Sociologists have shown that external evaluation stimulates convergent organizational
behavior, yet many evaluative practices are superficial or susceptible to manipulation. When …

This article puts institutional economics concepts to work to help identify the proper role of
evaluation in organizations and circumvent key obstacles to evaluation use. Looking at the …

This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of
valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in …

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 …

Drawing on categorization theory, semiotics, and labeling theory, we argue that categories
and labels are widely utilized by individuals in organizational settings to help structure and …

A review of the literature on organizational rankings across management, sociology,
education, and law reveals three perspectives on these complex evaluations—rankings are …

Recent research shows that audiences sometimes respond to organizational performance in
ways that seem anomalous according to prior theory. In this paper we propose that …

This study calls into question the completeness of the argument that economic actors who
fail to conform to certain identity-based logics—such as the categorical structure of markets …

The distinction of macro-and microfoundations of institutions implies a multilevel
conceptualization of institutional processes. We adopt the evaluators' perspective on …

This article is about evaluation use. It focuses on the well-known paradox that evaluation is
undertaken to improve policy, but in fact rarely does so. Additionally, the article also finds …