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The visualization of ranking information in global public policy is moving away from traditional “league table” formats and toward dashboards and interactive data displays. This paper explores the rhetoric underpinning the visualization of ranking information in such interactive formats, the purpose of which is to encourage country participation in reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper unpacks the strategies that the visualization experts adopt in the measurement of global poverty and wellbeing, focusing on a variety of interactive ranking visualizations produced by the OECD, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the ‘Our World in Data’ group at the University of Oxford. Building on visual and discourse analysis, the study details how the politically and ethically sensitive nature of global public policy, coupled with the pressures for “decolonizing” development, influence how rankings are visualized. The study makes two contributions to the literature on rankings. First, it details the move away from league table formats toward multivocal interactive layouts that seek to mitigate the competitive and potentially dysfunctional pressures of the display of “winners and losers.” Second, it theorizes ranking visualizations in global public policy as “alignment devices” that entice country buy-in and seek to align actors around common global agendas.

Organizational sociology and organization studies have a long history together, while also sharing a proclivity to self-diagnose crises. Instead of taking these assessments at face value, this paper treats them as an object of study, asking what conditions have fueled them. In the case of organizational sociology, there are indications of a connection between rising levels of discontent and community building: self-identified organizational sociologists have progressively withdrawn from general debates in the discipline and turned their attention to organization studies, which, they suspect, has seen dramatic levels of growth at their expense. Organization studies, on the other hand, are still haunted by “a Faustian bargain”: leaning heavily on the authority of the social sciences, business school faculty were able to facilitate the emergence of a scholarly field of practice dedicated to the study of organizations, which they control. However, in doing so, they also set organization studies on a path of continued dependence on knowledge produced elsewhere: notably, by university disciplines such as sociology.

Organizations remain a vital sociological topic, but organizational sociology, as a subfield, has evolved significantly since its inception. In this paper, I argue that organization sociology is becoming increasingly disconnected from organizational theory, as currently conceived. The focus of sociological research on organizations has become more empirically grounded in the study of social problems and how organizations contribute to them. Sociologists continue to see organizations as important actors in society that play a role in shaping social order and as contexts in which social processes play out. I propose two main sociological approaches for organizational research, which I describe as “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as platforms and locations of social interactions and the building of community. These approaches are somewhat disconnected from the sort of grand theorizing that characterizes much of organizational theory. I argue that the problem-oriented sociology of these two approaches offers a vital way for organizational scholars to expand and theoretically revitalize the field.