I am a sociologist, with a particular interest in elites and in how educational and social hierarchies are produced and justified. I hold a postdoctoral position at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, and I am a researcher at Uppsala University, where I got my PhD in 2024. At Borås I work on ENSURE, funded by the Swedish Energy Agency, on how the quality and societal impact of energy research can be assessed.
In my dissertation, The World-Class Ordination, I studied global university rankings using Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, combined with historical analysis, multiple correspondence analysis and social network analysis. I found that the rankings measure how closely an institution resembles the American Ivy League and Oxbridge. Internationalisation turns out to be a secondary dimension of that space. What structures it is reputation, together with a division between old institutions holding Nobel Prizes and younger ones producing high citation counts.
More generally, I study how evaluation produces hierarchy, and how its results come to look like the natural order of things. Together with Emil Bertilsson I have studied students from elite families in Chile who lack the grades for the most prestigious programmes, and how they use expensive private universities and preparatory years to hold on to their position.
At the Institute for Futures Studies I am a postdoctoral researcher on Fragmentation or cohesion? Networks and organizations of the Swedish power elite, a four-year project led by Anna Tyllström and funded by the Swedish Research Council, with Nils Gustafsson (Lund University), Anton Grau Larsen (Roskilde University), and Christoph Houman Ellersgaard (Copenhagen Business School). We are mapping the Swedish power elite and asking whether its sectors are connected to each other or stand apart. My responsibility is the data. I build the network of individuals and the organisations they belong to out of public registers, and I work on the biographical mapping of the people that network identifies, using large language models to extract education, career and social background from public sources.
For more information about me, visit https://pablolc.net
