Marketing Higher Education: The Promotion of Relevance and the Relevance of Promotion

Abstract

This paper examines the marketization of higher education. It takes the curriculum development for a degree sponsored by industry as a focus for exploring the involvement of industry and, more specifically, prospective employers, in shaping higher education provision. Empirical material gathered from a three and a half‐year ethnographic study is used to illustrate how mundane promotional work associated with sponsored curricula operates to reconstitute higher education. It is shown how, in the process of introducing sponsored curricula into the university, a market relevance discourse is merged with traditional discourse to promote a new discursive order and thereby contribute to the reformation of university education. This hybrid discourse (of tradition and relevance) makes traditional resistance to the encroachment of “relevance” into university education more difficult to justify, and perhaps impossible to sustain. Nonetheless, it produces new antagonisms that provide future sites of resistance.

Keywords:

• Higher Education
• Marketing
• Relevance
• Industry
• Discourse Analysis

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Lowrie

Anthony Lowrie is an ESRC funded research fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He has recently completed his doctorate at Cambridge and was a teaching fellow at Loughborough University from 1998 to 2002. His publications and research interests are in the fields of marketing higher education and marketing communications.

Hugh Willmott

Hugh Willmott is Professorial Research Fellow at Cardiff University Business School, having previously been Diageo Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. His research in higher education has focused upon processes of commodification, organizational change and research assessment. Further details can be found on his homepage: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/hr22/hcwhome.