deathmtn

Espeland and Sauder give us a perfect example of value capture.
They studied archived online conversations between prospective law students discussing which law school to go to. And the rankings, the authors say, completely changed how law students thought and what they valued.
Espeland and Sauder report that before the rankings, the decision about which law school to go to often triggered some real soul-searching. Students had to decide between institutions that embodied deeply different values.

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U.S. News & World Report changed all that. The moment those rankings came out, students stopped trying to figure out what mattered to them personally. The rankings offered what looked like a single, objective answer to what counts as "best." Most students just took it on board, and assumed that their goal was to get into the highest-ranked law school they could. The rankings suppressed the richness of various values and offered, instead, a singular, monolithic value system. Instead of going through the difficult process of developing their own values for themselves, the students now hadan easier route: they could adopt a prefabricated value system.