My paper will offer a critique of the power relations, and the forms of the social reproduction of power, that operate through global university rankings (ie. QS, THE, ARWU, U-Multirank). It is my contention, contrary to the contemporary fashion for objectivity-fetishism, scientism, and fatalism, that rankings are not reality-reflecting, but reality-forming phenomena. Global rankings not only constitute a historically emergent technology of disciplining individuals, but also serve as strategic apparatuses for regulating and ordering populations in a genealogically unfolding Liberal Governmentality. Furthermore, in the process of an emerging global knowledge-economy, global rankings engineer the social stratifications and spatial exclusions so necessary for knowledge-capital accumulation, thus subordinating thought and knowledge to the needs of global capital rather than to those of people as they claim. Simultaneously, by reifying and instrumentalising people and institutions as ‘objects’, ranking itself serves to legitimise and perpetuate throughout the Lifeworld, not only the status quo, but also certain identifiable ideological agendas, discursive rationalities, and power relations, with potentially devastating consequences for Understanding and the human condition. I shall target my critical analysis by succinctly orchestrating a ‘tactical alliance’ of critical traditions, including Marxist Geography, Foucauldian Governmentality, Bourdieuian Structuralism, and Critical Theory.
Key question include: Why has there emerged an explosive phenomenon of global rankings of all kinds over the last 20 years across the global university landscape? Why have rankings generally come to colonise our mental landscapes so thoroughly? How have they affected the social reproduction of power? What new social cleavages and stratifications are rankings engendering? What ideological agendas or rationalities do they serve? How does political power operate through them to order social reality? Perhaps most significantly, what are the implications for knowledge and understanding of a human existence so totally oriented toward ubiquitous rankings and so completely absorbed by their objectivated aura?
