How institutions represent their image of world-class university on websites

• In Event: Student mobility

Proposal

Context and Background
With the growing importance of knowledge production for economic development in the global economy, higher education institutions as well as governments over the world have started global quests to build world-class universities (WCUs), satisfying the global standards of education and obtaining global prestige (Altbach & Salmi, 2011; Byun, Jon, & Kim, 2013; Rhoads, Li & Ilano, 2014; Shin & Kehm, 2013). Developing WCUs seems to be equated with achieving greater research performance and rising in the global university rankings in diverse higher education systems. WCU projects are prevalent and highlighted in the non-Anglo-American countries, especially in Asian countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea (Shin & Kehm, 2013). Pursuing this image of WCUs, research-oriented universities with high global standing, governments and higher education institutions (HEIs) in these nations made special efforts to review their educational practices and restructure their education systems (Deem, Mok & Lucas, 2008).
Among these various initiatives for building WCUs, a growing number of institutions recognized the importance of the web visibility which might significantly determine people’s perceptions on institutional prestige or image (Lee & Park, 2012). This is because institutional websites serve as mighty tools to share immense information on their practices and outcomes, and communicate with their internal or external audiences (Saichaie, 2011). As building a WCU became one of the most important agenda items in the aforementioned countries, HEIs have developed distinctive languages either in textual or visual forms to represent their world class images on their websites. Despite these increased interests on how to depict their institutions as WCUs on the websites, few researchers examined the language used on those websites focusing on the WCU initiatives. Previous studies on the institutional websites seemed to examine the textual and visual representations used on the websites only as a tool to maximize the efficiency of marketing for student recruitment (Saichaie, 2011).
Considering this growing importance of institutional websites as multi-purpose tools to communicate with a wide variety of audiences, examining the contents of websites from more diverse perspectives would be helpful to understand the institutions themselves, as organizations. Through the analyses on different aspects of institutional representation, researchers could investigate the underlying intentions and meanings of institutional image-making processes. Also, these expanded approaches greatly increase the knowledge on specific higher education issues. For this case, by examining the textual and visual languages of WCUs on websites, it would be possible to find out how HEIs interpret the meaning of being WCUs and how the global quest for WCUs influences the institutional practices.

Research Question and Methodology
The principal research question guiding this study is how universities use language to represent their WCU status on institutional websites. Under this question, this study will analyze both textual and visual language used on the websites and understand the underlying discourse of WCU at broader levels. To establish clearer directions and foci of the whole study, these following questions delineate which areas will be examined specifically. 1) How is the image of WCU represented in the language of institutional websites? 2) What similarities or dissimilarities exist in the language to represent the WCU status of institutions for domestic and international audiences? 3) What similarities or dissimilarities exist in the language to represent the WCU status of institutions according to different institutional types and contexts?
To address these questions, this study adopted a qualitative research approach to understand the meanings of the language used on institutional websites, which would be constructed by individual colleges and universities as collective social entities. Among a variety of qualitative analytic approaches, critical discourse analysis (CDA) was applied as a conceptual framework and analytic tool to explore and interpret the nature of language represented on institutional websites. CDA, consisting of three different dimensions—Textual, Process, and Societal Analyses—is an efficient method and framework at the same time to examine discourse and the relevant meaning in socially situated contexts (Fairclough, 1992).

Sampling
Although many HEIs in Asian and European countries use their institutional websites to promote their world-class images, this study focused on four 4-year research-oriented universities in China and South Korea. The institutions investigated in this research included Peking University, Tsinghua University, Seoul National University, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which have been recognized as leading institutions and highly ranked both in the domestic and international university rankings. The scope and sampling of research were decided by a set of criteria including the researchers’ accessibility and previous research on institutional websites. In the case of investigating online contents as in this study, purposeful sampling has been recommended as an appropriate method to select specific samples providing detailed information (Creswell, 2014). Therefore, this study examined the textual and visual language representing the WCU on the institutional websites of the four HEIs, including both of their English (for international audiences) and Chinese/Korean versions (for domestic audiences).

Findings and Implications
From the language of the websites, these four institutions shared similar characteristics in representing themselves online. The institutions claimed that they have contributed to the building of their nations and aimed to become a world-class institution through their productive research. All four cases articulated their aspirations to become world-class universities by emphasizing their research capacity and international cooperation. The textual and visual language used to display these features were almost identical across the institutions and countries. In addition, the institutions used images showing their science/engineering laboratories to underline their research capabilities and their international interactions with western scholars to stress their global aspects. This might lead to some critical questions such as “How do Asian institutions naturalize WCU initiatives as their ideological norms?” and “How do Asian institutions create these dominant images of WCUs?” The findings of this study might provide a critical insight to examine the underlying meanings and influences of the WCU initiatives in and explore an alternative approach to enhance the higher education systems in the East Asian countries beyond the global rankings.

Authors

• Sohyeon Bae, Michigan State University

• Adam Grimm, Michigan State University