The Discipline of Rankings

This is the title of an article by Michael Sauder and Wendy Nelson Espeland in the American Sociological Review. The Foucaultian jargon is not to my taste but underneath it there is a sensible and data-backed article on the prevasive and negative effects of rankings on US law schools.

Here is the abstract:


"The Discipline of Rankings: Tight
Coupling and Organizational Change

Michael Sauder Wendy Nelson Espeland
University of Iowa Northwestern University

This article demonstrates the value of Foucault’s conception of discipline for
understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools,
we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these
organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault’s
depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how
rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive
means. This approach advances organizational theory by highlighting conditions that
affect the prevalence and effectiveness of buffering. Decoupling is not determined solely
by the external enforcement of institutional pressures or the capacity of organizational
actors to buffer or hide some activities. Members’ tendency to internalize these
pressures, to become self-disciplining, is also salient. Internalization is fostered by the
anxiety that rankings produce, by their allure for the administrators who try to
manipulate them, and by the resistance they provoke. Rankings are just one example of
the public measures of performance that are becoming increasingly influential in many
institutional environments, and understanding how organizations respond to these
measures is a crucial task for scholars.