Zeitschrift für Weiterbildungsforschung - Report (Dec 2023)

Websites as institutional imaginary positionings

  • Eva Bulgrin,
  • Susanne Maria Weber

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40955-023-00266-6
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 46, no. 3
pp. 575 – 592

Abstract

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Abstract The paper contributes to methodological innovations in the field of organisational education research and further education. The paper shows the potential of discourse-analytical website analysis for the imaginary positionings of Higher Education Institutions. It offers a discourse analytical research methodology and discusses University websites as surfaces of emergence of specific discourses. Discourse-analytical website analysis is especially significant as universities’ visually rich web-based communication is becoming increasingly critical. Our journal article reflects on websites as institutional imaginary positionings: First, we start by theorising organisations as orders of the gaze. Second, from a discourse-analytical power/knowledge based organisational education perspective, we make fruitful Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge for a multimodal website analysis. Third, we map the field and state the art of methods and methodologies of website analysis, including examples from a current research project on how transversal themes are represented on university websites. Our article contributes to methodological innovation through discourse-analytical website analysis in the field of organisational education and further education.

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