My presentation for Work, Employment and Society 2013

1. Academy 2.0?
The Politics of Digital Change in Higher
Education

2. Social Media in Higher
Education
National organizations - RCUK, AHRC, ESRC,
NCRM, Professional Associations etc
University groups
Universities
Research projects
University services
Academic departments
Individual scholars

3. What purpose does this serve?
Enhancing institutional reputation and prestige
Social media engagement coming to be seen as
integral to marketing and communications
strategies
Need to ‘differentiate’ from other institutions
in increasingly competitive higher education
market
Need to build and sustain relations with
students (former and current) and alumni
Careful management of reputation integral to
this - social media as opportunity AND
threat

4. Five predictions for the future
of higher education marketing
“HEIs will become increasingly divergent and
differentiated”
“Investment will increase significantly”
“Marketing high-fliers will be attracted to HEIs”
“The use of customer relationship management (CRM) will
become widespread”
“Measurement of marketing effectiveness and return on
investment will become increasingly the norm”
Guardian Higher Education Network, 28thGuardian Higher Education Network, 28th
November 2011November 2011

5. Quadrant Consultants estimate HEIs spent between 0.75%
and 1.5% of their revenue on marketing, including
staff costs
They estimate at least 50% growth over next five years
“Students’ expectations are going to be higher; our
challenge is to show the value of coming to university
and getting a degree and the quality of the student
experience” - Kerry Law, director of external
relations at De Montfort University
Changing systemic environment in which HEIs compete
for the ‘best’ students because numbers are otherwise
capped.
But also vested interest in promoting a certain
conception of these challenges as integral to the
institution

6. The questionable efficacy of some of
this marketing activity invites the
construction of an apparatus to
assess it
Higher Education both is and is being
seen as a growth area for marketing
and communications
So what the implications of this...?

7. The Politics of
Circulation
“The outcomes and findings of social research have always circulated back
into the social world in variegated and often untraceable forms (Savage,
2010). But the changing media through which research is being
communicated opens this research up to a new range of possibilities for
circulation and re-appropriation. If it gets any attention, it will be
commented upon and rated (or ‘liked’) and, crucially, it will be re-
appropriated through sharing, re-tweeting, re-blogging and as sections of
the content (particularly visualizations) are cut-and-pasted into other posts
for use by other ‘authors’.” - David Beer

8. In this new context “some ideas will
gain visibility, others will be lost”
Social and technical structures
increasingly influential in
conditioning the circulation of ideas
The expansion of marketing and
communication should be seen in this
light
The politics of circulation be
reshaped by factors outside but also
WITHIN the university

9. This is why digital communicative
competency should be understood in terms
of academic agency
Two opposing tendencies competing to
shape the circulation of academic work
Marketing/communications
instrumentalisation of ‘content’ vs
autonomous researcher led engagement
But the currently ‘open’ field of
academic digital communications cannot
be assumed to stay that way indefinitely

10. This is why digital communicative
competency should be understood in terms
of academic agency
Two opposing tendencies competing to
shape the circulation of academic work
Marketing/communications
instrumentalisation of ‘content’ vs
autonomous researcher led engagement
But the currently ‘open’ field of
academic digital communications cannot
be assumed to stay that way indefinitely