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Andrea Mennicken, Christine Musselin, Marion Fourcade, Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder, Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. New York, NY, Russell Sage Foundation, 2016., Socio-Economic Review, Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 207–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx044
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*Correspondence: [email protected]
Numbers, including university rankings, as Espeland and Sauder’s book so powerfully demonstrates, have in many ways come to rule our lives. Whether in the public or private sector, economic, social or political life, activities are increasingly structured around numerical representations: quantified impact assessments, benchmarks, cost-benefit analyses, estimates of social and financial return, measurements of performance and risk. It is essential that we consider how such an advance of quantification is affecting our lives, our values, and sociological imagination. ‘Engines of Anxiety’ helps us develop a better understanding of this new culture of numerical evaluation, the ‘audit society’, as Power put it some years ago (Power 1997, see also Strathern 2000). The book is an essential read, not least as the numbers it considers (university rankings) increasingly affect our very own academic lives. The book helps to get to grips with the inner workings and effects of ‘governing by numbers’ (Miller 2001) and it does so in a very captivating way, albeit the insights it delivers are chilling in many respects.
