Forschung

Project Description

Companies, artists, sports clubs, hospitals, hotels, universities or countries: Today, all kinds of entities are being "ranked" on a regular basis. Most of the literature focuses on rankings that emerged and proliferated since the 1990s. This neglects, however, that rankings have a long history that we need to understand in order to explain their rise in the last few decades. Our project therefore looks at the history of rankings in two fields - competitive sports and science/universities - between the mid-nineteenth century and around 1980. We conceptualize rankings as a modern practice of comparison that combines comparison of performances, quantification, visualization and publication. With this understanding in mind, we are particularly interested in three research questions: (1) Which rankings were produced and published during this period? (2) How were they discursively received and interpreted? (3) And how where they related to discourses on performance, competition, and transparency / publicity?