Datafying Universities: The social construction of organizations as statistical units

• Applicant: Dr. Jelena Brankovic, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544700537

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 activities 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. Three international data repositories are selected as cases, each contributing to an expanding infrastructure that treats universities as statistical units, 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 draws on documents, digital media, observations, and interviews. Overall, the research aims to contribute to (i) the sociology of organizations, by calling attention to the role of datafication in the construction of global organizational fields and (ii) 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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants