The Strength of Weak Expertise: How Do New ‘Experts’ Arise in Knowledge Governance

In this proposed contribution, I show how university rankers emerge as weak yet influential experts in global higher education management. Using insights from a long field study, interviews with key respondents, and an analysis of hundreds of related documents, I explain how rankers build up their expertise with respect to targeted audiences by carrying out a careful, continued, and negotiated balance of objectives in the production of their ranking tables and curating new events in which higher education ‘thought leaders’ congregate. Because of their varied operating models and organizational histories, ranking makers face difficult choices. They often have different target audiences (Lim, 2017); although these often overlap with other rankers. Some of them explicitly engage with national policy makers (Lim and Oerberg, 2017; Hazelkorn 2011) and have been studied as political instruments (Erkkila, 2013). Ranking agencies need to produce better instruments that are (1) reliable and comparable through time, (2) based on robust data and (3) relevant to their main target audiences. No ranking is able to convincingly achieve all these goals. Despite their efforts, there is widespread scepticism regarding the validity and even value of ranking products (see Kehm, 2013). Rankings are regularly critiqued by researchers even though they are among the primary consumers and users of rankings. Despite this pushback, this paper shows how one organization – the Times Higher Education (THE) - uses this apparent weakness to build up a network of advisers and consultants through a ‘sustained dialogue’ with its target community. This, in turn, reinforces its position as an agenda-setter and ‘qualified’ expert in the field, although one with contested and limited influence. The case of the THE shows one set of strategies and logics by which new actors emerge in the field of global knowledge governance.