I received many emails about the "management" rankings. I have to admit rankings, while personally pleasing, are actually complex social phenomenon. Americans love to rank things, from scariest movies, to greatest rock songs of all time, to buisness schools and wines. Since I know a little about business schools, let me describe the impact rankings have had.
There are many who have argued that the ranking business schools has proven to be a significant problem and others who argued that it has taken something in the shadows and cast sunshine on it. The critics charge that students are no
longer being educated and teachers are no longer teaching; instead, they buy
and sell rankings. A school ranked in the top five will have a higher yield rate
than one ranked in the top ten. As a
result, a lot of time and energy is invested into making sure that the ratings’
criteria are being met.
What
explains the prestige, power, and duplication of business school rankings? Not
very often, however, are the rankings thought about in the abstract, as an idea
about how they impact business education. In a sense, the ranking system
devised by BusinessWeek and the other media organizations reflects a kind of
conceptual reductionism; a method of evaluation that seems to parallel the “thumbs
up or thumbs down” approach used in contemporary movie reviews. Be that as it
may, it goes without saying that rankings of all types are crucial to the
functioning of market life. For example, in places where prices do not
accurately reflect the value of an underlying good, systems of rank have emerged
as putatively objective methods of evaluation. Sociologists Wendy Espeland and
Mitchell Stevens describe this process of quantification in a professional
field or area as “commensuration.” Commensuration, they argue, is “the
expression or measurement of characteristics normally represented by different
units according to a common metric.” A noteworthy example of how a good can shift
from a complex judgment to a more commensurate ranking is the system of Robert
Parker’s wine rating and the recent imposition of elementary education exams
created by the 200x, No Child Left Behind Act.
Rankings are also attractive
because they are simplistic and they convey a sense of order. By virtue of quantification,
rankings promise comparability and standardization which are partially achieved
by forcing those being ranked to be more
judicious in standardizing their own internal processes. The rankings in
outlets like U.S. News and World Report
and BusinessWeek forced schools to
standardize their measures and adopt particular definitions of particular data.
Consequently, most schools now share a common definition of starting salary,
acceptance rate, and employment, thereby allowing for common metrics which transcend
institutional differences.
By reducing what economists call
“search costs,”rankings make accessing and evaluating important information
easier. Like the maximizing shareholder price, rankings mechanize the decision
making process by, in part, marginalizing the elements that resist
quantification while highlighting those that are particularly amenable.
Yet, rankings provide the illusion of scientific rigor vis-à-vis a
process that actually calls for careful judgment and nuanced interpretation. It is one
thing to give Wharton, Tuck, or Columbia a rating as a top business school; this
leaves some room for interpretation. However, to say that Wharton is number
one, Columbia number 3 and Tuck number 2 indicates a level of precision that just cannot be achieved, except on
the cover of a newsmagazine and then in the minds of students.
Consider,
for purposes of illustration another complex product, wine. Robert Parker has developed a popular 100-point scale for rating a
complex product like wine. I don't know much about wine, but I buy it on ocassion. When one
walks into a wine store and looks at the ratings, it is not uncommon to ask oneself
is there really a meaningful qualitative difference between a wine rated 90 on
the one hand, and a wine rated 91 on the other. Perhaps not? My uncle who owns a wine store tells me that the ratings system helped expand the market for wines in America
where people previously felt they had no way to judge it or did not consider
themselves experts. The problem he says, is that these newly initiated wine drinkers became score
obsessed and willing to buy only those wines Parker rated above some certain
score. The result is that producers then trip all over themselves trying to
produce those wines that Parker's palate likes ( dark, high alcohol content, earthy, and jammy strong wines). As a result, high quality wines increasingly taste the same.
So, this raises a broader question. What kind of knowledge does ranking management thinkers produce?
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