Abstract

The emergence of enterprise culture has raised the issue of how techniques of governmentality are being used to re-make individuals and institutions as bearers of enterprising qualities. This paper examines one such specific technique of governmentality, that of the ranked list. The ranked list is interesting for three reasons. One, just about anything can be ranked. Two, it is a widely accepted and normalized communicative genre. Three, there are properties of the ranked list that make it particularly potent as a technique of governmentality, including the following: it is strongly oriented towards the consumer; it encourages the view of ranking as competition; and its hegemonic status makes it difficult to resist, so that any opposition to a proposal for ranking is usually put on the defensive.