Going global: Rankings as rhetorical devices to construct an international field of management education
基于制度理论，分析国际排名如何作为修辞手段在欧洲商学院中构建合法性，并影响管理教育领域的形成与变革，同时揭示了排名如何维持现有地位格局。
Analysing the introduction of international rankings in the field of management education, this article aims to understand how and why rankings have proliferated and institutionalized and with what effects. Building on institutional theory, I propose that rankings function as rhetorical devices to construct legitimacy within the field, which actors use to attempt to shape and reform the field as it develops. Rhetorical devices shape meaning, as they are used to justify practices and procedures and shape the means of comparison and assessment. The rankings are used by European business schools to attempt to alter perceptions of the field and their own positions within it. The result of these processes is also, however, a preservation of status and the principles whereby status is formed in the field, primarily through the work of habitus. I discuss the implications of these findings for understanding rankings and for institutional theories of fields.