Websites as institutional imaginary positionings

Abstract

The paper contributes to methodological innovations in the field of organisational education research and further education. The paper shows the potential of discourse-analytical website analysis for the imaginary positionings of Higher Education Institutions. It offers a discourse analytical research methodology and discusses University websites as surfaces of emergence of specific discourses. Discourse-analytical website analysis is especially significant as universities’ visually rich web-based communication is becoming increasingly critical. Our journal article reflects on websites as institutional imaginary positionings: First, we start by theorising organisations as orders of the gaze. Second, from a discourse-analytical power/knowledge based organisational education perspective, we make fruitful Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge for a multimodal website analysis. Third, we map the field and state the art of methods and methodologies of website analysis, including examples from a current research project on how transversal themes are represented on university websites. Our article contributes to methodological innovation through discourse-analytical website analysis in the field of organisational education and further education.