Wendy Nelson Espeland

TL;DR: The annual rankings of universities and their programs result in copies of U.S. News & World Report flying off the shelves, and great fanfare follows as discussed by the authors, and the Internet goes all abuzz with discussions about the year's gains and losses in standing.

TL;DR: The U.S. News & World Report rankings have become increasingly influential in the world of legal education as discussed by the authors and they have prompted critical responses from virtually every major law school organization, including the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), the American Association of Legal Scholars (AALS), the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT).

TL;DR: The relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior, was analyzed in this article, where the efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions and incorporated their preferences into their models for evaluating plans.

TL;DR: This work examines three ethical features that are characteristic of quantification – its capacity to express or mediate power, focus attention, and shape opportunity structures in the context of three recent examples of new types ofquantification : university rankings, the racial classification of Asians in the US, and facial recognition algorithms.

TL;DR: Porter argues that the prestige, power, and ubiquity of quantification in the modem world can be explained by the ability of numbers to create and overcome distance, both physical and social.