ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the representation of the notion of employability and the job-seeking ‘reality’. It is part of a wider research project that looks closely into the careers services se...

Using a critical ‘hypermodal approach’ informed by social semiotics, this paper investigates the changing discourses of marketization found on the website of the National University of Singapore over a 14-year period. Analysis of visual-spatial features and action potentials of progressive versions of the site reveals changes in the website functions, first from providing information about resources and expertise to addressing potential students as consumers of goods and of products offered by the university. Later we find the website pointing not so (...) much to education as a process of learning and mentoring but as a type of lifestyle, experience, and abstracted personal transformation and journey. Here the university positions itself increasingly in a global as opposed to national community, where students are to be fine-tuned to the new kinds of marketized demands this will bring. (shrink)

This article focuses on the global phenomenon of the marketization of higher education and how it has shaped the discourses of China’s top universities. By analyzing the university presidents’ messages published in the websites of 36 top-ranked universities in China, the aim is to ascertain the extent to which this institutionalized genre imbricates a marketizing role with other ideological imperatives. Informed by the theoretical principles of Critical Discourse Analysis and adopting a genre analysis methodological approach, we first examined the macro-level (...) rhetorical structure followed by a micro-level analysis of the discursive strategies used in the presidents’ messages. The findings reveal a dynamic interweaving of three distinct discursive strands – bureaucratic, conversational and advertising – constructed in and around the move structure of the presidents’ messages. This interdiscursive analysis reveals competing imperatives and contestations that reflect the dual role of the presidents’ messages to project a globalized, international outlook while maintaining an allegiance to political ideologies and national interests that top-ranked universities in China have to simultaneously negotiate. (shrink)

This paper explores how national socialist aesthetics and semiotics are regimented within the Swedish Nazi milieu today. In order to treat fascism as contemporary ideology, the article applies intertextuality and provenance as analytical concepts in the analysis of how Nazism is re-emerging discursively. The analysis contributes unique insights, as the dataset consists of extremist discourse aimed at providing members of the most prominent Swedish Nazi movement with guidance on how to embody and express national socialism in their everyday lives. The (...) analysis reveals that common-sense notions about ‘a natural life’ and mainstream aesthetics concerning an outdoor lifestyle emerge as central expressions of a ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ embodiment of national socialism. This aesthetic finds its ideological motive in opposition to a ‘sick’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘parasitical’ way of living. Mainstream notions are thus turned into vehicles for political extremism. (shrink)

In recent years critical discourse analysts have increasingly pointed to the World Wide Web as a distinctive site of discursive practice, and have urged that more research work be conducted with specifically web-based corpora. While the conduct of ‘wired CDA’ presents new possibilities for CDA, it also entails apparent dilemmas that stem from the scale of web-specific corpora and CDA's disciplinary remit to conduct close qualitative readings of relatively small sample texts. Social anthropology has grappled with similar dilemmas as the (...) relevance of trans-local ethnography in the contemporary world has become increasingly apparent, and in this process has developed productive analytical resources that might fruitfully inform wired CDA. This article explores a range of associated methodological issues, with particular emphasis on the identification and use of ‘keywords’ as a moment in the conduct of wired CDA. The paper looks at methodological precedents that frame the use of ‘keywords’ as an analytical category that shapes processes of data gathering and analysis, and argues that alternative categories are called for that address the peculiarity of the scaling capacities of the web. The paper proposes the analytical category ‘animating vernaculars’ as a supportive alternative to ‘keywords’, and argues for its relative focus on the scaled character of wired discourse practices. A study of the web presence of the transnational policy model ‘integrated water research management’ serves as a case study that concretizes the methodological discussion. (shrink)

