As a result of globalization and the digital revolution, the concept of creativity has become increasingly central to education policy and practice. On the one hand, the calls for creativity are driven by an economic imperative. The argument is that there has been a shift from an industrial-based economy to a knowledge-based economy to a creative…

Slaughter and Rhoades (2009) developed the theory of academic capitalism to explain the market-like behaviors of colleges and universities, which has been made more prevalent by the rise in neoliberal ideology and the new knowledge-based economy. Bok (2003), Giroux (2003), and others have warned against these market-like behaviors as a threat to…

This study analyzes the internal and external forces that led to the creation and revisions of a community college's mission statement over the course of its 53-year history. We used discourse-historical analysis to examine published college mission statements, transcripts of interviews with the founding dean of the college, and the college's…

Prior research has analyzed the purpose and composition of athletic mission statements, but no prior work has moved beyond athletic mission statements and toward athletic diversity mission statements. Specifically, this study sought to understand the prevalence of both athletic mission and diversity mission statements and how National Collegiate…

This paper examines how internationalisation of higher education institutions is reflected through their mission and vision statements by comparatively analysing the mission and vision statements of selected universities in Malaysia and the Philippines. To carry out the study, twenty (20) mission and vision statements of public and private…

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have mission statements as a matter of course. This article analyses 127 mission statements from UK HEIs, comprising 76.048% of the mainstream UK higher education sector. The statements were divided into the categories of Russell Group; Other; and Specialist Institution. A mixed methods research approach was…

This study investigates the changing discourses of the value of degrees in prospectuses between 1976 and 2013, chosen due to the massification of higher education and use of the particular marketing tool of prospectuses. This research analysed the messages in prospectuses through the period in four English higher education institutions of…

Corporate mission, a core part of corporate culture, plays an important role in the development and competition of companies. The study of mission statements is beneficial to both companies and stakeholders. This paper explores corporate mission from the perspective of linguistics on the basis of speech act theory and adaptation theory and reveals…

This paper examines how international schools negotiate the competing demands set forth by the discourses of ideological 'internationalism' and 'market-driven' multinationalism. This was accomplished through a critical discourse analysis of the mission statements of 46 Association of American Schools in South America (AASSA) member international…

In this paper, we critically analyze institutional mission statements as discursive texts replete with symbolic meaning, as we believe these texts reveal a great deal about the ways in which higher education remains increasingly stratified. We argue that beneath the generalized rhetoric of institutional mission statements, lie powerful messages…

This article presents findings from a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of mission and vision statements of 105 state and 66 private/foundation universities in Turkey. The paper combines a corpus-based approach with critical discourse analysis to interpret the data in relation to its institutional as well as socio-political context. It argues…

Recent news cycles have illuminated the disparate, racialized experiences of Black people in the United States but university leadership responses have been reactionary, or worse non-responsive. This study examines how university responses to national racial incidences such as the police brutality affect how faculty of color in one discipline…

Objective: To examine the discursive strategies deployed by community colleges to sustain legitimacy in an evolving and contradictory institutional environment. Method: Using corpus linguistics software, I compared 1,009 mission statements from 2012-2013 with a reference corpus of 427 mission statements from 2004. Results: Keywords analysis,…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are critical to the delivery of education for all in any nation state. What they believe and what they do are critical components to creating societal impact. But what they believe and do is not always clear. Using a derivative of SWIFT (Structured Word Identification and Frequency Totals), the authors examined…

This paper draws on the Republic of Ireland as a case study of the 'new' development advocacy, i.e. government, philanthropic, and celebrity humanitarian engagement with international development and statutory efforts to deepen understanding of international development among citizens in the global North (Biccum, 2010; 2011). It outlines some of…