The portrayal of the future as legitimacy construction: discursive strategies in highly ranked business schools’ external communication

Abstract

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 future. Consequently, we utilise corpus-based discourse analysis of highly ranked business schools’ website communication by focusing on sentences containing the expression ‘future’. At first, we analysed the future-related language use to reveal the general future picture in the corpus. Furthermore, by combining qualitative and quantitative textual data, we identified six typical agency frames (i.e. preparing, shaping, adjusting, exploring, personal future, responsibility) about the future. By examining the co-occurrence of these frames, we were able to identify different discursive strategies. As we connected our findings to general societal phenomena we could interpret why and how business schools utilise these discursive strategies to (re)create and maintain their legitimacy.