In the past years, there has been an intensive discussion on the topic of academic freedom in the university. More precisely, it has been criticized that the university is confronted with a growing intolerance and the request to limit free speech. This contribution takes a case at a German university as point of departure. It shows how the current discussions draw on central figures of the philosophy of Enlightenment. In the first part of the paper, the ideas of free speech (...) following Kant, Mill, and Popper are presented. The second part of the article shows how these positions can also lead to an inversion or instrumentalization of Enlightenment thought. This is illustrated using exemplary statements from the case presented in the beginning of the article. In the third part of the article, the concept of higher education or Bildung will be discussed in relation to academic freedom. The guiding principle is an openness toward a pluralistic discourse that is to be framed by societal analysis, civility, and critique. (shrink)

Observations have been made about branding’s shift from a material to conceptual focus. Consequently, corporate branding has become more focused on associating and imbuing corporate brands with supposedly positive values and attributes. This article locates this emphasis in the context of Singapore’s marketized higher education sector, and examines how conceptual values like flexibility, freedom and empowerment are expressed linguistically and, more significantly, symbolized in and through photographic images in corporate brand communication. It is argued that while the circulation of conceptual (...) values in branding has arisen in part due to the imperatives of branding, the privileging of values like flexibility, freedom and empowerment is symptomatic of neoliberal capitalist influence and the subjection of higher education in Singapore to a knowledge-based economic logic. This helps to shape stakeholders’ concepts and expectations of higher education as well as public attitudes towards the neoliberal knowledge-based market system more broadly. (shrink)

Corporate organizations, in their corporate branding efforts, often associate or imbue themselves with values and attributes like dynamism, competitiveness and empowerment, which are reflective of post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalist ideology. This article examines how such values are semioticized by a particular group of organizations – Singapore's corporatized universities – as they enact their corporate brands both verbally and visually, specifically through metaphor and modality. In doing so, these organizations and their corporate brands are conceived of as nodes of neoliberal governmentality, where (...) they are subject to the regulatory influence of both the state and capital, while at the same time potentially exercising influence over brand recipients. The organizations' governmentalizing potential is actualized when stakeholders and brand supporters appropriate these corporate brands as symbolic and cultural resources in fashioning their individual subjectivities, making themselves amenable to the workings of capital, which in turn helps to sustain the prevailing neoliberal order. (shrink)

In critical discourse analysis, we have learned much about the nature of the marketized language that now dominates public institutions such as universities, playing a role in changing their identities. But less is known about the processes whereby this language enters the everyday practices of these institutions through documents that are used to manage teaching and research. What is the role of language in the shift to the way these activities are internally organized, managed, run and evaluated in terms of (...) productivity and market-based principles? In this paper we analyse a chain of documents taken from a wider corpus of management documents in Swedish universities to show how this language recontextualizes the practices of teaching and research. Our focus is on the important role played by lists, bullet points and tables and how these are central to decoupling language from work processes and so legitimizing this marketized discourse. The affordances of these multimodal structures allow complex processes and social relations to be abstracted, fragmented and treated as things. They are also important in allowing documents to form a complex self-referential information infrastructure. (shrink)

Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizational analysis of decision-making to compare how two university artificial intelligence labs manage ambiguities at the edge of scientific knowledge. One (...) lab focuses on garnering funding through commercialization schemes, while the other is oriented to federal science agencies. The ethnographic comparison identifies the mechanisms through which an industry-oriented lab can be highly adventurous yet produce a research program that is thin and erratic due to a priority placed on commercialization. However, the comparison does not yield an implicit nostalgia for federalized science; it reveals the mechanisms through which agency-oriented labs can pursue a thick and consistent research portfolio but in a strikingly myopic fashion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the representation of the notion of employability and the job-seeking ‘reality’. It is part of a wider research project that looks closely into the careers services sector within Higher Education Institutions in the United Kingdom. The chosen methodology, that is corpus-based critical discourse analysis, combined qualitative and quantitative methods and tools for the analysis of 2.6 million words deriving from 58 university websites, and more specifically the careers services sections. The analysis brings to light some (...) problematic, common-sense ideas that are being disseminated by these services and encourages the denaturalisation of the careers services’ discourse. It shows that the language used by careers services reproduces and promotes neoliberal ideology. In addition, it argues that the notion of employability could be interpreted as a pseudo-solution to the social problem of (youth) unemployment and fierce competition in the graduate job market. (shrink)

