The marketisation of education is not a new phenomenon. What is ‘new’, as Morrish & Sauntson pinpoint, is a neoliberal impulse, where most universities now ‘feel obliged to cast themselves as simulacra of profit-making organisations’ (1). Drawing on analytical tools from applied linguistics, the authors offer a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a wide data set to demonstrate how neoliberal ideologies underpin institutional practices in (British) universities, observable through the striking homogeneity in different institutions’ marketised discourse.
In the introduction, Morrish & Sauntson begin by aligning this book with critical university studies, a nascent field that investigates the interrelationships between neoliberalism, economic and political developments, and changes in higher education. They posit that a linguistic approach to examining the discourses arising from managerial universities will make a contribution to the field. They then outline the systematic analytical framework used in the book. This framework includes corpus linguistic methodologies (mainly keyword and concordance analyses), strategically deployable shifters (SDS) analysis, critical metaphor analysis, appraisal analysis, and multimodal critical discourse analysis.
In chapter 1, the authors contextualise their research by detailing the transmogrification of British universities by managerialism and corporatisation since the 1970s. Against this backdrop, four themes explored in subsequent chapters are introduced: student as consumer (chapter 2), marketing the university (chapter 3), audit culture (chapters 4 and 5) and the corporate academic (chapter 6). In total, eight case studies are presented.
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the consumerist positioning of students and the self-promotion of universities in genres such as student union websites, prospectuses, and mission statements. Even though students are constructed as consumers whose demands and evaluations are valued, the authors argue that this is a strategy to mould them into ‘less democratic and neoliberal subjects’ (89). Chapters 4 and 5 reveal the surveillance faced by academics in light of ‘performance management’. Through examining SDS that refer to indefinable qualities and sport/war metaphors, the authors underline a demeaning and hostile environment counter-productive to both research and teaching. Its consequences, which sadly include suicide cases of university lecturers, clearly show that research and teaching assessment exercises are far from the ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ as promised at the outset. Chapter 6 presents a further case on how pervasive managerialism is by analysing a corpus of staff training materials. Recurring discoursal manifestations of neoliberal values found previously are again identified. The authors claim that the prevalence of such discourse has led to the formation of a subjectivity that coerces academics to always feel insecure.
Overall, the analysis chapters highlight the key role of language in the increasingly commercialised nature of universities, which accords with previous CDA studies. In the conclusion (chapter 7), Morrish & Saunton iterate that resistance to neoliberalism is not impossible. However, few have done enough to offer alternatives. The authors themselves suggest several discursive alternatives, including reducing the use of SDS and replacing sport/wars metaphors with ‘more organic’ ones (i.e. those associated with nature). They also call for the contribution from critical linguists to raising awareness and ‘re-writing the language of higher education’ (233).
