Abstract
In this chapter, the author maintains that rankings of universities and their social carriers participate in the relatively successful practical realization of the academic standards they seek to codify and of the shaping of reality according to the criteria they promote. In this sense, global university rankings are becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prediction that becomes true through positive feedback of varying intensity. They have succeeded in establishing through quantitative objectification certain types of equivalences between scientific excellence and numerical indicators. The reasons for their success are their performative efficiency (‘scientific’, quantitative) and the practical necessities of bureaucratic and political control of scientific outputs.
There is no such thing as an objective indicator. (AUBR 2010, p. 12)
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Kauppi, N. (2018). European Political Science and Global Knowledge. In: Toward a Reflexive Political Sociology of the European Union. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71002-0_9
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