Legitimating Agencies in the Face of Selection: The Case of AACSB
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes that legitimating agencies such as accreditation organizations face selection pressures to both maintain their legitimacy among their constituents, but also to expand the domain of their activities. We argue that domain expansion raises three important research questions: first, the factors that lead legitimating agencies to expand their domain; second, the need to maintain legitimacy among existing constituents; and third, the establishment of legitimacy in the new domain. We use the domain expansion of the AACSB to develop propositions relevant to these three research issues. Quality concerns, process vs. content strategy, and institutional entrepreneurship are the main factors that impact the legitimation of legitimating agencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".