Suchergebnisse

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- About the Authors -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1 - The Transparency of Transparency Measures -- Chapter 2 - Accountability by the Numbers -- Chapter 3 - 0L: How Prospective Law Students Use Rankings -- Chapter 4 - Rankings and Admissions -- Chapter 5 - Rankings at the Top: Inside the Dean's Office -- Chapter 6 - Career Services and Employment -- Chapter 7 - Rankings Everywhere -- Appendix A: Methods and Data -- Appendix B: U.S. News' Methodology for Calculating Rankings, by Category -- Notes -- References -- Index

AbstractThe decision not to build Orme Dam was a great political victory for residents of the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation in central Arizona. This article examines the conditions that gave rise to what most considered an unlikely outcome, and the lessons it suggests for understanding the politics of large water projects. These lessons include the importance of understanding that rationality takes multiple forms; that how value is expressed can be as significant as what, and how much, something is valued; that identity politics which elaborates and celebrates cultural differences can be an effective means for challenging even powerful bureaucracies; and that law can be an important mediating structure in the politics of bureaucratic decision‐making. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Calculation and quantification have been critical features of modern societies, closely linked to science, markets, and administration. In the past thirty years, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification have greatly expanded, and there has been a corresponding increase in scholarship on quantification. We offer an assessment of the widely dispersed literature on quantification across four domains where quantification and quantification scholarship have particularly flourished: administration, democratic rule, economics, and personal life. In doing so, we seek to stimulate more cross-disciplinary debate and exchange. We caution against unifying accounts of quantification and highlight the importance of tracking quantification across different sites in order to appreciate its essential ambiguity and conduct more systematic investigations of interactions between different quantification regimes.

This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive means. This approach advances organizational theory by highlighting conditions that affect the prevalence and effectiveness of buffering. Decoupling is not determined solely by the external enforcement of institutional pressures or the capacity of organizational actors to buffer or hide some activities. Members' tendency to internalize these pressures, to become self-disciplining, is also salient. Internalization is fostered by the anxiety that rankings produce, by their allure for the administrators who try to manipulate them, and by the resistance they provoke. Rankings are just one example of the public measures of performance that are becoming increasingly influential in many institutional environments, and understanding how organizations respond to these measures is a crucial task for scholars.

AbstractOne of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification – the production and communication of numbers – as a general sociological phenomenon. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences in Europe and North America as well as humanistic inquiry, we articulate five sociological dimensions of quantification and call for an ethics of numbers.

Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and political stakes inherent in calling something incommensurable. We provide a framework for future empirical study of commensuration and demonstrate how this analytic focus can inform established fields of sociological inquiry.

Modern money creates, transforms, transports, and possesses meaning by virtue of how it is used. This article devises a framework for the systematic study of monetary meaning. In particular, monetary meanings depend on the flow of money (both its proximate source and future direction) and on who promulgates or issues it. Meanings also derive from how money's use and flow are restricted and on monetary media. Monetarization quantifies social activities and introduces new equivalences and comparisons. The factors shaping meaning also underpin important types of monetary variation (homogeneous vs. differentiated money; anonymous vs. personal; material vs. immaterial).

This volume contains an Open Access chapter. We have witnessed an avalanche of quantitative public measures over the past decades. Research in the social sciences has shown that rankings in particular are now a driving force of social change - both, desired and undesired - in many areas of modern life. This volume explores the distinct allure of rankings in diverse empirical settings such as healthcare, the IT sector, the arts, professional sports, anti-slavery advocacy, the pharma industry, and educational governance. Drawing from a rich variety of social theories and methodologies, the contributions to this volume advance our understanding of the production, institutionalization, and effects of rankings significantly, sparking new debates and suggesting promising pathways forward.