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What's for Sale at Canadian Universities? A Mixed‐Methods Analysis of Promotional Strategies
Author(s) -
Pizarro Milian Roger
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
higher education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.976
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1468-2273
pISSN - 0951-5224
DOI - 10.1111/hequ.12108
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , rhetoric , relation (database) , public relations , work (physics) , sociology , higher education , political science , marketing , business , engineering , law , mechanical engineering , ecology , philosophy , linguistics , database , computer science , biology
The current fiscal environment has driven Canadian universities to become more entrepreneurial, seeking out and competing over new sources of funding. Despite such intensifying competition, little effort has been made to document the promotional tactics that Canadian universities are using to render themselves appealing to external audiences. This study examines the contents of the home pages of English‐speaking universities in Canada. It finds that, though there are some differences in the tactics that primarily undergraduate and research‐intensive universities employ, both generally strive to emulate the same institutional ‘template’. Moreover, the usage of more unorthodox promotional tactics, drawing on labour market rhetoric or discourses of inclusivity, is limited. These findings are theorised in relation to contemporary work within organisational sociology and strategic management.