Prestige auditing and the market for academic esteem: a framework and an appeal
<p class="first" id="d271703e69">Much has been written about the remarkable rise of global university rankings from their initial appearance in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai) tables in 2003. The examination of all things rankin...
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Pluto Journals
2017-02-01
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Series: | Prometheus |
Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.1080/08109028.2017.1366018 |
Summary: | <p class="first" id="d271703e69">Much has been written about the remarkable rise of global university rankings from
their initial appearance in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai)
tables in 2003. The examination of all things rankings, however, has arguably outpaced
its conceptual uptake. This paper addresses this imbalance by reviewing prestige audits
as resource management tools and status allocation measures. The paper argues that
audit ambition has courted audit failure in both dimensions. The resource management
justification underestimates the challenge of devising reliable proxy variables across
international higher education sectors, organizational types, and disciplinary/departmental
objectives. Evidential data sets are duly recast as data narratives that compete with
each other and cloud the ordinal clarity aspired to in ranking tables. The status
competition approach generates Matthew effects and encourages factor gaming. Positional
goods investments are also socially and economically wasteful. In either strict (rigid)
or relaxed (normed) form, finally, their zero-sum logic fails to account for private
and public externalities. The paper closes with an appeal to soft-variable evaluations
in higher education contexts as well as to closer scrutiny of the vocabulary informing
both quantitative and qualitative assessments.
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ISSN: | 0810-9028 1470-1030 |