ABSTRACT

Discourses around research excellence and quality are predominant within the economic sciences, with various forms of ranking playing a central role. They make “excellence” in research and teaching visible, but they also create hierarchical orders between researchers, institutions, publication outlets and countries.

The authors of this volume analyse the role of rankings in shaping and transforming economics from different theoretical, methodological and disciplinary perspectives. The various contributions explore the specific situation in different countries as well as global developments within economics and beyond. In addition, the book contributes to an overall debate about the role and function of rankings in academia. The analysis focuses on four aspects: rankings and social hierarchies, rankings and paradigmatic hegemonies, rankings and regulations/policies, as well as rankings and critique/alternatives.

The book addresses scholars in economic sociology, economics, higher education and science studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

part I|13 pages

Introduction

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part II|86 pages

Rankings and the formation of social hierarchies

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chapter 2|21 pages

Why are economists obsessed with rankings?

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An empirical and theoretical exploration of a field-specific preoccupation
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chapter 3|18 pages

Varieties of truth games

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How economists produce different forms of true knowledge between ranking evaluations and political expertise
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chapter 4|22 pages

The network determinants of publishing in Top five journals

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Evidence from the Swiss field of economics professors (1991–2020)
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chapter 5|23 pages

Gendered competitive practices in economics

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A multi-layer model of women's underrepresentation
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part III|65 pages

Rankings and their impact on paradigmatic hegemony

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chapter 7|28 pages

“Cream of the crop”

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A prosopographical analysis of the top 150 economists in the RePEc ranking
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part IV|83 pages

Excellence policies and regulations through rankings

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chapter 9|23 pages

Evaluating research organisations

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Public policy and the search for excellence in the trajectory of the Portuguese Science and Technology system 1
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chapter 10|19 pages

Organizers and promoters of academic competition?

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The role of (academic) social networks and platforms in the competitization of science
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chapter 11|17 pages

What are the disciplines of excellence?

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The case of the French Excellence Initiatives
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