Driven by the aim of transparency and user empowerment in public and private services, comparisons have become a crucial instrument in contemporary forms of governance. In this paper, we describe the emergence and development of rankings, by zooming in on some of the differences made by these comparative techniques after their introduction in the past two decades. We describe rankings as tools for governance that revolve mostly around competition and ‘commensuration’ – social mechanisms through which highly diverse entities (countries, institutions, people) are rendered measurable and comparable through quantitative means (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Secondly, and drawing on a comparison between university and hospital ranking practices, we analyse how ranking contributes to making organizations auditable and comparable. We examine some of the differences and similarities of ranking practices in universities and hospitals by focusing on three themes that emerged from our comparative work: 1. The ambivalence of ranking; 2. The performativity of ranking; and 3. Coordinating ranking practices.
