Datafying Universities: The social construction of organizations as statistical units
Principal Investigator: Dr. Jelena Brankovic
Research assistants: Malika Karieva
Today, more than ever before, universities are being observed, compared, and evaluated through the lens of a growing amount of data. This research examines this phenomenon more closely by focusing on the practices and relations that enable it. In contrast with most literature on the rising importance of data in society, which tends to focus on individual-level data and the transformative effect of recent digital technologies, this project (a) focuses on the production of large volumes of data centering on organizations as discrete, countable, and comparable units of analysis, and (b) situates the recent increase in the availability of this type of data within the historical interest in empirically driven cross-national comparisons of universities.
To understand the phenomenon of datafication of university organizations as a social-historical phenomenon in more precise terms, the research draws on (a) critical data studies, (b) studies of information infrastructure, (c) the practice turn in the study of social knowledge. Empirically, the research focuses on international data repositories that make part of an expanding infrastructure centering on universities as units of observation, thus enabling their listing, classifying, and sorting at scale. The research design is rooted in abductive reasoning; it is qualitative, multi-sited, to a degree also comparative, and it comprises document analysis (including archival material), digital media analysis, observations, and interviews.
The research aims to contribute to (a) the sociology of organizations, by calling attention to the role of datafication in the construction of global organizational fields and (b) the sociology of higher education, where it aims to advance our understanding of the epistemological foundations of higher education as a field of research, policy, and practice.
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