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The sociologies of quantification, university rankings, and infrastructure are a loosely connected set of scholarly endeavors. Research in these areas typically examines production of certain types of quantification, their effects, and institutionalization. Despite these commonalities, scholars have noted a lack of conceptual coherence, debates on how to study quantification, a need to examine their socio-epistemological prerequisites, and research that crosses organization and national boundaries. In this paper, I argue that institutional ethnography--an alternative sociology for people--provides a unifying ontology for the sociology of quantification and studies of rankings and metrics in higher education. Institutional ethnography examines socio-epistemological prerequisites of quantification and facilitates a collaborative transnational project due to its focus on the extra local coordination of action. I also share results of the first transnational institutional ethnography of university rankings and related metrics, demonstrating coordinated action across several junctures of what has been called a global university ranking surveillance assemblage.

University rankings have been widely criticized and examined in terms of the environment they create for universities. In this paper, I reverse the question by examining how ranking organizations have responded to criticisms. I contrast ranking values and evaluation with those practiced by academic communities. I argue that the business of ranking higher education institutions is not one that lends itself to isomorphism with scholarly values and evaluation and that this dissonance creates reputational risk for ranking organizations. I argue that such risk caused global ranking organizations to create the Berlin Principles on Ranking Higher Education Institutions, which I also demonstrate are decoupled from actual ranking practices. I argue that the Berlin Principles can be best regarded as a legitimizing practice to institutionalize rankings and symbolically align them with academic values and systems of evaluation in the face of criticism. Finally, I argue that despite dissonance between ranking and academic evaluation, there is still enough similarity that choosing to adopt rankings as a strategy to distinguish one's institution can be regarded as a legitimate option for universities.