Branding devices in place: Neoliberal academic event posters in a Hong Kong university

Abstract

Operating as a hegemonic, market-driven governmentality, neoliberalism has been colonizing academic institutions and academic professionals’ everyday lives globally. This article demonstrates how several sets of academic event posters displayed at a public Hong Kong university work as spatialized multimodal branding devices that discursively entangle certain types of individuals, activities, institutions, and political economy under a specific mode of neoliberal governmentality. It shows that the posters position the university and its academic units as internationally competitive, Global-North-oriented knowledge enterprises in a mutually shaping relationship with a globalized neoliberal political economy par excellence in Asia. The study signals the need for research on neoliberal academic discourses to pay closer attention to the spatialized, multi-semiotic nature of discursive practices and the multi-layered institutional, politico-economic and cultural contexts in which the neoliberal discourses are situated.

Keywords

Academic event posters Critical Discourse Analysis geosemiotics Hong Kong marketization multimodality Neoliberalism university

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Agha

(2015) Tropes of branding in forms of life. Signs and Society 3(1): 174–194.

Altbach

(2012) The globalization of college and university rankings. Change The Magazine of Higher Learning 44(1): 26–31.

Blommaert

(2007) Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(1): 1–19.

Bourdieu

(1988) Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cannizzo

(2018) Tactical evaluations: Everyday neoliberalism in academia. Journal of Sociology 54(1): 77–91.

Canagarajah

De Costa

(2016) Introduction: Scales analysis, and its uses and prospects in educational linguistics. Linguistics and Education 34: 1–10.

Carr

Lempert

(2016) Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Chow

Loo

(2017) Higher education activities in world cities: A spatial study of global leadership and connectivity. In: Mok

(ed.) Managing International Connectivity, Diversity of Learning and Changing Labour Markets: East Asian Perspectives. Singapore: Springer, pp.91–104.

Cook

(2001) The Discourse of Advertising, 2nd edn. Oxon: Routledge.

10.

Dunmire

(2011) Projecting the Future Through Political Discourse: The Case of the Bush Doctrine. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

11.

Fairclough

(1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

12.

Fairclough

(1993) Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: The universities. Discourse & Society 4(2): 133–168.

13.

Feng

(2019) Interdiscursivity, social media and marketized university discourse: A genre analysis of universities’ recruitment posts on WeChat. Journal of Pragmatics 143: 121–134.

14.

Flowerdew

(2004) The discursive construction of a world-class city. Discourse & Society 15(5): 579–605.

15.

Flubacher

Del Percio

(eds) (2017) Language, Education and Neoliberalism: Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

16.

Goldhaber

(1997) The attention economy and the net. First Monday 2(4): 519.

17.

Goldman

Papson

(2006) Capital’s brandscapes. Journal of Consumer Culture 6(3): 327–353.

18.

Harvey

(1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.

19.

Holmwood

(2014) From social rights to the market: Neoliberalism and the knowledge economy. International Journal of Lifelong Education 33(1): 62–76.

20.

Hsu

Song

(2013) Destination image in travel magazines: A textual and pictorial analysis of Hong Kong and Macau. Journal of Vacation Marketing 19(3): 253–268.

21.

Hyland

(2011) The presentation of self in scholarly life: Identity and marginalization in academic homepages. English for Specific Purposes 30(4): 286–297.

22.

Hyon

(2011) Evaluation in tenure and promotion letters: Constructing faculty as communicators, stars, and workers. Applied Linguistics 32(4): 389–407.

23.

Kheovichai

(2014) Marketized university discourse: A synchronic and diachronic comparison of the discursive constructions of employer organizations in academic and business job advertisements. Discourse & Communication 8(4): 371–390.

24.

Kress

van Leeuwen

(2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Graphic Design, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

25.

Ledin

Machin

(2016) A discourse–design approach to multimodality: The visual communication of neoliberal management discourse. Social Semiotics 26(1): 1–18.

26.

Lin

(2009) Local interpretation of global management discourses in higher education in Hong Kong: Potential impact on academic culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10(2): 260–274.

27.

WYW

(2017) The recalibration of neoliberalisation: Repoliticising higher education policy in Hong Kong. Higher Education 73(5): 759–773.

28.

WYW

(2018) Hybridization and higher education governance in Hong Kong. Journal of Asian Public Policy 11(1): 14–27.

29.

Lorés

(2020) Science on the web: The exploration of European research websites of energy-related projects as digital genres for the promotion of values. Discourse Context & Media 35: 100389.

30.

Lou

(2010) Chinatown transformed: Ideology, power, and resources in narrative place-making. Discourse Studies 12(5): 625–647.

31.

Lou

(2017) Spaces of consumption and senses of place: A geosemiotic analysis of three markets in Hong Kong. Social Semiotics 27(4): 513–531.

32.

Machin

(2016) The need for a social and affordance-driven multimodal critical discourse studies. Discourse & Society 27(3): 322–334.

33.

Mafofo

Banda

(2014) Accentuating institutional brands: A multimodal analysis of the homepages of selected South African universities. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 32(4): 417–432.

34.

Mok

(2015) Research, development and innovation in Asia Pacific Higher Education. In: Hawkins

Mok

(eds) Questing for Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Enhancing Global Competitiveness in Hong Kong: Academic Reflections. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.115–134.

35.

Mok

(2018) Does internationalisation of higher education still matter? Critical reflections on student learning, graduate employment and faculty development in Asia. Higher Education Quarterly 72(3): 183–193.

36.

Mok

Cheung

ABL

(2011) Global aspirations and strategising for world-class status: New form of politics in higher education governance in Hong Kong. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 33(3): 231–251.

37.

Morrish

Sauntson

(2020) Academic Irregularities: Language and Neoliberalism in Higher Education. London: Routledge.

38.

CJW

(2014) Semioticizing capitalism in corporate brand enactment: The case of Singapore’s corporatized universities. Critical Discourse Studies 11(2): 139–157.

39.

CJW

(2018) Performing brand identity: Situating branding in discursive-ideological landscapes. Consumption Markets and Culture 21(2): 147–170.

40.

CJW

(2019) “You are your only limit”: Appropriations and valorizations of affect in university branding. Journal of Sociolinguistics 23(2): 121–139.

41.

O’Regan

Gray

(2018) The bureaucratic distortion of academic work: A transdisciplinary analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework in the age of neoliberalism. Language and Intercultural Communication 18(5): 533–548.

42.

Porsché

Scholz

Singh

(eds) (2022) Institutionality - Studies of Discursive and Material (Re-)ordering. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

43.

Scollon

(2003) Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge.

44.

Slaughter

Cantwell

(2012) Transatlantic moves to the market: The United States and the European Union. Higher Education 63(5): 583–606.

45.

Tang

Scherer

Morrison

(2011) Web site–based destination images: A comparison of Macau and Hong Kong. Journal of China Tourism Research 7(1): 2–19.

46.

Thurlow

(2019) Semiotic creativities in and with space: Binaries and boundaries, beware! International Journal of Multilingualism 16(1): 94–104.

47.

Van Leeuwen

(2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

48.

Wegener

(1992) Concepts and measurement of prestige. Annual Review of Sociology 18: 253–280.

49.

Xiong

(2012) Discourse and marketization of higher education in China: The genre of advertisements for academic posts. Discourse & Society 23(3): 318–337.

50.

Zhang

O’Halloran

(2013) ‘Toward a global knowledge enterprise’: University websites as portals to the ongoing marketization of higher education. Critical Discourse Studies 10(4): 468–485.