Policing Academics: Governance, Accumulation, and Control in Global Academic Ranking

This Dissertation offers a political analysis of global academic rankings. The basic thesis is that systemic and secular crisis conditions in the dominant accumulation model of the capitalist world-system are profoundly reshaping the governing of academic life, drawing it into the accumulation circuits of capital and into the orbit of political problems that such accumulation entails. Consequently, the social relations of academic life are being reconfigured by stratifying and mobilising governmental techniques of control toward the production of both capitalist oligarchy and appropriately governable labour subjectivities for capital. We must therefore ask how the governing of academic life is being reconfigured in terms of global accumulation, why this is happening now, and what role rankings play in this reconfiguration as a political and social technology. Aside from the actual rankings themselves, critique is focused on the neoliberal claims made of rankings throughout their formative years (1990s-2010s), namely that they are efficient, transparent, and market-establishing instruments of policy-formation in global governance. The dissertation interrogates these claims, demonstrating how rankings function as a political technology, rather than a non-politicized and neutral instrument of science, and how they produce stratifying social relations typical to managerial oligarchy, rather than commodifying markets. Moving away from strictly institutionalist, positivist, and managerialist preoccupations of research on rankings, the dissertation tries to penetrate closer to the production of subjectivities realised in rankings by exploring three aspects to the operation of the rankings technology that are absent from the literature: arkhè, dispositif, and dialektik. These aspects are vital elements for a critical analysis of ranking that brings out its transformative and historical character. Once established, this subjectivity production is then translated in the analysis onto the broader terrain of world-systemic problems in accumulation, crisis, and governance, so as to reach for a more strategic insight into the formation of oligarchical governance. Through a series of five peer-reviewed articles, the dissertation aims to reveal the epistemic operation of police power in rankings (Article I-II), the production of governable subjectivities for capital that is secured by rankings as a material-semiotic-affective apparatus (Article III-IV), the role of rankings in the global accumulation regime (Articles IV-V), and the contingent space for political engagement and transcendence opened up by a dialectic that is immanent to rankings as an historical technology (Article I-V).