Numerous countries have implemented excellence initiatives designed to establish world-class universities, boost research productivity, build up staff capacity, and thereby reform doctoral education systems as part of this agenda. To date, the relationship between excellence-driven initiatives and leading universities' doctoral education…

Neoliberalism is becoming more dominant in education internationally. In Hungary, the marketisation of education is well illustrated by the government's 'Vocational Training in the Service of the Economy' development concept and the amendment of the vocational law. My main question is how the capitalist system reproduces itself through vocational…

This paper offers a linguistic approach to narrative analysis, illustrated through a quantitative/qualitative lexico-semantic study of sustainability reports by BP, Equinor, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil. It contributes novel insights into how major CO2 emitters present themselves in climate narratives. My aim is, first, to show how the basic…

Social media offer an unprecedented opportunity for companies to interact more closely with customers and market their products and services. But social media also present reputational risks as negative word-of-mouth can spread more quickly and widely through these platforms than ever before. This study investigates how companies respond to…

A political discourse would comprise terminology related to economic development, social welfare, national identity, international relations, and security. The purpose of this study was to determine the function of political discourse and study its role as a mass media that shapes public opinion, and to prove through discourse that political…

Community engagement has played central roles in tertiary education, expanding the potentials for academic as well as civic enhancement. Such efforts are often undertaken in part with the use of metrics, as tertiary education institutions attempt to reach various community audiences with quantitatively-supported defenses of their missions, through…

This article employs critical discourse analysis of the Spear's Schools Index of 'the best private schools in the world', the first such global ranking of schools, to understand representations of elite education in globalised societies. It argues that the Index is a powerful text that exemplifies a global gaze -- an imagined perspective from…

This study investigates how talent cultivation contributes to creating world-class universities in China from the perspectives of characteristics, problems, and choices. A policy discourse perspective is applied to examine the overall landscape of policy formulation and implementation, relatively. It explores the policy discourse analysis of…

In this paper, we investigate how highly ranked business schools construct their legitimacy claims by analysing their online organisational communication. We argue that in the case of higher education institutions in general, and business schools in particular, the discursive formation of these legitimacy claims is strongly connected to the…

We gain much of our knowledge from other people. Because people are fallible--they lie, mislead, and are mistaken--it seems essential to monitor their claims and their reliability as sources of information. An intuitive way to do this is to draw on our expectations about claims and sources: to perform expectation-based updating (Hahn, Merdes,…

This article examines the development of a university's advertising campaign through the discursive justifications of the university's communications office, its deans, and the advertising agency involved in the process. Empirical material is gathered from a three-year-long ethnographic research. Drawing on the notion of floating signifier, we…

The Western-style internationalisation of Russian universities, which guided the evolution of the country's higher education sector for over three decades, has been challenged by Western sanctions following the 2022 Russian 'Special military operation in Ukraine'. The authors show through the prism of constructivist theory how the norm on the…

This article discusses new philanthropy participation in public education in the context of the broader transnational policymaking landscape. Drawing on data published by the Lemann Foundation on its official Twitter, now known as X, along with previous research from the authors, this article examines how policy problems are framed for the general…

This study aims to critically and systematically investigate the contemporary discourse within scholarship on world-class universities in different higher education context. It applies critical discourse analysis to review articles from some top higher education academic journals and books published between 2000 and 2019. Exploring the notion of…

The aims of this study were: (1) to identify the general description of the frequency of use of DMs (adding something) in the Thesis' Abstracts of Ph.D. writing; and (2) to investigate the relationship between the numbers of DMs (adding something) contribute in the Thesis' Abstracts of Ph.D. writing. The quantitative and qualitative in discourse…