Building a Sector Reputation: The Strategic Communication of National Higher Education

Abstract

What characterises strategic communication aimed at building the reputation of an entire public subsector? This is the main question for this study, pursued through content analysis of one-stop web portals for national higher education from the 21 countries listed in the Times Higher Education's Top 150 Universities ranking. Findings show that strategic communication is formed by national governments to depict their higher education sector as a coherent whole without letting prominent universities "represent" the higher education sector. The tension between similarity and difference that often occurs in public sector reputation-building is handled partly by emphasising similarity concerns in the structure and format of the presentations, and partly by emphasising differentiation concerns in the contents of the presentations. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies addressing either the reputation management and branding efforts of single institutions, specific public sector entities, or those of nations, this study shows how higher education reputation-building integrates these different levels through strategic communication.

Effect of Organisational Change on Performance in Kenyan Chartered Universities: A Sector Comparison

“…And with time they could have invested in the communication systems and built a reputation of better performance more than public universities in Kenya. Contrary to this study, Sataøen & Waeraas (2016) found that public institutions had more developed communication web-based portals which were the key informational delivery channels through which they disseminated their products to their target markets.…”

Sub-sector branding and nation branding: the case of higher education

“…This paper builds on exploratory research and the study relies on two sources of data. First, the paper benefits from an already established data set of one-stop web-portals for HE from the 23 countries listed in Times Higher Education's (2016) top-160-universities ranking (see Sataøen and Waeraas, 2016). Secondly, the paper scrutinizes the Norwegian public sector agency Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education's (SIU) branding campaign for the HE sector.…”

“…The organizational locus for sub-sector branding of HE tends to be "single-purpose agencies under the control of (but with autonomy from) a specific ministry" (Sataøen and Waeraas, 2016). Such semi-autonomous public agencies, and their role in public branding, are interesting from a public-administration perspective as they imply "[a] shift from direct to indirect government, and important policy-making powers are delegated to independent technocratic bodies with considerable political leeway" (Christensen and Laegreid, 2006).…”

“…Although a growing body of literature is investigating university branding (e.g. Aspara et al , 2014; Chapleo et al , 2011; Christensen and Gornitzka, 2018; Drori et al , 2013), little empirical attention has been given to the coordinated efforts of branding an entire public sub-sector by means of strategic communication (Sataøen and Wæraas, 2016). Public policy is divisible into a number of more or less clearly defined policy areas, fields or sub-sectors (Rayner et al , 2001).…”

“…The article builds on a comparison of 23 countries' presentations of their HE sectors, in combination with a sample and brief overview of Norway's sub-sector branding of its HE sector. In the process of branding their HE sectors, states tend to use national values, traits and characteristics as means of building reputation and distinctiveness (Sataøen, 2015;Sataøen and Waeraas, 2016). However, little is known about the influence of national traits and values in sub-sector branding initiatives and programs.…”