Think about the last time you checked a ranking or rating before making a decision. Maybe it was a TripAdvisor score when booking a hotel, a movie rating before choosing what to watch, or a Trustpilot ranking as you looked for a reliable local tradesperson. Today, ratings, rankings and league tables are everywhere. They are no longer the domain of sports teams or individuals. There are different types: some are rating aggregators, like TripAdvisor, that pool user-generated ratings together; others are expert critics, like restaurant critics and financial analysts, who use a more subjective methodology; and others are produced by organisations using quantitative methods, like corporate ESG ratings. Across all these scales, companies are evaluated in many ways. From credit ratings by Moody’s to Fortune’s Most Admired Companies, these scores shape reputations and guide the decisions of clients, partners, and stakeholders, influencing billions of pounds in economic activity. The numbers and lists can feel authoritative too. We may sometimes wonder “How did they calculate that?” – but we still use them. And companies pay attention, because rankings can affect customers, investors, and regulators. But here’s the question rarely explored: Who makes these rankings, and how are they actually built? MEET THE RANKINGS ENTREPRENEUR For our work, we are interested in producers who create their own ranking or rating based on a quantitative methodology. In business and policy, many rankings and ratings are made by what researchers call benchmark producers. These can be big names like Standard & Poor’s (credit ratings) or the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (ESG ratings), but also smaller producers that rate companies on specific issues, such as human rights (e.g., BankTrack), climate action (e.g., CDP), or animal welfare (e.g., Business benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare – BBFAW). Our research focused on one such small but fascinating producer: Seafood Intelligence (SI). Between 2011 and 2017, SI published an annual transparency rating of around 35 of the world’s largest salmon producers, who between them accounted for about 80% of global production. Why salmon, you might ask? Although the industry is highly concentrated, it is economically and environmentally significant – worth billions of pounds, and growing rapidly, it significantly impacts the ecologies and communities where it operates and beyond. Key impacts include changes to the surrounding habitat and impact on local species, employment and labour practices, and sourcing of fish feed materials. The person behind SI was a former journalist turned rankings entrepreneur: creating a rating not just to measure performance, but to change it. For this benchmark producer, boosting transparency was both a way to improve industry sustainability and to make information available for journalistic reporting and analysis. BEHIND THE SCENES Most people think rankings are rather technical: you crunch the numbers, follow a method, and out comes a 24 |
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