| Summary: | This article presents a sociology of journal classifications in economics and management. Based on extensive documentary sources and complementary interviews, it analyses the trajectory of the journal ranking of the French National Committee for Scientific Research 37th section, from its premises in 2001 to its current version, and shows four main production and transformation steps. The journal ranking is first conceived as a social justice tool devoted to candidates and research units, largely based on an external expertise. It then becomes a reasoned categorization, solidified through the reviewing of shareable arguments by an internal committee in order to resist to the comparison with other classifications. Then, the French Evaluation Agency for Research and Higher Education establishes it as an evaluation and counting instrument, based on an almost identical content, but whose proper use is radically transformed. Finally, it is a part of a much longer list of journals only used to calculate the rate of “productive in terms of research and results’ exploitation” academics. Each of these classifications is systematically produced with revision or update clauses: they are straightaway defined as temporary, subjected to certain forms of criticisms, thus ontologically unstable. Therefore, they are submitted to an ever going publication/uses/revisions cycle, providing new frontiers and professional norms.
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