An Investigation of Value Claims in Academic and Corporate ‘About us’ Texts

The marketization of higher education in the UK and elsewhere has attracted a great deal of attention (and criticism) from applied linguists in recent years, but there is still little linguistic evidence of its impact on the actual value system of academic institutions. As a contribution to the ongoing debate, this study compares the lexis of self-evaluation in a sample of academic and corporate ‘About us’ texts, using a combination of corpus analysis and manual inspection. The procedure identified 50 value markers belonging to eight semantic categories (Globalism, Worth, Primacy, Qualities, Impact, Delivery, Emotion, and Rootedness) whose normalized frequency (relevant occurrences) was 25 per cent higher in the academic sample. Despite differences in the distribution of individual items, such categories showed a considerable degree of overlap (77 per cent) across the two samples. Thus, universities and multinational corporations appear to prioritize a similar axiological repertoire for self-evaluation—a finding that is consistent with encroaching promotionalism but, more significantly, suggests the existence of a set of organizational values common to both academia and the corporate world.