Spreading the gospel: Legitimating university rankings as boundary work

The dramatic salience of university rankings is usually attributed to a number of macro-level trends, such as neoliberal ideology, the spread of audit culture, and globalization in the broadest sense. We propose that the institutionalization of university rankings cannot be fully accounted for without a better understanding of the meso-level processes that enable it. To explore these, we zoom in […]

The institutionalization of rankings in higher education: continuities, interdependencies, engagement

In this article, we introduce the special issue of Higher Education that centers on the question of the institutionalization of rankings in higher education. The article has three parts. In the first part, we argue that the grand narratives such as globalization and neoliberalism are unsatisfactory as standalone explanations of why and how college and university rankings become institutionalized. As a remedy, […]