'Globalizing' Academics? Ranking and Appropriation in the Transformations of the World-System (original) (raw)

New Managerialism, Neoliberalism and Ranking

This paper analyses the ranking of universities within the socio-political context of neoliberalism and the organisational context of new managerialism. It examines the forces that have facilitated the emergence of the ranking industry and the ideologies underpinning the so-called ‘global’ university rankings. What the paper shows is that rankings are a politically inspired mode of governance; they are designed to ensure that universities are regulated and controlled in accordance with market values. The seemingly objective character of rankings, in particular the use of numbers, creates an impression that what is of value in education can be simply counted, hierarchically ordered and uncontrovertibly judged. The simplicity and accessibility of rankings deflects attention from their political and moral purposes. Rankings are reconstituting the academy, for both academics and students; they are a new mode of external governance through which market values are reframing the social relations of education. They have altered the cognitive and moral frames through which university education is being appraised. The paper calls for a debate on the public interest objectives of universities in the context of growing market regulation

International rankings and the contest for university hegemony

Journal of Education Policy, 2014

In just a decade, the international university rankings have become dominant measures of institutional performance for policy-makers worldwide. Bolstered by the façade of scientific neutrality, these classification systems have reinforced the hegemonic model of higher educationthat of the elite, Anglo-Saxon research universityon a global scale. The process is a manifestation of what Bourdieu and Wacquant have termed US "cultural imperialism." However, the rankings paradigm is facing growing criticism and resistance, particularly in regions such as Latin America, where the systems are seen as forcing institutions into a costly and high-stakes "academic arms race" at the expense of more pressing development priorities. That position, expressed at the recent UNESCO conferences in Buenos Aires, Paris, and Mexico City, shows the degree to which the rankings have become a fundamental element in the contest for cultural hegemony, waged through the prism of higher education.

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.

Subjectivising Academics: The Ranking Apparatus, Social Transformation, and a 'Crisis of Subjectivity'

Subjectivity, 2020

By positioning academic rankings as the telos of audit culture, the paper tries to demonstrate the transformative political reason that is immanent to the emergence of rankings. Given the imperatives in historical capitalism both to govern and to accumulate, rankings are analysed as an apparatus of social transformation for the production of more governable subjectivities for capital. The paper presents how rankings operate as one of the material-semiotic-affective apparatuses of capitalist governmentality, and how that apparatus both is constituted as a system of objects and in turn constitutes subjects of control. Perhaps most significantly, by understanding rankings simultaneously as ‘semiologies of signification’ and ‘asignifying semiotics’, a dialectical space of struggle over subjectivity production can be realised and a praxis of counter-conduct and resistance be conceived.

Three Peripheries in the Global Quest for Prestige in Higher Education

CHAPTER FROM THE FOLLOWING COMPENDIUM: CITE AS Bégin-Caouette, O. (2016). Three Peripheries in the Global Quest for Prestige in Higher Education. In S. Niyozov & P. Tarc (Eds). Working With, Against and Despite Global 'Best Practices' - Educational Conversations Around the Globe. RICE/CIDEC Compendium. [http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/cidec/UserFiles/File/Website/Compendium\_GBP\_Final\_Jan\_2016.pdf\]. Since their inception, universities have been global institutions. In the Middle Age, Latin was the lingua franca and students were traveling across Europe to study law in Bologna, theology in Paris and philosophy in Oxford (Neave, 2001). If higher education systems have been “nationalized” with the development of nation-states, the recent geospatial process of globalization has heightened the global quest for academic prestige. University rankings have become private instruments of governance (Marginson 2006) and, like credit rating agencies, they give value to specific outputs and define the “best practices” in higher education. While metrics can help scholars to understand the geopolitical transformations in knowledge, presenting them as ideals encourages a transnational isomorphism (Marginson & van der Wende 2009) that adversely affect pursuit of science. Historically, the core-periphery dynamic in science was structured by nationality, colonial past, scientific heritage and infrastructure (Zelnio 2012). Yet metrics create new peripheries based on scientific disciplines, language and economic resources.

