Academic capitalization and public relations communication in higher education: a diachronic genre analysis of university annual reports in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

The academic capitalization in higher education has aroused much public attention with its impact on every aspect of universities. To survive in the market, universities in Hong Kong have been striving to build desirable images among stakeholders in public communication. Drawing upon critical genre theory and the notion of interdiscursivity, this study examines the annual reports of six universities in Hong Kong from academic year 1994/95 to 2015/16. Analysis shows that the genre of university annual reports is a hybridity of management discourse, reporting discourse, and public relation discourse. Such hybridity reflects the multi-facet nature of academic capitalization influenced by corporate values of managerialism, public accountability, promotionalization, and stakeholder orientation. The diachronic analysis indicates an increasing awareness of branding and public relations in university public communication. The study contributes to the previously overlooked research on university public relations communication, as well as to the understanding of academic capitalization and its development in Hong Kong.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic capitalization
• university annual reports
• interdiscursivity
• genre
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The selected universities are ranked as top six in Hong Kong by QS World University Ranking 2016–2020. Retrieved from https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings by 15 January 2021.

2. For instance, the first volume of review report by CUHK was published in 1970. It was titled The First Six Years, covering the years 1963 to 1969. However, it was not until 1993 that the university began to issue annual reports regularly on yearly basis. Retrieved from https://www.iso.cuhk.edu.hk/english/pub/annual-report/ by 15 January 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under Grant 1-ZE7U; Guangdong University of Foreign Studies under Grant 19QN04.

Notes on contributors

Yi Deng

Yi Deng is a Lecturer at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Her research interests include business and institutional communication, (multimodal) discourse analysis, pragmatics. Her works have been published in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics and Lingua.

Dezheng (William) Feng

Dezheng (William) Feng, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on the critical and multimodal discourse analysis of various media and communication practices. His publications appeared in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse and Communication, Visual Communication, and Critical Arts.