The colonising effect: Marketisation and the discursive enactment of institutional identity on Ghanaian universities’ website

Abstract

The relationship between discourses of marketization and the institutional discourses of higher education has been widely explored. The focus has been on discerning the ways whereby discourses of marketization have come to colonize institutional discourses, and shape the identities, as well as the purposes of higher education institutions. A major research trend on the relationship between marketization and higher education has been the reliance on promotional discourse genres. The literature on how marketization has come to shape online institutional discourses in Ghana is scant. This study explores how the discourses of marketization have shaped the types of identities that are enacted through the international students’ section on the websites of two leading institutions. The study draws on the dialectical relational approach to CDA (Fairclough, 2013), as the principal methodological and analytical framework. The findings show that the discourses of marketization have colonized institutional discourses, thus greatly affecting institutions’ construal of instrumental, entrepreneurial, and globalized identities. In addition, the paper explores how the verbal and visual modes were used in complementarity, in the performance of institutional discourses. The study concludes by arguing that higher education institutions in Ghana will have to construe identities that are more academically oriented.