Editorial: Measure for Measure (original) (raw)

From journal rankings to making sense of the world

Journal ranking is yet another form of discriminatory practice in the higher education sector. I outline here why journal ranking should be considered a small but significant part of the hegemonic structures of inequality in the academic labor process. To further the debate that Adler and Harzing set out, I explain why the rankings should be considered part and parcel of a broader game of White masculine domination that excludes research that matters, research that helps us understand the world of work and contribute to meaningful improvements for individuals and organizations.

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.

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.