Global university rankings influence students' choices and higher education policies throughout the world. When rankers not only evaluate universities but also provide them with consulting, analytics, or advertising services, rankers are vulnerable to conflicts of interest that may potentially distort their rankings. The paper assesses the impact…

Nowadays, university rankings are a familiar phenomenon in higher education all over the world. But how did rankings achieve this status? To address this question, we bring in a historical-sociological perspective and conceptualize rankings as a phenomenon in history. We focus on the United States and identify the emergence of a specific…

With internationalization now an imperative for institutions of higher learning around the world, this article examines the specific case of how France's elite engineering and business schools, known as the "grandes écoles," have taken on this challenge. Mobilizing work on organizational allomorphism and the "glonacal"…

This paper examines the mechanisms through which higher education institutions (HEIs) explore, focusing on organizational status and institutional logic. We hypothesize that the exploration mechanisms differ depending on the public and private sectors. Revisiting middle-status conformity, we assert that the U-shaped relationship is stronger for…

Research on scientific careers finds a mover's advantage. International migration correlates with increased visibility and productivity. However, if scientists who move internationally, on average, enter into more prestigious employments than they came from, extant research may overestimate the direct performance gains associated with…

The extent to which collegiality conflicts or merges with managerial ideas and practices has recently given rise to a lively scholarly debate: have universities surrendered to managerialization or, on the contrary, do they continue to exhibit collegial traits? Part of this debate arises from the lack of a clear definition of…

Recruitment is one of the main strategic tools for universities, which aim to hire the best possible candidates for their academic positions. However, not every institution can hire whom they perceive as the best. Our paper investigates what are perceived to be the most pressing hindrances to attracting the best researchers. We focus on national…

Following a global trend, higher education (HE) in Africa has also become a complex enterprise, potentially demanding specific expertise in higher education research. However, despite this, there is a dearth of analysis into the state of research on African HE. This paper seeks to fill this gap by mapping and analysing African HE research. We…

Modern societies regularly face crises that have major disruptive effects. Learning from past crises can inform better choices and policies when facing a new one. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, higher education scholars explored its effects on students' tuition fees through cuts in public funding. This article instead investigates how…

Despite the ubiquity of global university rankings coverage in media and academia, a concerted attempt to investigate the role of social media in ranking entrepreneurship remains absent. By drawing on an affect lens, we critically examine the social media activities of two commercial rankers: Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds…

The growing influence of global rankings drives higher education institutions (HEIs) across the globe to conform to the indicators and implement changes to obtain world-class status. We examine why HEIs in similar institutional environments are structured and processed differently on the ranking issue with different outcomes. By employing a…

Over the past decade, universities in the People's Republic of China have notably progressed in international rankings. Most of the existing literature interested in this development describes the adoption of university rankings in China as a recent import of a global institution, and as being driven by a governmental agenda that seeks to bolster…

Global university rankings (GUR) have become increasingly influential as a proxy measure of higher education quality. The more recent development of regionalised forms of rankings has increased their global reach, drawing a greatly expanded range of institutions into their orbit. As a result, regionalised GUR have developed an increasing potential…

Universities in the USA must navigate a complex set of organizational goals when communicating about international students. On one hand, international students signal that the university has a global reach and diverse student body; on the other hand, international students have been viewed as edging out domestic students for access to scarce…

In this paper, we investigate how highly ranked business schools construct their legitimacy claims by analysing their online organisational communication. We argue that in the case of higher education institutions in general, and business schools in particular, the discursive formation of these legitimacy claims is strongly connected to the…