Ranking European Social Science and Stratifying Global Knowledge: The Example of European Political Science

Abstract

With globalization the world has become more complex, creating in all sectors of society a social demand for symbolic tools that enable the governance of this complexity. This social demand is particularly strong among professionals involved in the governance of higher education, university administrators and civil servants in national and regional ministries, politicians and decision makers, but also those individuals whose professional life depends on higher education, notably faculty and students. Since the 1990s, the European Commission and national civil servants in Europe have been spending considerable energy in attempts to reform the European university system, to make it more competitive vis-à-vis certain American universities. Rankings of performance and efficiency as quantitative tools of public policy have played a key role in this process (Hazelkorn, 2007, 2011; Kauppi and Erkkilä, 2011). The much publicized league tables of the best universities in the world have been accompanied by a host of techniques of higher education transnational governance that produce, despite the considerable criticism, equivalences between certain quantitative indicators and academic excellence (for overviews see, for instance, Reinalda and Kulesza, 2006; and Harmsen and Kauppi, 2013).

There is no such thing as an objective indicator. (AUBR, 2010, p. 12)