Abstract

This study introduces and adopts the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’ from political philosophy and the Weberian concept of ‘commensuration’ from Espeland and Stevens’s social theory to HE to analyse the power situation of universities under the international programmes of university rankings and to further reflect the power relationship between universities and their external power entities of economic capital (e.g., companies, organisations, and agencies). Taking China Mainland as the context, this study empirically conducts a critical discourse analysis (CDA) on the documents from two cases of rankings (U.S. News Rankings and Times Rankings) and six cases of universities to demonstrate Chinese prestigious universities’ resistance to anglosphere-centric international ranking programmes.

Introduction

As pointed out by Pusser and Marginson (2013), the issue of power has been neglected, and even rarely linked, with university rankings (e.g., U.S. News Rankings, QS Rankings, and Times Rankings) in higher education (HE) studies. Especially, several Chinese prestigious universities have recently announced that they will withdraw from certain international ranking programmes, which brings the issue of universities’ protest against the power of rankings to the forefront of HE political research.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of this study is structured with the concepts of ‘passive revolution’ and ‘commensuration’, the former of which is a cutting-edge issue of Gramscian study and is recognised as ‘surprisingly not prominent in the immediate post-war reception of the Prison Notebooks’ (Thomas 2013: 23) and the latter of which is initially proposed as the essence of a broad social process but lacks deduction and application in subsequent sociological empirical research.

By tracing the notion of ‘passive revolution’ back in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1947), its conceptual connotation is originally abstracted by this study as (1) a process in which the dominant classes managed to exclude the popular classes from participation in social modernisation, (2) a gradual and progressive process of molecular incorporation with a neutralisation of oppositional forces, (3) a contradictory process, without a radical ‘Jacobin moment’ like the political movement of French Revolution, of economic modernisation without political modernisation, and (4) a paradoxical situation in which political changes take place without any consistent mobilisation of the masses.

As Espeland and Stevens (1998) propose, the notion of ‘commensuration’ refers to a social process rooted in Weber’s investigations of rationalisation. For Weber (1981), the expanding role of calculation as a strategy to manage uncertainty was a central feature of Western rationalism and crucial for the development of capitalism. This study abstracts the conceptual connotation of ‘commensuration’ as (1) the expression or measurement of characteristics normally represented by different units according to a common metric, (2) a social process that transforms qualities into quantities while homogenising differences into magnitude; and (3) a method to reduce and simplify disparate information into quantitative and statistical numbers that can easily be compared.

Methodology Critical Dialogue Analysis (CDA) serves as the central empirical approach of this study, as it provides the methodological framework through which to interrogate the documents that constitute the textual data for this study. The primary data sources of this study are policy and administrative documents together with media files from both sides of international rankings: the implementers (ranking issuers) and participators (Chinese prestigious universities). Rooted in Foucault’s theory of dialogue order, this study regards these document discourses as a dialogue between two sides, so that CDA exposes the relationship between discourse (in documents) and values (in documents). As ‘texts are both socially-structuring and socially-structured’ (Fairclough et al. 2002: 3), CDA gives us a way to think about what can be empirically observed (documents data) and to see through them to the worlds of the actual and the real (Fairclough 2005; Fairclough et al. 2002): (1) what higher educational values have been input by the rankers with their ranking metrics and how are these values Anglosphere-centric; (2) what technique have been employed by the rankers to empower themselves to make the ranked (Chinese) universities accept the (Anglosphere-centric) values; (3) how the case (Chinese) universities have protested against the (Anglosphere-centric) ranking power.

Findings This study demonstrates the theoretical values of Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ (1947; Thomas, 2006) together with his theory of ‘hegemony’ and the Weberian concept of ‘commensuration’ (Espeland and Stevens, 1998) together with his theory of ‘authority’ in explaining the power essence of rankings. ‘Passive revolution’ is demonstrated to be applicable to the power technique that external subjects uses to empower themselves to make universities gradually accept the ruling-and-ruled social status, bringing Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explain the power relationship between universities and external subjects. ‘Commensuration’ is demonstrated to be applicable to the power technique that empowers external subjects to deicide educational evaluation criteria for universities. With a consensus-building process, rankings are essentially higher education evaluations of hegemonic commensuration that interferes in the ruled universities and influences their internal affairs. Ranking is essentially a technique that empowers a subject to commensurate and then rule universities (esp. modern universities with academic autonomy), as well as to hierarchise them according to its one-size-fit-all evaluation criteria despite the differences between universities and regardless of any uniqueness or characteristic of a university. Times/US-News ranking is the process that an Anglosphere-based company realises its hegemonic power over Chinese prestigious universities to make them gradually accept the re-structured power status out of their academic autonomy. Chinese universities’ critiques on U.S. News and Times Rankings are analysing them as a set of hegemonic discourse with Anglosphere-centric values, with English language research as dominant, with Anglosphere-based employment as superior, and with characteristic of university in immigration country as beneficial (e.g. international diversity). Chinese prestigious universities are conducting (1) institutional adaptation and (2) academic development to discourse with (protest against) international ranking metrics in multi-aspects of higher educational affairs, especially respectively in (1) academic discipline construction with Chinese characteristic and (2) encouragement for research that serves China.

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