SEMIOTICIZING CAPITALISM IN CORPORATE BRAND ENACTMENT

Abstract

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.

KEYWORDS:

• corporate branding
• neoliberal governmentality
• semiotic enactment
• Singapore universities
• metaphor
• modality

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University for permission to reproduce Figure 1 and Figures 2 and 3 respectively.

Notes

1. Singapore's corporatized universities are the NUS, NTU, SMU and, most recently, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), which opened its doors in 2012. In this article, I draw mainly on material from the three older universities.

2. In the case of SMU, for instance, there were more than 10 applicants for every available place even when it was just starting up (Teo, 2000). This is similar for Singapore's fourth and newest corporatized university, SUTD, which admitted less than 10% of the applicants for its pioneer intake in 2012 (Lin, 2012).

3. As is the convention, conceptual metaphors and their domains are given in small capitals.

4. Need is not a full modal, and can be either lexical or modal. Although its occurrence in the context of stipulating admissions requirements is always lexical, I discuss it in the context of modal auxiliaries since there do not seem to be significant semantic differences between modal and lexical need.

Additional information

Carl Jon Way Ng recently completed his PhD at Lancaster University, UK, focusing on corporate branding in Singapore's HE sector. His academic interests lie broadly in the area of critical discourse analysis, particularly of corporate and political discourses. He is also interested in issues of identity in the context of contemporary capitalism.