This article employs a sociological analysis of the changing role and mission of higher education from that of a ?public good? to that of a service industry. In this regard, the rise of modern universities as corporate enterprises in the recent decades has often neglected the important dimension of education as a process of enlightenment, with its ethical and moral dimensions. The author tries to put into perspective the relevance of searching for an ?ethical university? by proposing to integrate the (...) important notion of Enlightenment as formulated by Kant, Newman's idea of the university and other similar western ideals, with the eastern ideas of the Confucian Classic The Great Learning, in order to suggest how the quest for an ?ethical university? might materialize in the future. (shrink)

This article traces how students are represented in undergraduate prospectuses from 1998 to 2021 by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis of a 1.9 million word corpus of prospectuses from a single Russell Group university in England. Recent decades have witnessed an increase in tuition fees and competition to attract students; hence, it is important to understand to what extent, if any, the representation of students has changed in the prospectuses. Our findings add to the literature by showing (...) for the first time that the representation of students in prospectuses has shifted in ways consistent with the impact of market-driven policy on the sector. Initially, students were positioned primarily as learners, partners to the university, and members of a community. Latterly, students are positioned primarily as consumers and future professionals. These findings are significant because they capture the extent to which a market-driven agenda has been normalised by institutions, and demonstrate how this process of normalisation occurs. Even before they reach campus, young people are conditioned and defined by the market, with the prospectus presenting university as an opportunity to enhance earning power rather than to benefit from life-changing education. (shrink)

The world financial crisis of 2008 reached a head in the Eurozone in 2012, when major problems became apparent affecting several countries in Southern Europe. During this time, the British press focused particularly on Spain, watching the potentially volatile political situation with interest, and documenting the negotiations between Spanish and European leaders. This article considers how this situation was reported in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent, applying corpus linguistics techniques to identify salient aspects of the crisis and (...) to detect patterns in language use that had an ideological dimension. The 2012 crisis emerges mainly as a political issue, and the reporting focuses on solutions rather than causes or effects. However, even though these two publications are not noted for Euroscepticism, they both show a strong tendency to group South European countries together within a negative frame, collectivizing them and establishing a dichotomy with Northern Europe. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing mission statements from the UCT, UWC and Stellenbosch University, we explore how the three universities have rematerialised prior discourses to rebrand their identities as dictated by contemporary national and global aspirations. We reveal how the universities have recontextualised the experiences and discourses of liberation struggle and the new government's post-apartheid social transformation discourses to construct distinctive identities that are locally relevant and globally aspiring. This has led to the semiotic refiguring of universities from spatial edifices of racially based unequal (...) education, to equal opportunity institutions of higher learning, and to the blurring of historical boundaries between these universities. We conclude that the universities have reconstructed distinct and recognisable identities which speak to a segregated past, but with a post-apartheid voice of equity and redress. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the existing debate about the marketization of higher education and offers a detailed study of the way the practices of marketization manifest themselves at the level of discourse in higher education. Taking its point of departure in Critical Discourse Analysis and using a text-driven procedure for genre analysis, the article describes and analyses the international student prospectus as an instance of a highly promotional genre which clearly reflects the values and forces of the free (...) market. The article contains two analyses. The first analysis compares four instances of the international student prospectus genre from Finland, Scotland, Australia and Japan and tries to establish genre membership and genre characteristics by considering the overall text structure, and by looking for similarities in content and `rhetorical moves'. The second analysis is an in-depth analysis of the language use in the international student prospectus from the University of Stirling, Scotland. This analysis pays particular attention to the way the rhetorical moves and visual and lexico-grammatical features in the text are used to represent the two main participants in the text: the university and its students. Both analyses show that the student prospectus is trying to construct an image of the University of Stirling and its students which goes hand in hand with the new trend in higher education — namely that of offering innovative products to `demanding' clients on the look-out for the best possible `university experience'. (shrink)