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Abstract
<jats:p>This article analyses faculty and student views on the university's strategies to improve its rankings in Uzbekistan. The current literature on the reform of university rankings in Uzbekistan has mainly been based on university leadership and national policy perspectives. This study instead explores two groups of stakeholders who typically interact more directly with daily practice and experience in higher education – faculty and students. The empirical material is comprised of two faculty focus-group sessions and three student sessions with five students from four institutions. Based on academic capitalism, street-level bureaucracy, institutional theory and signalling theory, two opposing patterns are identified. The evidence presented by the faculty indicates that there is a pattern of documenting compliance to meet higher levels of ranking, and the fact of the matter is that it does not need to be done this way. The other disconnection is student-expressed: four out of the five students indicated that they did not take into account the results of international rankings when choosing a university to attend; students primarily considered the quality of teaching, the infrastructure, interaction with the faculty, career opportunities, and the perceived strength of the discipline. The results indicate that, in addition to the 'implementation decoupling' of formal reporting activity and substantive organisational change, the audience decoupling of ranking goals and the information agenda of existing students is possible. Ranking strategy should, therefore, be assessed in terms of external indicators, but also in terms of internal experience of stakeholders.</jats:p>