A power-critique of academic rankings: Beyond managers, institutions, and positivism

Abstract

The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with ‘best practices’, and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of ‘governance’. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of ‘police science’ and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the extant research from which a departure would be critically fruitful – positivism, managerialism, institutionalism – and then goes on to outline three aspects of rankings that a critical political analysis should explore, integrate, and develop into future research from the discourses of critical theory – arkhè, dispositif, and dialectik.

Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

“…As the twin crises of disciplinary power and capital accumulation draw us from the enclosures of the factory to the apparatuses of the ‘social factory’ (see De Angelis and Harvie, 2009: 4; Arvidsson, 2011: 43; Negri, 2018), the meta-disciplinary techniques of the camp become more helpful for understanding our new audit condition than are institutional settings (the ‘ formelle Institution ’, see Vonderau, 2015: 36), to which we usually look for critical, analytical, dissentient, and organizational inspiration (see Welsh, 2021b). Much more than ‘a desire for punishment’, this technology creates a ‘nightmare of a different kind, in which the horrors of force, violence, physical coercion and hardship are replaced by the slow suffocation of the spirit, the intellect and the capacity to resist’ (Evans, 2004: 52), what Solzhenitsyn called ‘soul mange’ (Solzhenitsyn, 2007b: 621–622, 640).…”

Stratifying academia: ranking, oligarchy and the market‐myth in academic audit regimes

“…To get near this, we are going to have to investigate how the control techniques of audit technologies function in 'the gap between internalisation and coercion' (2011: 8), which means penetrating our dialectical thinking into the very space of subjectivity formation itself (Shore 2010;Welsh 2021d). This is a task for another day (see Welsh 2020cWelsh , 2021aWelsh , 2021c.…”

“…Thinking of the ranking technology in terms of the dispositif (apparatus) is helpful here, 1 because that concept places the operations of knowledge-power front and centre in how we should understand the workings both of ranking and audit (Welsh 2018(Welsh , 2021a). If we are to understand the political power that is immanent to rankings, rather than merely consequent to their implementation, and if we wish to contextualise politically our anthropological experiences of audit regimes (Shore 2010: 17), then the 'crisis effects' of rankings need to be explored in more penetratingly epistemological terms.…”