Investigating rankings in the field of business education, we aim to examine field structuration process to understand how categories build symbolic value in an institutional field. We selected twenty reputed business schools from Pakistan and the United Kingdom (UK) through purposive sampling method. Adopting the concept of data triangulation, we gathered empirical evidences through interviews with business school marketing managers, academic experts in the field of marketing and reputation, and with industry experts. This data was further supplemented by variety of secondary sources such as internal student surveys, annual reports, newsletters and industry reports to perform a thematic analysis adopted in this study. Thematic analysis helped us to develop a model of institutional work and field level change by emphasizing on the key role categorization systems (rankings) in shaping perceptions of symbolic value (reputation). Our findings suggest, categorization tools create a contest at different levels. Consequently, it redefines the perception about value in the field. The current study may be useful for academia and Higher Education policy-makers by providing them with a theoretical understanding of categorization systems such as university rankings and the changing perception of value in the field.

The current study is an attempt to critically analyze the role and politics of voice in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns in terms of categorical and stereotypical representation of the Pashtuns. It is a critical discourse study (Norman Fairclough, 1989, 2018) of the selected data. Moreover, the data is viewed from the perspective of critical discourse studies. The novels under study are polyphonic in nature, and the characters belong to various Afghan ethnic backgrounds, like the Pashtuns, the Tajiks and the Hazaras. The study concludes that the novelist's choice of the characters with their respective voices and the roles assigned to them are political, ideological and somewhat biased. The Pashtuns have been stereotypically represented by categorizing them as the social, well-educated and more or less liberal Pashtuns, the tribal and traditionalist Pashtuns, extremist and fundamentalist Pashtuns, like Taliban. Misrepresentation of the tribal and fundamentalist Pashtuns as racists, ethnic nationalists, ideologists, sexists, exclusionists, traditionalists and power-abusers is indicative of the novelist's biasedness and exaggeration.