Discourse in institutional administration of public Universities in Ghana: A shift towards a market paradigm?

Abstract

Language as an ideological tool is used in discourse by institutions, sometimes to change their discourse in order to buy into existing economic as well as social powers. In recent years, Ghanaian public universities have changed the discourse used in defining their aims and objectives. This paper uses Fairclough’s model for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze documents that lay out the strategic plan that redefine the visions, aims, and objectives of four public universities in Ghana. The analysis shows that there is a shift from the traditional academic discourse to a marketization discourse. The changes are evident in the linguistic features as well as the orders of discourse that shape the universities as corporate bodies in a business marketplace. The paper also discusses the relationship between this discourse shift and the positioning of public universities in Ghana