‘Toward a global knowledge enterprise’: university websites as portals to the ongoing marketization of higher education

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• university website
• critical discourse analysis
• hypermodal approach
• marketization
• consumer
• higher education

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the grant NRF2007IDM-IDM002-066 funded by the Interactive Digital Media Program Office under the National Research Foundation (NRF) in Singapore. The authors would like to thank Dr David Machin and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

The homepages are archived in Wayback Machine: http://www.archive.org.

http://www.nus.edu.sg/identity/intro/elements.htm. Retrieved October 7, 2008.

http://www.nus.edu.sg/identity/intro/elements.htm. Retrieved October 7, 2008.

A demoted link means a link to a webpage that used to be on a homepage is now no longer on the homepage, but the webpage is still available in the website.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kay L. O'Halloran

Current address: School of Education, Curtin University, Australia.