This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially stratifying political objectives that actually frustrate the kind of market-rule for which rankings have been hitherto legitimised among the public. The insight here is that rankings make of audit techniques neither simply a market proxy, nor merely the basis for bureaucratic managerialism, but a social technology or ‘apparatus’ (dispositif) that simultaneously substitutes and frustrates market operations in favour of a more acutely stratified social order. This quality to the operation of rankings can then be connected to the chronic accumulation crisis that is the neoliberal regime of political economy, and to the growing political appetite therein for power-knowledge techniques propitious for oligarchy formation and accumulation-by-dispossession in the kind of low-growth and zero-sum environment typical in real terms to societies dominated by financialisation. A dialectical approach to rankings is suggested, so that a more effective engagement with their internal and practical contradictions can be realised in a way that belies the market-myths of neoliberal theory.

中文翻译：

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学术分层：学术审计制度中的排名、寡头统治和市场神话

这种历史唯物主义分析将排名置于治理和积累的必要性中，并将学术排名特别定位为更普遍的审计文化的目的。通过确定排名如何不仅影响质量的量化，而且影响数量的数量，我们可以揭示州政府、管理层和政治精英如何实现社会分层的政治目标，这些目标实际上挫败了迄今为止排名所遵循的那种市场规则在公众中合法化。这里的见解是，排名不仅使审计技术成为市场代理，也不仅仅是官僚管理主义的基础，而是一种社会技术或“设备”（dispositif)，它同时替代并阻碍了市场运作，有利于更严格分层的社会秩序。排名运作的这种品质可以与长期积累危机（即政治经济学的新自由主义政权）联系起来，也与其中对权力知识技术日益增长的政治胃口相关联低增长和零和环境在以金融化为主导的社会中以实际价值计算是典型的。提出了一种辩证的排名方法，以便更有效地处理它们的内部和实际矛盾，从而以一种掩盖新自由主义理论的市场神话的方式实现。