Fielding stratification: competition and multiple ranking effects in German higher education

Competition is one of the key signifiers that describes the changes to higher education in the last decades. Reform processes and new devices such as new public management and a ubiquitous number of rankings are said to re-frame the space of higher education in a way that emphasizes competition among universities and their sub-units. But how does this competition play out, for and among whom? A closer look at higher education and across nations makes it clear that higher education institutions – while resembling each other as institutions – are very different organizations depending on national regulation, research, teaching and service orientation (cf. Stensaker et al. 2018). Competition might be diffused through “a refined semantic of scarce resources” (Werron 2009: 23; transl. AM; cf. Krücken 2017: 17) but there are barely any resources that universities and their sub-units could jointly and unequivocally compete for. In order to analyze universities or their sub-units as competing, it is necessary to focus on observable expressions of competition. Competition is not a goal in itself but the assumption of directed agency among comparable units. Different to market competition, organizational competition in higher education is predominantly directed at increases in public status. As public status perceptions in modern societies operate in mediation, competition is directed towards and over-values mediating devices (Werron 2009). Competition then derives from distinct speech acts, texts, visualizations and stratigraphies which assume organizations have been or will be acting towards establishing verticality among each other. As an empirical fact competition operates in and is subordinated to a stratificatory topology. The paper aims to map out this competition-inducing stratification as a process I call field stratification and with regard to rankings in German higher education (Bloch and Mitterle 2017). It draws on seven case studies in aspirative public and private degree programs and focuses on the inclusive CHE-ranking and the exclusive FT-Ranking. Field stratification assumes higher education units (HEU) as comparable actors in a competitive social space. By performing along defined attributes, HEU obtain positions in this field. Rankings refine such imagined fields positions as ranks in a hierarchy. In a setting of multiple rankings, a ranking evokes competition in two distinct ways: it mobilizes competitive action in the field for itself (A) and among others in itself (B) as a mere status signal. This allows for at least four forms of competitive responses by HEU. The invocation of competitive agency through rankings may cause resistance or non-recognition (1), compliance along the criteria of actions and in the organizational form as evoked by the ranking (2), recognition of a ranking as a valid but incomplete depiction of the field (3), or beggar-thy-neighbor approaches derived from inconsistencies in the evocation of agency (4). Building on examples from the case studies the paper shows that the distinct nature of competition in higher education is multi-fold building on a range of competitive field evocations that instead of answering who competes and how engage in a range of circular references that above all perpetuate the need to (re-)act competitively.