The Organizational Engine of Rankings: Connecting “New” and “Old” Institutionalism

When explaining the ubiquity of rankings, researchers tend to emphasize macro or contextual phenomena, such as the power of or the trust in numbers, neoliberal forces, or a general spirit of competition. Meanwhile, the properties of rankers are rarely, if at all, taken into account. In contrast to the received wisdom, we argue that the institutionalization of rankings in different fields is also contingent upon another, often-neglected factor: Over time, rankers have become increasingly more organized. To investigate the role of ranking organizations, we look into the distinct properties of present-day rankings and highlight three dimensions along which rankings have evolved over the course of the twentieth century, namely, publication frequency, handling complex tasks, and audience engagement. On this basis, we argue that these dimensions have to a large extent been affected by formal organization and we show how ranking organizations have over time developed capacities to: (a) publish rankings on a continual basis; (b) handle the often complex production process by means of division of labor; and (c) generate considerable degrees of attention by addressing large and diverse audiences. On a more general note, we argue that accounting for the role of organization in the instutionalization of rankings requires a combination of insights from both “old” and “new” strands of thinking in institutional theory.

THE STATE AS INTERACTING WITH THE MARKET – A SUITABLE CONTEXT FOR THE NONPROFIT SECTOR

The paper aims to contextualize the elements that define the peculiarities of the nonprofit nonprofit sector. In a general note, there is provided a series of answers to the following questions: ‘Which ones are the factors that influenced the establishment of the nonprofit sector?’, and ‘Of what consists the object of the conceptual delineations regarding the nonprofit sector?’. In a particular sense, the first part of the paper refers primarily to the aspects regarding the necessity to optimize the manner of organizing the society, along with the one related to the establishment of a distinctive framework in terms of organizational infrastructure of the civil society. The second part of the paper begins with the structural-operational definition of the nonprofit sector and continues with its general characteristics.

A category mistake in observational claims regarding ultrashort-lived unstable particles

The physics literature contains many claims that ultrashort-lived unstable particles, such as a Higgs boson, have been observed. These claims are a matter of applying the [Formula: see text]-convention in particle physics. This paper, however, shows that by applying this [Formula: see text]-convention a category mistake is made, by which a pure reasoning is passed off as an observation. Not only are these two fundamentally different primitive notions at the very basis of science, but the pure reasoning in question is also weaker than an observation: what we have in each case is that the existence of the ultrashort-lived unstable particle is inferred to the best explanation, but that does absolutely not merit the stronger claim that the particle in question has been “observed”. Consequently, the observational claims in question will thus have to be dismissed as overstatements. On a general note, this demonstrates that the empirical support for the Standard Model of particle physics is significantly less than hitherto thought.