actors are coerced and seduced to internalize the normative pressures
imposed upon them’ (Bastedo and Bowman 2011, 9). As anodyne a description
of the disciplinary mode as this might be, it is at least a start. In an explicitly
Foucauldian vein, Sauder and Espeland take this line further by presenting
rankings as a technology of ‘disciplinary rationality’ revealed through ‘processes
of surveillance and normalization’ (2009, 64).
In keeping with the Foucault of the middle works (1991, 2003, 2006), this is a
fruitful line of analysis but remains nevertheless resolutely somatic, spatial, and
optic in its capillary modeling of the disciplinary power in rankings. The
argument here is important and fresh, but I advocate taking this line of analysis
forward from this point into Foucault’s later lectures and the crucial shift in his
genealogical treatment there of modern modalities and rationalities of power.
Whilst Sauder and Espeland mobilize Foucault’s classic of ‘disciplinary power’
(Foucault 1991), it is in his later lectures on ‘governmentality’ (governmental
rationality) that the emergence of global rankings as global ‘apparatuses of
security’ (dispositives) can more strikingly and comprehensively be apprehended
and their historic potency grasped. In fact, this line of further research is indeed
hinted at the end of their article, where they state that ‘rankings are part of a
global movement that is redefining accountability, transparency, and good
governance in terms of quantitative measures. We ignore these trends at our
peril’ (Sauder and Espeland 2009, 80).
By bringing these three lines of critical analysis on academic rankings – doxa, instru-
mentality, and (meta-)disciplinarity – into contact with one another, a new agenda of
critical analysis can be brought to bear on rankings that posits them as apparatuses of
governmentality that have emerged in historical capitalism between the logic of police
power and the imperative of capital accumulation in the world system.
Conclusion: apparatus, arkhê, and dialectic

To explore this new agenda, I suggest analysis of three features of academic rankings
that are currently undertreated: apparatus, arkhê, and dialectic.
The first move is to treat rankings as an apparatus of governmentality. Amsler and

Bolsmann (2012) explicitly recognize the political character of rankings as violent appa-
ratuses and as ‘politico-ideological technologies’. This is to build on the ‘disciplinary
power’ in academic rankings as a ‘regime of institutional control’, but to take our analyses
beyond the disciplinary rationality and its institutional ‘armatures’ and into the axiomatic
rationality of government. This is necessary to reclaim the global scope of rankings
research mired in the ‘governance’ idiom, and to resituate the emergence of rankings
out of decidedly global social forces but in political terms of power and control as opposed
to the bureaucratic managerialism and its normative ‘challenges’. This line of analysis has
the potential to inquire into the mechanisms and techniques of ‘passionate servitude’ and
conative investment (Lordon 2014), which characterize the post-disciplinary capitalism
that rankings seem to reproduce so helpfully by their ‘police’ logic (Rancière 2015). The
principal utility of the governmentality concept, of which the vocabulary of ‘apparatuses’

constitutes a component, is that it allows for a consideration of global or population
government in a manner that does not bracket what ought to be central in the critical spirit
of analysis. Whilst the ‘governance’ idiom supplies the requisite knowledge for manage-
ment of the capitalist society, ‘governmentality’ places its own logic, rationality, techni-
ques, modulations, and epistemic predicates within the medium of the concept itself
integrating a comprehensive reflexivity proper to the critical idiom.
The second feature of rankings on which we should concentrate intellectual effort is
how they are constituting the arkhê of a new political order (Rancière 1999, 61–93). The
arkhê is the logic establishing a
clear distribution of positions and capacities, grounding the distribution of power between
rulers and ruled; it is a temporal beginning entailing that the fact of ruling is anticipated in
the disposition to rule and, conversely, that the evidence of this disposition is given by the
fact of its empirical operation. (Rancière 2015, 59)
The arkhê is the political counterpart to a social doxa. Where a doxa realizes and
reproduces a given set of epistemological assumptions through an instrumental ration-
ality set in motion, the arhkê is the political moment that motivates this motion and the
logic that establishes the doxa’s circularity into social relations. Research must then
elaborate how rankings have emerged and operate as arkhê and then empirically
investigate how this rankings arkhê has emerged historically in the transformation of
academic life and the wider social relations of which it is a part.
Third, there is the dialectical relationship alluded to earlier between the contingency
of political form and the necessity of social force. The conventional research collapses
these two into a static and reactionary acceptance of the status quo established by the
arkhè of rankings. The critical aim is to separate form from force and then place them
back into relation with each other but in dialectical relation to each other through
historical time. It is in this manner that we can see how nothing is ‘here to stay’, how
resignation can be converted into conditions of possibility, and how political practice
can transform the contingency of rankings form through the application of critical
thought.
This takes us to the beginning of a potentially new agenda in rankings research from
which we can possibly articulate a rejection of the principle of rankings so that we need
not collaborate in its practice. However, this will only be possible if we resist the
18 J. WELSH
temptations and intimidations to work through the extant literature on academic

rankings and have the intellectual courage to make a break from the modes and
assumptions of this literature and thus fashion our own critical and political discourse.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
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.
ORCID
John Welsh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7136-1001
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Ranking Academics: Toward A Critical Politics of Academic Rankings

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Critical Policy Studies

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Ranking academics: toward a critical politics of academic

CONTACT John Welsh john.welsh@helsinki.ﬁ

the governmentalities they deserve.

Three dominant assumptions in ranking research

Ahistoricity: determinist assumptions

Anti-epistemology: positivist assumptions

Monolithicity: instrumental assumptions

them ‘performative’, and a more or less delimited instrument of ‘global governance

Whether as conscious instrument of social policy, or as unconscious instrumental

setting, rather than as an immanent dialectical response within academia to increasing

the German Humboldtian university of Bildung, the national-bureaucratic Nordic

Literature 1: the micro-methodologists

(1) Data availability: There is insuﬃcient availability of data for rankings to be

‘reputation’ variable in particular has been singled out by micro-methodologists

Naturally, the central preoccupation of this category of research is with issues of

Literature 2: sociocultural criticism

(1) English language: Rankings privilege primarily Anglophonic institutions and

expense of smaller more specialist institutions (liberal arts colleges, engineering

Literature 3: critical potential

(1) Doxa – Building on Bourdieu’s work on space, classiﬁcation, social stratiﬁcation,

(2) Instrumental reason – Whilst allusion to the ‘instrumental’ selection of values

rationality inherent to modern forms of social organization. Building on

(3) Disciplinarity – Disciplinary power is paraphrased as ‘the process by which

Conclusion: apparatus, arkhê, and dialectic

The ﬁrst move is to treat rankings as an apparatus of governmentality. Amsler and

principal utility of the governmentality concept, of which the vocabulary of ‘apparatuses’

temptations and intimidations to work through the extant literature on academic

Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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