Abstract
We investigate how competing forces interdiscursively manifest in Japan-based higher education through a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993, 1995). Higher education job advertisements are constitutive of institutions’ public images that are targeted toward academics in specific fields. They are discursive spaces where marketized discourse has colonized previously dominant discourses of universities as independent authorities (Fairclough, 1993, 1995). Such marketized discourses within higher education express neoliberal ideologies and free-market conventions (Ball, 1998; Pack, 2018). However, the international extent of university discourse marketization is largely implicitly assumed rather than empirically examined, hence we investigate these forces with respect to Japanese higher education.
Highlights
Higher education’s metrification trends are well-documented, with increasing use of characteristics as varied as publication outputs (Kuwayama, 2017), gender diversity (Wieczorek-Szymanska, 2020), and internationalization of universities (de Wit, 2009), to name but a few
We examine the following research questions: 1. How does marketisation manifest in Japan-based higher education institutions’ job advertisements? How do such representations compare across disciplines?
This study examines job advertisements to understand how the academic profession is represented in them using discourse analysis, which concerns the relationship between power and discourse (Foucault, 1972)
Summary
Higher education’s metrification trends are well-documented, with increasing use of characteristics as varied as publication outputs (Kuwayama, 2017), gender diversity (Wieczorek-Szymanska, 2020), and internationalization of universities (de Wit, 2009), to name but a few Such metrification is representative of the colonization of higher education discourses by neoliberal marketized discourses, which prioritize viewing institutions as businesses answering to stakeholders (Teichler, 2004; Brown, 2011). Such ideologies jeopardize characterizations of the academic profession as exhibiting “shared ethical codes, values, and morals, altruistic missions, esoteric knowledge, intellectual supremacy, the intrinsic definition of qualifications, quality of work and new members and organized unions” Marketization is understood as a force that “challenges stakeholders with radical change encompassing issues of power, funding, labour, markets, and complexity” (Lowrie & Hemsley-Brown, 2011, p. 1081) that reshapes and redefines the academic profession
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