Attempting to imagine the unimaginable: a decolonial reading of global university rankings (GURs)

This article presents a collaboration among critical scholars of color grappling with the challenges of re-imagining global university rankings (GURs) in an effort to rethink the field of comparative education from a decolonial perspective. We start with an empathetic review of scholarship on rankings. This effort evidenced that rankings are embedded and sustained within a broader dominant imaginary of higher education, circumscribed by what is deemed possible and desirable within modern institutions. Seeking inspiration to explore beyond the current limits of our modern imagination, we turned to the teachings of the Dagara, as a mirror that cast a different light on our investments in the very onto-epistemic structures that sustain the GURs. Being taught by Dagara’s teachings led us to realize that rankings are symptomatic of a much broader crisis shaking the ontological securities of modern institutions and that it is only through the loss of our satisfaction with these securities that we can start to imagine otherwise.

University Rankings, Global Models, and Emerging Hegemony

Journal of Studies in International Education, 2009

The study analyzes how the emergence of dominant models in higher education and power they embody affect non-Western, non-English language universities such as those in Japan. Based on extended micro-level participant observation in a Japanese research university aspiring to become a “world-class” institution, their struggles and the quest for new identities are examined. The prevalent and oft-referenced university rankings and league tables give rise to de facto global standards and models, against which traditions of national language education and research as well as self-sustenance in human resources are challenged and tested. Such new modes of objectifying academic excellence alter domestic academic hierarchies and internal dynamics within universities. This study uses these insights to look critically at new dimensions of knowledge construction and an emerging hegemony in today's global higher education context.

Towards transnational academic capitalism

This paper contributes to current debates on the relationship between globalisation and higher education. The main argument of the paper is that we are currently witnessing transnationalisation of academic capitalism. This argument is illustrated by examining the collaboration between transnational corporations and research universities, and how transnational academic capitalism has been promoted by different intermediating organizations. On theoretical level the paper draws from global capitalism school and the theory of academic capitalism, but also moves beyond them by introducing new concepts such as knowledge-intensive transnational economic practices. The emergence of transnational academic capitalism challenges the common assumption that universities are primarily promoters of national economic competitiveness.

Galczynski, M. (2009). Who benefits when higher education rankings go global?

Contrary to the insistence of U.S. News and World Report, global rankings of higher education do more to widen the gap between wealthy and developing nations than to bridge it. Through globalization, higher education becomes a marketable commodity where the wealthiest (and highest ranked) nations are able to utilize branding strategies to gain an even more economically competitive advantage than they already have. The commodification of higher education, in turn, begins to alter the entire structure of the educational system, as university administrators and government officials invoke rankings as the basis for changes in educational policies and funding. U.S. News (2009) advertises that the rankings “have obtained increasing influence among academics worldwide and have a growing effect on prospective students and government policymakers.” However, “an analysis of university restructuring must also consider the context of power dynamics within the world economic system, and particularly the role of corporate foundations and supranational institutions in fostering particular reforms impacting higher education” (Torres & Schugurensky, 2002). With the highest ranked universities being rewarded through funding and high student enrollment, the particular type of knowledge produced by these institutions appreciates in value. Thus, globalization not only creates an economical hierarchy in higher education, but it also reinforces a (re)colonization of knowledge around the world by Western thinking.

Faculty Discourse on University Rankings: Links to Neoliberalism and Consequent Practices

Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 2013

The purpose of this paper was to consider how faculty members, a group core to the higher education field, construct rankings as a valuable system. Drawing from post-structuralism and post-modernism and using critical discourse analysis, we argue that faculty members in our study constructed rankings as a way to organize the higher education field. Faculty comments on rankings and striving suggested that excellence or quality could be achieved, measured, replicated, and then made into a competition. Yet, a few faculty members issued critiques about the rankings and articulated serious questions about the fairness of the rankings. Overall, we argue that when we, faculty, as actors in the field of higher education, power up rankings and striving as normative systems, as games that we must play, we marginalize multiple instances of excellence as they unfold across the diverse higher education field. Implications towards praxis are discussed.