As the number of international rankings has risen dramatically since the 1990s, a large body of scholarship has emerged to examine and understand them. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of this body of work and to chart out fruitful directions for future research. In short, prior scholarship has been surprisingly quiet on the relations among multiple actors and their economic dimensions at the core of country performance indicator (CPI) activities. To foreground crucial socioeconomic relations, we develop a relational heuristic based upon a sports analogy: the actors involved in the creation and maintenance of CPIs can fruitfully be approached as a complex of players, referees, coaches, and audiences. Such an account helps us better understand how CPIs emerge and are sustained, even when they rely on dodgy data and their effects are perverse. We use nation brand rankings—overlooked in international relations research—as empirical illustration.

中文翻译：

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排名游戏：国家绩效指标的关系方法

自 1990 年代以来，随着国际排名的数量急剧增加，出现了大量的学术研究来研究和理解它们。本文的目的是对这项工作进行概述，并为未来的研究指明富有成果的方向。简而言之，先前的学术研究在国家绩效指标 (CPI) 活动的核心中多个参与者之间的关系及其经济层面一直出人意料地保持沉默。为了突出重要的社会经济关系，我们开发了一种基于体育类比的关系启发式：参与创建和维护 CPI 的参与者可以有效地被视为一个由球员、裁判、教练和观众组成的复合体。这样的帐户有助于我们更好地了解 CPI 是如何出现和持续的，即使他们依赖不可靠的数据并且其效果是反常的。我们使用在国际关系研究中被忽视的国家品牌排名作为实证说明。