Why Management Scholars Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Journal Rankings

Journal rankings are often understood as instruments of managerial control, and as bound up with the disempowering tendencies of the neoliberal business school. This essay reconceptualizes journal rankings as shaping how institutional power is enacted and experienced, and argues that they can help to redistribute power in ways that benefit less privileged and ordinary rank and file academics. Drawing on Lukes’ three-dimensional account of power, the essay offers three arguments. First, by making evaluative criteria more explicit, journal rankings can reduce opacity in agenda-setting. Second, rankings can promote greater consistency of judgement while preserving a central role for expert evaluation, thereby helping to shield academics from arbitrary managerial decision-making power. Third, rankings can partially counteract institutional prestige bias and thus limit the ideological power of status hierarchies. While journal rankings are imperfect, the essay argues that they may nonetheless mitigate some of the less visible and more insidious forms of power that shape academic life.