Business schools, shut the f… up with your rankings!

It's ranking season again, and here comes the choir of schools crowing about their miraculous rankings.

Apart from giving school deans and their communications managers an opportunity to gloat, are these rankings of the slightest interest and, above all, isn't it time we thought about the almost exclusively negative consequences of these rankings?? Here's the start of a non-exhaustive list.

I'll start with my favourite: none of the rankings mention course content! How many international teachers, what's the carbon footprint... Sure, that you will find in rankings. But what about the relevance of the teaching? nada! I encourage you to look at the list of criteria used by the Financial Times, the benchmark ranking. I can already hear the answer that it's difficult to measure the quality of teaching, so we should measure it indirectly by looking at the salary at the end of the course, for example, and therefore trust companies and HR to assess the value of teaching. So let's use the invisible hand of the market to compensate for the inability of these rankings to reflect on the quality of a programme. Who still believes that companies and their HR analyse the content of the courses received by the candidates they interview? The consequence? Well, since content is not measured, why bother? You might as well put the schools' resources into developing new campuses, new technologies, new exchanges, etc. That's what the rankings are all about. So don’t expect any impovement of management by business schools which focus on these rankings. Rankings are the best way of preventing management schools from thinking about management!

Another nice consequence? The total standardisation of business schools. These rankings impose their criteria as the absolute horizon for business schools. To be a good business school, it's easy, you just have to be good on these criteria. So everyone aligns themselves with these criteria. Hello, copycats and Panurge’s sheeps. Worse still, the very idea of ranking implies that schools can be compared on a continuous scale (even if it is multi-criteria). This comparability means that the only difference between schools playing the ranking game is that some will be better or worse than others on these criteria. All the same, but some a little better than others, so to speak. And as many of these rankings are international, we even end up with a standardisation of schools at a global level without any integration of cultural or contextual specificities. But it gets worse: Powell and Dimaggio, the great institutionalist researchers, have shown us that when the demands for compliance with criteria or standards increase in parallel with the increase in the risk of making a strategic mistake, then organisations, and therefore business schools too, will tend to copy each other. In other words, the more important the rankings become, the more anxious schools become about the risk of falling in the rankings, and the more mimetic they will be in their behaviour. Did you want an even more mimetic and standardised management world? Thank you, rankings!

And here's another effect of this standardisation through rankings: the rise of bullshit in the way business schools talk about themselves, because they can't just say they're doing what everyone else is doing. So the more we standardise, the more we develop a hollow discourse on the uniqueness of our schools to try and hide the increasing homogenisation of the schools' programmes. But even this talk of uniqueness is becoming standardised. All you have to do is look at the slogans and mottos of the schools and count those that are not a simple variation on the words leadership, responsible, impacting, future and others. Even when schools try to have a singular discourse, it is mimetic.

But the real consequence is that business schools' discourse on what they do is losing credibility. How can we believe in these communications when we see that they are themselves standardised and disconnected from the reality of the content of the teaching? This decoupling of discourse and reality by business schools adds to the growing chorus of managerial bullshit. By bringing business schools, which are supposed to be academic references, to produce empty rhetoric, the rankings contribute to the de-legitimisation of management as a science.

The list goes on and on: I could mention the tendency of schools to manipulate the data and accuse their peers of doing it better than them; the creation of a false impression of poor quality associated with lower-ranked schools; the devaluation of the quality of research carried out by professors at lower-ranked schools; the fact that many public funders use these rankings to allocate financial resources to schools, thereby helping to perpetuate the system; that these rankings are based entirely on criteria that schools with less financial resources or from developing countries cannot meet; that these rankings are carried out by newspapers that turn them into a business and whose rigour it is difficult to monitor; ... . I'll leave you to think about all the negative consequences of these rankings.

More generally, since today it is essential to judge everything in terms of sustainability and social responsibility, I think we need to make it very clear that business school rankings are totally irresponsible. Or at least that business schools' obsession with these rankings makes them irresponsible by leading them to behave like a sheep-like mass aiming for “always more” and “always better” on the basis of ranking criteria that are homogenising, reinforcing inequalities and divorced from course content. For business schools, rankings are the best way to stop thinking about the content of their courses and the way they are taught.

Of course, I know that these rankings can help students who have to choose between an ever-increasing number of business schools, and that they cannot be ignored because they exist and they contain information that can be useful.

But let's at least be responsible and stop promoting these rankings.