From journal rankings to making sense of the world (original) (raw)
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Should Journal Rankings Matter? Assigning “Prestige and Quality” in the Neoliberal Academy
Affilia, 2020
Why do we publish and who does this knowledge benefit? Our interest in these questions was reignited with the recent publication by Hodge et al. (2019) who reported findings on their survey of social work faculty who teach in programs that offer a PhD. Respondents were asked to rank order a list of social work journals according to their sense of each journal's quality and to assess their degree of familiarity with those journals. Using these reports, the authors created two journal rankings: quality and prestige. The latter was derived by multiplying a journal's composite quality score by its familiarity score. These rankings were offered as an alternative to commonly used impact factor scores which have been long critiqued as limited measures affected by field-dependent dynamics and vulnerable to "journal impact factor engineering" (Reedijk & Moed, 2008). Considering the journal's unique mission to create a space for feminist scholarship in social work, an aim which continues to be a marginalizing endeavor in the field (Barretti, 2011), we were surprised to see Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work appear in the rankings at all. We were unsurprised, however, that it did not make it to the top tier. As Hodge and colleagues (2019) remind us, "the venues in which scholarship is published can have a significant, determinative effect on decisions regarding tenure, promotion, funding, merit increases, and professional visibility" (p. 1). The hierarchy of ranking has material consequences also for journals, including Affilia. Indeed, Affilia's perceived value influences the number and types of submissions, who is willing to review those submissions, as well as how many individuals or institutions are willing to pay to access them. Journal rankings do matter, whatever our views of them. But should they? Our aim here is not to evaluate the article by Hodge and colleagues or critique the methods they employed. In this editorial, we consider, instead, the politics of assessing "prestige and quality" in the context of persistent systemic inequities in the neoliberal university and global inequities in academic publishing (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). What do the terms "quality" and "prestige" mean within the context of the U.S. academic industrial complex, a system where western-centric, positivist, universalist epistemologies continue to dominate knowledge production and dissemination? What forms of epistemic injustices accompany the construction of "quality" and "prestige"? How do we understand such terms within institutions of higher education where lack of diversity among
Ranking academics: Toward a Critical Politics of Academic Rankings
Critical Policy Studies, 2019
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.
Journal Rankings: positioning the field of educational research and educational academics
Power and Education, 2011
This article explores the way in which journal ranking processes in education impact upon the field of education and educational researchers. The article draws upon the recent moves to rank order journals in academic disciplines/domains of research in Australia through the introduction of the ERA -Excellence in Research for Australia -as a means of evaluating academic work. Drawing upon an analysis of the specific ordering of 'leading' journals in education according to the ERA and the national locations of journal editors, the article focuses on how these processes of 'academic accountancy' have implications for the field of educational research, as well as for individual academics measured and monitored through this process. The research demonstrates how already privileged Anglo-US research and research outlets continue to be consecrated and legitimated at the expense of more local and alternative programs and outlets. The article suggests that the push to manage and measure research productivity, taken up in policy within and across specific nation states (in this case, Australia), ignores the breadth of existing research within the field of educational research and potentially narrows the nature of the research undertaken by individual academics and reduces the potential publication outlets, thereby contributing to the recalibration and repositioning of academic work.
Who Climbs the Academic Ladder? Race and Gender Stratification in a World of Whiteness
Review of Black Political Economy, 2018
Under-represented (URM) minority faculty can expand the range of perspectives taught to students, but only if they are hired, granted tenure, and promoted. Their career paths can be constrained due to a stratification process that appears to legitimate a non-Hispanic white male set of rules and practices, including value-neutrality and objectivity. This article measures specific aspects of human and social capital and their relationship to academic stratification in two social science disciplines, economics and sociology. Here, we measure stratification by the distribution of academic rank, and examine differences based on discipline, institution type, race/ethnicity, gender, and publications in terms of academic career success. Our data are unique because they are gathered from multiple secondary sources. One contribution of this paper is to measure social capital as a " two worlds " phenomenon, taken from W.E.B. DuBois. Not surprisingly, we find that " publish or perish " still rules. Conversely, URM-oriented social capital, which can provide a safe space and opportunities to collaborate on scholarly work, is not significant. But, it may be related to feelings of satisfaction and inclusion. The only exceptions are URM-oriented sections in sociology. The article concludes with a series of policy recommendations to support URM faculty members in their careers.
Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2013
“Critical diversity” is the equal inclusion of people from varied backgrounds on a parity basis throughout all ranks and divisions of an organization. The critical diversity perspective argues that as organizations become more diverse, they benefit relative to their competitors. This is in contrast to other accounts that view diversity as either inconsequential to success or actually detrimental. Using data from the 2011 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Rankings of U.S. Research Universities, this paper examines whether racial and gender diversity “pay” in terms of the rankings of academic programs at research universities. The NAS data set consists of several indicators relating to research productivity, student support and outcomes, and program diversity from over 5000 doctoral programs at US research universities. The results show that net of factors such as publication rates, grants, scholarly awards, program size, region, and whether the institution is public or private, racial and gender diversity among faculty and students at research universities are positively associated with departmental rankings. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for diversity in higher education.
A Power-Critique of Academic Rankings: Beyond Managers, Institutions, and Positivism
Power & Education, 2021
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-arkh e, dispositif, and dialectik.
Policing Academics: The Arkhè of Transformation in Academic Ranking
Critical Horizons, 2018
This article attempts a properly critical and political analysis of the “police power” immanent to the form and logic of academic rankings, and which is reproduced in the extant academic literature generated around them. In contrast to the democratising claims made of rankings, this police power short-circuits the moment of democratic politics and establishes the basis for the oligarchic power of the State and its status quo. Central in this founding political moment is the notion of the Arkhè, a necessarily asymmetric “distribution of the sensible” that establishes the basis of the political order, in this case an oligarchic political order. Drawing on Foucault and Rancière, the article argues for a necessary “dissensus” with both the ranking practice and its attendant academic literature, as the first step towards a politics of ranking that is properly critical, and therefore genuinely political.
Academic stars and university rankings in higher education: impacts on policy and practice
Policy reviews in higher education, 2019
Drawing on the concepts of mediatisation and celebrification, this paper analyses how the Nobel Prize is used as a proxy of excellence by the 'Big Three' university rankers and top-ranked universities. Ranking advisories, university leadership at topranked institutions, and Nobel Prize adjudication committees are overwhelming from the same demographic: white men from the Global North. Who they deem 'world class' is overwhelmingly from the same demographic. Even though universities no longer have policies that keep out equity-seeking groups, the metrics used to determine world-classness re-entrench who is seen as a scholarly and administrative leader in higher education and what is considered world class knowledge. Drawing on social network analysis and multimedia critical discourse analysis, this paper argues that Nobel adjudication committees, ranking advisories and the leadership of top-ranked institutions form an echo chamber that conflates academic excellence with being white, male, wealthy, and famous. The paper concludes with the urgent need to address the cognitive dissonance of universities promoting spurious media-based metrics while at the same time claiming a commitment to equity policies and practices.
Do Journals Have Preferences? Insights from The Journal of Higher Education
Innovative Higher Education, 2022
Using five years of publishing data from the Journal of Higher Education, we describe the publication pipeline at the journal, explore trends with respect to topic, the geographic distribution of authors, and each paper's methodological approach. Following the presentation of these trends, we discuss implications for the field of higher education and those publishing within it.