Join us for an Academic Insights Breakfast Seminar devoted to the issue of public rankings.  

Public rankings are a ubiquitous form of performance evaluation used to evaluate diverse entities, ranging from universities and hotels to plumbers and doctors. Public rankings are different from other accounting technologies such as ratings, benchmarks and performance measurement systems as seen in the four defining features: they are numerical and rely on calculative practices; they are comparative, presenting their scores on an ordinal scale; they are normally visualized as league tables ordered from top to bottom; and they are public measures, with periodical publication. Previous research has mainly highlighted the competitive nature of emerging public ranking communities, either detailing how public rankings create new competitive ranking communities, or how they can intensify existing competitive relationships and create new rivalries. Consequently, much less is known about how collaborative learning may be the intent, means and outcome of public rankings.

Based on extensive field work of the origins and development of the Swedish Municipality Public Quality Ranking (KKIK) from 2007-2020, Stockholm School of Economics Professor of Accounting Kalle Kraus, also Director of the recently launched Center for Municipality Governance, discusses this topic.