upsetting the rankings

Brayden

Ranking stuff helps us understand how something fits into its category (e.g. hospitals, movies). Rankings of organizations often translate into reputational capital – a kind of intangible asset that helps organizations get more customers, more satisfied employees, etc. The ranking ends up becoming a key component of a company’s reputation. Given the value that reputation has for organizations, you can see why organizations care a great deal about ranking systems. If you’re ranked highly, then your organization will probably support the current ranking system. If you’re struggling, you probably question the legitimacy of the rankings.

Dissatisfaction with rankings is causing a number of U.S. college presidents to call for a boycott of the U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of top colleges and universities. As this Washington Post article explains, some administrators are asking their peers to stop providing the magazine with the numbers used to produce the rankings.

“But why should we help U.S. News sell magazines?” asked Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and college relations at Dickinson College…

“We believe these rankings are misleading and do not serve well the interests of prospective students in finding a college or university that is well suited to their education beyond high school,” read a letter sent from 12 school president…

This effort to disrupt the ranking process ties into a larger debate about evaluating the quality of college education. The U.S. News ranking relies mostly on data about endowment size and the SAT scores of incoming students. Not surprisingly, these data tend to reproduce the reputational positions of elite schools. Up-and-comers have a harder time gaining ground in a system like this. Matthew Yglesias points to a couple of interesting statements on the topic.

But the more general problem that should be of interest to organizational scholars is, how do organizations deal with ranking systems that do not favor the organization? Not enough has been written about this. Most reputation scholars are interested in creating better rankings, decomposing existing rankings, etc. The more interesting topic to me though is how organizations interact with the rankings as a socially constructed source of reputation. Rather than thinking about rankings as measuring some latent quality of an organization, we can/should think about rankings as a social construct that organizations have a part in creating and amplifying. Reputation doesn’t exist outside the organization. It actually has an effect on the organization’s own identity – how it defines itself relative to its peers. Threats to an organization’s reputation, then, can also be threats to an organization’s identity.

This is the point of an excellent ASQ paper written by Kimberly Elsbach and Roderick Kramer, “Members’ responses to organizational identity threats: Encountering and countering the Business Week rankings.” Elsbach and Kramer look at how eight top business schools responded to new rankings of their schools. The Business Week rankings were meant to weed out the pretenders from the elite of business schools by providing a single set of criteria that students and recruiters could use to evaluate a school’s success. While this looked good on the surface, many business schools had in the past defined themselves in very unique ways. The new ranking system forced them to re-define their identity according to criteria that valued national prestige among students and recruiters. The new “objective” evaluative criteria of the Business Week rankings were a clear threat to identity.

Elsbach and Kramer refer to this distress when dealing with imposed evaluative criteria as “identity dissonance,” or the “cognitive dissonance related to the disparity or inconsistency between members’ perceptions of their organization’s identity (e.g. their perception that their school is ‘a dynamic, still growing program’) and the identity attributed to it by the Business Week survey (the assertion that the school ‘is standing still’)” (452-54). The rankings posed two kinds of threats: 1) threats to core identity attributes and 2) threats to the school’s positional status (i.e. their reputation). Interestingly, members of schools that received lower rankings typically responded with disbelief or denial. Rather than submit to the new rankings, members of lower-ranked schools tended to emphasize identity characteristics that they saw as existing outside the ranking criteria. Members tended to affirm existing “cherished dimensions” of their identity that had been overlooked by survey respondents (458). If they were unhappy with their position in the rankings, members strived to find a new basis for comparison by recategorizing the organization. For example, if a school did not fare well in comparison to other elite, national schools, then they might recategorize themselves as a regional school and seek to establish a reputation in this new category. Or they might seek to categorize the school as primarily-research oriented, casting it in the same category as Stanford and Chicago.

One of the more interesting implications of Elsbach and Kramer, I think, is that ranking systems reconstitute an organizational field by forcing organizations within that field to define their identities relative to a particular set of criteria. Identities are reconstructed in opposition to (or in congruence with) those criteria. Organizations on the outside looking in may seek to challenge the criteria (as you see the administrators doing now), but they are probably more likely to have success if they simply recategorize their organization and find an alternative set of criteria that allow them to distinguish themselves from their peers.