If you're a person who cares about US News rankings (and I include both those who love them and those who hate them) and you find the work of Michael Foucault interesting, compelling, or outrageous…your article has arrived. May I present: The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and and Organizational Change (74 Am. Sociology Rev. 63 (Feb. 2009)) by sociologists Michael Sauder and Wendy Nelson Espeland.
This article is worth reading not only for its sexy content, but as a particular model of qualitative empirical research. These folks spent serious time trying to understand the role of US News in the law school setting – and they didn't, and frankly couldn't, do that by counting stuff. Rather, they used 137 semi-structured interviews with law school administrators and faculty. This may not satisfy those who demand to know the truth, but it certainly sheds light on how the world works. And for those of us with more modest demands of scholarship, that's pretty darn good.
Here is the abstract:
This article demonstrates the value of Foucault’s conception of discipline for uderstanding 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 epiction 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.
H/T Inside Higher Ed and Paul Caron.