Estudios de la Economía

Breve artículo de José Ossandón para journal online griego: Re-Public cuyo tema puede ser de eventual interés acá….

There is no doubt: rankings are everywhere. We are surrounded by thousands of lists measuring a vast array of variables such as: competitiveness, productivity, quality of life, risk, and even happiness. Some globally famous examples are: Fortune 500, the FICO Score, The Times Higher Education World University Ranking, The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Global Competitiveness, and the UNDP Human Development Index. Together with the growing relevance of rankings, in the last years there has been a multiplication in the modes of approaching these objects within social sciences and particularly sociology. In the following paragraphs I distinguish six different sociologies of rankings, and to finish, in the last part, I give a brief comment about some of the political consequences connected with each of these levels.

1. Quantitative scales have been part of social sciences since their beginning (Hacking 1990). Sociologists have since then participated in the production of new modes of listing different social units (such as: countries, firms, universities, cities and people) numerically. Their work in this context has had to do mainly with the delimitation of the object of analysis (for instance, the “level of productivity of different researchers” or “poverty in different countries”), and how to translate them into dimensions, indicators and variables that can be measured. Actually, a very central proportion of the education in methods for undergraduate students even today has mainly to do with the development of these types of tools. Despite its eminently expert character, sometimes discussions regarding how to measure a social index can be the object of heated public debates (for instance when there is no agreement about how to measure inflation, Neiburg 2006, or the risk associated with the bonds of a specific country).

2. The tools of sociology are also central in the analysis of social rankings. This analysis can have a “descriptive” or a “structural” character. In the first case, the main variables are described (for instance by building averages or distribution charts), while in the second case, their distributions are correlated to other variables such as age, sex or socio-economic origin. Structural analysis, even though it does not have the hegemonic position it used to have (Savage 2009), is part of a long and respected tradition that goes from Durkheim’s “Suicide” to Bourdieu’s “Distinction” with Coleman’s famous “Education Report” in between. These types of methods, as everyone who has attended statistics courses knows, are a world in its own, going from the simple cross tabulation tables to the more sophisticated regression analyses. The structural analysis, given its scientific character, tends to inform important decisions concerning social policies. Some topics where this is particularly relevant are “development”, “inequality” and the association between household conditions and educational outcomes. It is important to keep in mind, however, that these methods are used by researchers inspired by multiple kinds of theoretical or political principles (such as “public choice”, “social cohesion” or even the rather leftist critical structural sociology).

3. Rankings are also the object of criticism as they reduce complex social practices to abstract indicators that are hierarchically comparable. This type of criticism is generally produced by defenders of qualitative and ethnographic methods to approach the social world. In this context, but at a more general level, rankings are criticized because they do not only poorly represent what they observe, but because they also violate the observed social practices, insofar as the results of measurements end up imposing themselves on them (Miller 1998). For example, it is possible to argue that the complexity of a classroom is not just poorly represented by international tests such asPISA, but also social policies that react to such simplifications act upon the everyday practice of teaching and learning. This kind of discussion is related with controversies about how determined social spaces should be protected from quantification (as it is done, for instance, in those countries where it is not permitted to numerically evaluate students up to a certain age).

4. Rankings can be analyzed as a type of “generalized media of communication” (Chernilo 2006). Rankings, like Money, are abstractions that enable comparison and transmission of specialized and complex information in a simple, or at least comparable, way. Rankings in this sense act like a music ripper that transform analog sound into digital music, simplifying and at the same time increasing the possibilities of transferring and re-combining the new information (Ganβmann 1988, Luhmann 2007: Ch. 2). Rankings make very different situations comparable (such as the academic results between a department of art and a department of engineering, or the risk to invest in China or on Easter Island), and, in this way, they increase the options of exchange among multiple actors and organizations (for example: among investors and producers without a common language). However, while simplifying the world, rankings enable the emergence of new levels of complexity. For instance, more auditing doesn’t necessarily make administration simpler (Power 1997), or the proliferation and extension of forms of risk assessment in finance, that have been essential in the development of asset-backed securities, have in turn increased the risk of the global financial system (Poon 2009).

5. The process of producing rankings can also be studied as a social process in itself. From this perspective what has been called “commensuration” (Espeland &Stevens 1998) or also “investment in forms” (Thevenot 1984) becomes very relevant. These concepts refer to the process needed to produce and apply a ranking, which includes the “technical” task of producing the instruments of measurement, as well as the slow “harmonization” needed to make different units comparable (Desrosieres 2000). Today these processes largely transcend national discussions and are an important part of producing new global institutions (Barry 2006). Within this context, sociologists are spending more and more energy following the production and consolidation of rankings (Sabaté & Tironi 2008).

6. Finally, once stabilized, rankings are transformed into a new social thing that, despite the contingency of its production, appears like a “black box” for the actors that confront them (Latour 2005). In this sense, it is essential to study how rankings are “enacted” (Mol 2002; Law & Urry 2004; Ossandon 2009), or to follow them as “social objects” that transform the world they inhabit. One of the most discussed issues in this context concerns those cases where the introduction of quantitative devices makes what they measure more “calculable” or “competitive”, questioning the limit between what is observed and the instrument of observation (Barry & Slater 2005; Espeland & Sauder 2007). At the same time it is more and more recognized that rankings are not only disciplinary devices, but they also enable the emergence of new collective actors – such as the “European citizens” (Law 2009), occupational categories (Desrosieres et al 1983) -; new markets (Poon 2007), and even new “concerned groups” emerging through the side effect of a specific type of statistical device (Callon 2007) – such as those that are excluded from a specific form of ordering customers in the contemporary banking system (Leyshon & Thrift 1999).

To sum up, rankings are multifaceted objects and it is possible to approach them from very different perspectives. It is important to consider that from each of these points of view different types of political questions are raised. As already mentioned, from the first type of analysis there can be public controversies about the quality of instruments used to measure social variables. Second, collective binding decisions are closely entangled with structural quantitative analyses (suffice it to think of the Stern report and its impact on the discussion of global warming). Third, also of a political nature, those elements of social life that should be “defended” from quantitative comparisons must be defined, as well as the re-introduction of the reactive or collateral effects of ranking in the definition of new policies. Finally, rankings are central agents in contemporary “hybrid forums” (Callon et al 2001), where controversies regarding them are not just about different methods but about the responsibility in the production of new natural and social “entities”, or what has been called a “political ontology” (Mol 1999).

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