To examine the discursive strategies deployed by community colleges to sustain legitimacy in an evolving and contradictory institutional environment.
Method:
Using corpus linguistics software, I compared 1,009 mission statements from 2012-2013 with a reference corpus of 427 mission statements from 2004.
Results:
Keywords analysis, collocation analysis, and concordance analysis suggest that mission statements have changed along four discourse trajectories: credentialing structures, pedagogies, practices, and curriculum goals.
Contributions:
These findings situate the community college as a point of entry into understanding the relations among institutional legitimacy and a changing cultural, political, and economic milieu.
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