Anxieties and ironies of marketing a higher education: toward a rooted reflexivity with Ulrich Beck

ABSTRACT

Renowned German sociologist Ulrich Beck offers an interpretive understanding of the tectonic societal transformations associated with advanced modernization. The reach of these significant shifts extends to higher education as an enterprise and industry. Both (prospective) students and universities face mounting pressures, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities. University decision-makers look to marketing communication as a way to manage their institution’s precarity amidst modernization disruptions and socioeconomic risks, yet such recourse is not without ironies. Beck’s theoretical framework provides socio-historical context for those pressures and anxieties confronting both universities and students. Appropriating Beck’s notion of reflexivity, this essay promotes a collegiate marketing practice that is responsive to present socioeconomic circumstances and simultaneously attentive to ethical ground. Beck’s interpretive outlook recasts the significance of marketing a higher education today and points to the need for a reflexive and ethically rooted approach.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Some observers are calling for legislative reform equal in scope to that of the Morrill Land-Grant Act (1862) or G.I. Bill (1942) in order to deliver the needed fiscal solution (Minow, 2014). In 2011, following the 2008 financial collapse wherein regulators failed to detect abuses in the mortgage lending industry, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was established to help safeguard student-borrowers (Blumenstyk, 2017). Roughly fifty million Americans hold or cosign for a student loan.

² In a similar vein, marketing and public relations entrepreneur John Brodeur (2016) proposes that, with recourse to big data and analytics, university marketing communication efforts “need to be integrated across all advancement functions, including development, alumni relations, communications, public affairs, and enrollment” (p. 22). It is important to note that faculty are conspicuously absent from this list of those university sectors involved in the process of developing the university brand and assisting with its “advancement.” Such an omission is characteristic of contemporary higher education’s “administrative turn” in which non-academic personnel and governance is continually and disproportionately expanding (Arnett, 2016, p. 4).

³ The strategies and techniques mentioned in this paragraph resonate with those promoted by the Kellogg School of Management and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, champions of IMC (Iacobucci & Calder, 2003; Schultz & Schultz, 2004).

⁴ Concern for multiple ways of knowing and the promotion of epistemic plurality drive the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Ellul, Charles Taylor, Chaim Perelman, and Francis J. Mootz, to name a few. Examples of such epistemic variety and richness include practical reason, hermeneutic discernment, and rhetorical knowledge and argumentation, among others. In fact, Ulrich Beck’s (1986/1992) discussion of social rationality, which he juxtaposes with scientific rationality and its limits, is another example of a publicly valid form of knowledge, one that is vital for mitigating the risks of advanced modern society.

⁵ In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) offers a paradigmatic account that characterizes our historical moment as postmodern. A key tenet for Lyotard – one that resonates with Beck’s (1986/1992) discussion of second modernity concerning the disruption of previous knowledge monopolies and norms of proof – is that the postmodern condition confronts scientific knowledge with the question of legitimacy, meaning that scientific statements (and legislators of scientific knowledge) too have been impacted by the crisis of legitimation. According to Lyotard, scientific discourse is one language game among others and no longer has the status of a metanarrative as it once did in (early) modernity.

⁶ In his discussion of the rationalization of society and work in modern life, Beck (1986/1992) makes explicit reference to the ideas of Max Weber and Frederick Taylor.

⁷ As mentioned earlier, universities as employers are no exception here given the expanding proportion of contingent faculty. Additionally, Beck (1997/2000) takes up the problem of the employment system under the conditions of advanced modernization once again in his book What is Globalization? See especially pp. 8, 13, 19, 57–63.

⁸ See Risk Society pp. 24–32, 56–64, 71–74, 76–77.

⁹ In Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, Alasdair MacIntyre (1990) traces the historical development of three prominent modes of intellectual and moral inquiry in the West. He attends not only to the conflict among these modes in the contemporary university but also to their incommensurability.

¹⁰ In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) refers to humanly built places and all other “work” of human hands as the artifactual world. She develops the significance of the thing-character of the artifactual world – how it conditions human existence and mediates human relations as the objective in-between. Complementing this, the web of human relationships and affairs, which pertains to “action,” serves as a subjective in-between. Though certainly linked to the objective world of things, this intangible, but no less real, interconnected network is a decidedly distinct intermediary that “owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another” (p. 183). This relational in-between is both the consequence of and the setting for action. It should be noted that Arendt also discusses “labor” in relation to the vita activa, however, only work and action are relevant to the discussion here.

¹¹ Berry (1987) contends that higher education is suffering from mission drift because, in large part, it has become preoccupied with the business of “career preparation” (p. 83). Higher education, according to Berry, ought to be aimed at producing neither “trained workers” (careerists) nor even just “knowledgeable citizens” but rather “responsible heirs and members of human culture” (p. 77). It is not that Berry deems careers and citizenship unimportant – quite the opposite. But, the telos of a university education is wider and higher than each of these, and because of that, such a purpose establishes or contextualizes career preparation and citizenship-making. “Underlying the idea of a university,” he proposes, “is the idea that good work and good citizenship are inevitable by-products of the making of a good – that is, a fully developed – human being. This, as I understand it, is the definition of the name university” (p. 77).

¹² Unreflective application of the IMC approach to higher education sets up a potential communication ethics misstep vis-à-vis that very feature proponents of IMC tout as its cornerstone: namely, a consumer-centric approach (Iacobucci & Calder, 2003; Schultz & Schultz, 2004; Van Riel & Frobrun, 2007). Iacobucci and Calder (2003) express this customer-centric approach unequivocally: “To market in the customer-driven marketplace of the twenty-first century, the firm must start with customers and prospects, their needs and wants, their potential, and their opportunities and integrate all the marketing and communication activities” (p. xvi).

¹³ This is, from a communication ethics standpoint, to conduct IMC on emotivist terms (McIntyre, 1981/2007; Arnett & Arneson, 1999). Alasdair MacIntyre (1981/2007) explains that an emotivist mode of thinking is a form of practical judgment and decision-making based on arbitrary, criteria-less preference.

¹⁴ Here I have in mind Charles Taylor’s (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity in which he engages an extended discussion of the need in advanced modernity for recovering our sense of moral sources for the self. Extrapolating this to collective human activities in corporate bodies, institutions of higher education must continually preserve and extend a narrative sense of those qualitative goods their mission represents.