New Research on Law School Rankings
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The new issue of the American Sociological Review includes an article by Michael Sauder (Iowa) and Wendy Espeland (Northwestern University) that is receiving national attention: "The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change.”
The article applies Foucault’s analysis to understanding organizational responses to the law school rankings issued by the US News and World Report. The authors argue that "Foucault’s depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive means. ... 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." The article shows that rankings can take on a life of their own, with law schools internalizing the pressures produced by the rankings and the procedures used to try to manipulate them. |
