A reappraisal of global university rankings’ influence in Canada: a senior university leaders’ perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to the debate on university organisational actorhood by surveying the drivers of university strategic behaviour and choice. Utilising organisational literature and interviews with senior leaders from three Canadian research-intensive universities, the article elucidates the dynamics underlying universities’ behaviours associated with global university rankings. Contrary to previous studies, the analysis suggests that global rankings exert more influence on Canadian universities than it is commonly assumed. Findings show that (1) global rankings are integral to the case universities’ strategic positioning, legitimacy managing, and revenue-generating efforts in an era where government funding has become a source of constant concern; (2) global rankings are perceived more important than Maclean’s – Canada’s national university ranking – for institutional priorities and promotional strategies; and (3) specialised personnel and units have been created by universities to optimise data flows and improve their ranking positions. The article additionally examines contemporary issues on the academic landscape that create the conditions for institutionalising global rankings, a course of action commonly perceived as irreconcilable with the egalitarian ethos and flatter hierarchical structure of Canada’s postsecondary education. The article offers a new perspective on the determinants of strategic behaviour and organisational change in higher education and outlines directions for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".