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University rankings and metrics have become an increasingly prominent basis of student decisions, generalized university reputation, and the resources university’s attract. We review the history of metrics in higher education and scholarship about the influence of ranking on the position and strategic behavior of universities and students. Most quantitative analyses on this topic estimate the influence of change in university rank on performance. These studies consistently identify a small, short-lived influence of rank shift on selectivity (e.g., one rank position corresponds to ≤1% more student applicants), comparable to ranking effects documented in other domains. This understates the larger system-level impact of metrification on universities, students, and the professions that surround them. We explore one system-level transformation likely influenced by the rise of rankings. Recent years have witnessed the rise of enrollment management and independent educational consultation. We illustrate a plausible pathway from ranking to this transformation: In an effort to improve rankings, universities solicit more applications from students to reduce their acceptance rate. Lower acceptance rates lead to more uncertainty for students about acceptance, leading them to apply to more schools, which decreases the probability that accepted students will attend. This leads to greater uncertainty about enrollment for students and universities and generates demand for new services to manage it. Because these and other system-level transformations are not as cleanly measured as rank position and performance, they have not received the same treatment or modeling attention in higher education scholarship, despite their importance for understanding and influencing education policy.

Much has been analyzed regarding the origins and the impact of rankings and metrics on policies, behaviors, and missions of universities. Surprisingly, little attention has been allocated to describing and analyzing the emergence of metrics as a new action field. This industry, fueled by the “new public management” policy perspectives that operate at the backstage of the contemporary pervasive “regime of excellence,” still remains a black box worth exploring in depth. This paper intends to fill this loophole. It first sets the stage for this new action field by stressing the differences between the policy fields of higher education in the United States and Europe, as a way to understand the specificities of the use of metrics and rankings on both continents. The second part describes the actors of the field, which productive organizations they build, what skills they combine, which products they put on the market, and their shared norms and audiences.

Rankings have become a popular topic in the social sciences over the past two decades. Adding to these debates, the present volume assembles studies that explore a variety of empirical settings, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging that there are multiple “Worlds of Rankings.” To this end, the first part of the chapter addresses the implications of two modes of criticism that characterize much of the scholarly work on rankings and summarizes extant conceptual debates. Taking stock of what we know, the second part distinguishes three areas of empirical research. The first area concerns the activities of those who produce rankings, such as the collection of data or different business strategies. Studies in the second area focus on inter-organizational, field-level, or discursive phenomena, particularly how rankings are received, interpreted, and institutionalized. The third area covers the manifold effects that research has unveiled, ranging from the diffusion of practices and changes in organizational identities to emotional distress. Taken together, the contributions to this volume expand our knowledge in all three areas, inviting new debates and suggesting pathways forward.

The use of national and international rankings of universities is increasing rapidly. Dill and Soo (2005), who take a generally positive view of university league tables, review the performance of some leading examples of the genre. They conclude that “Our review of the five leading commercial university league tables from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US suggests that the definitions of academic quality used in these tables are converging…It would be valuable to extend the analysis to league tables developed in Europe, Asia, and Latin America to see the extent to which a common construct of academic quality is becoming truly international” (Dill & Soo, 2005, pp. 525–526).

This paper ranks university faculties, accounting doctoral programs, individual behavioral accounting researchers, and the most influential articles based on Google Scholar citations to publications in Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research (AABR). All articles published in AABR in its first 15 volumes are included and four citation metrics are used. The paper identifies the articles, authors, faculties, and doctoral programs that made the greatest contribution to the development of AABR. Such an analysis provides a useful basis for understanding the direction the journal has taken and how it has contributed to the literature (Meyer & Rigsby, 2001). The h-index and m-index for AABR indicates it compares favorably among its peers. Potential doctoral students with an interest in behavioral accounting research, “new” accounting faculty with an interest in behavioral accounting research, current behavioral accounting research faculty, department chairs, deans, and other administrators will find these results informative.

