Content area
Full Text
This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive means. This approach advances organizational theory by highlighting conditions that affect the prevalence and effectiveness of buffering. Decoupling is not determined solely by the external enforcement of institutional pressures or the capacity of organizational actors to buffer or hide some activities. Members' tendency to internalize these pressures, to become self-disciplining, is also salient. Internalization is fostered by the anxiety that rankings produce, by their allure for the administrators who try to manipulate them, and by the resistance they provoke. Rankings are just one example of the public measures of performance that are becoming increasingly influential in many institutional environments, and understanding how organizations respond to these measures is a crucial task for scholars.
A central insight of institutional theory is that formal organizational structures often look quite different from informal practices. Work is often "loosely coupled" to or "decoupled" from the strictures of an institutional environment. To secure legitimacy and conform to general expectations, organizations may develop symbolic responses to environmental pressures without disrupting core technical activities. For example, organizations may create offices to give the appearance of legal compliance (Edelman 1992), implement ineffective programs (Kalev, Dobbin, Kelly 2006), or develop policies that may or may not be adopted (Westphal and Zajac 2001).
The pressures generated by educational rankings, like those published by U.S. News & World Report (USN), would seem to offer powerful incentives for organizations to buffer their activities. Rankings are a relatively recent feature of the educational environment, emerging as an important influence in many fields during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although they are popular with external constituents, such as prospective students and employers, rankings are widely resented by administrators and faculty. Moreover, rankings are expensive to manage and manipulate. A new, contentious and largely uncontrollable external pressure like rankings would seem to create a situation ripe for buffering, one likely to...