Using organizational theory as a lens, in this chapter, the author critiques the neoliberal rationality in which the national and international ranking systems take precedence over the institutional missions and visions in institutional operations. The author argues that these essentialized ranking systems overlook the necessary diversity and uniqueness of institutions in the higher education system. The author outlines the potential role of mission statements in setting the institutional priorities, and the unnecessary pressure caused neoliberalism against such priorities. The implications of such imperatives for quality in various academic practices are identified and the unfairness of coercive isomorphism in higher education is illustrated. The author then proposes a spatial approach in which universities, nationally and internationally, can appreciate diversity in identity and work together, drawing from each other’s strengths to strengthen the higher education system that will support students and promote national economies.

This paper analyzes citations from the first 20 volumes of Advances in Management Accounting using Google Scholar in April and May, 2013.

This study assesses the success of the first 20 volumes of Advances in Management Accounting using citation analysis. Four citation metrics are used. The four citation metrics are: (1) total citations since year of publication until April and May, 2013, (2) citations per author since year of publication until April and May, 2013, (3) citations per year since year of publication until April and May, 2013, and (4) citations per author per year since year of publication until April and May, 2013.

The top 20 authors for each citation metric, the top 20 faculties for each citation metric, and the top 20 doctoral programs for each citation metric are determined. Furthermore, the top 20 articles are determined using two citation metrics and the H-index for Advances in Management Accounting is computed.

Potential doctoral students, current doctoral students, “new” Ph.D.s with an interest in management accounting, current management accounting faculty, department chairs, deans, other administrators, journal editors, and journal publishers will find these results informative.

Governance initiatives based on rankings are predicated on the possibility of making companies compete for the achievement of social goals by means of public comparisons of performance. The public of such performance – the ranker and various stakeholders in whose name the ranker speaks – thus fulfills the role of a “third party” whose favor is sought by competitors in what Simmel analyzed as “pure” or “indirect” competition. Yet little is known about how rankers seek to produce or entice such favor in order to enact competition. Through the case of the Access to Medicine Index, we examine the process of selective foregrounding, enticing and orchestration of different stakeholders through the gearing of the ranking’s information infrastructure aimed at optimizing the type and intensity of the competitive pressure exercised on the ranked. We illustrate how the ranker segments the public into different third parties, some well-identified stakeholders alongside a more anonymous audience. We find that stakeholders perceived as wielding legitimate power in the eyes of companies (such as investors) are actively equipped with the tools to witness competition, whereas stakeholders seen as powerful but involved in an agonistic relation with the companies (such as radical Non-Governmental Organizations) are discretely groomed at a distance, while those stakeholders with no perceived power over companies tend to remain unequipped. Whilst the gaze of stakeholders as third parties is differentiated along the lines of a hierarchy of observations, the voice of stakeholders as representatives of different interests is equalized and unified so as to adhere to an ideal of consensus. We reflect on how the needs of competition and those of stakeholder representation come to intersect in the particular governance space of access to medicine. Competition, far from being the automatic consequence of rankings, emerges as a contrived and laborious enactment requiring painstaking attention to publics and their selective equipment as third parties. Understanding the modes of such enactment is thus crucial for appreciating rankings’ governance outcomes.

DEA is a favored method to investigate the efficiency of institutions that provide educational services. We measure the efficiency of German universities especially from the students’ perspective. Since 1998, the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE) evaluates German universities annually. The CHE ranking consists of three ranking groups for different indicators, but they do not create a hierarchy of the universities. Thus, a differentiation of the universities ranked in the same group is not possible. Based on the CHE data set, especially the surveys among students, we evaluate teaching performance from the students’ point of view using data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA enables us to identify departments that – in the students’ perspective – are efficient in the sense that they provide high quality of education. As a method for performance evaluation, we apply a DEA bootstrap approach. By the use of this approach, we incorporate stochastic influences in the data and derive confidence intervals for the efficiency. Based on data generated by the bootstrap procedure, we are able to identify stochastic efficient departments. These universities serve as a benchmark to improve teaching performance.