Applying critical discourse analysis to explore the Italian Universities. Orientation towards the entrepreneurial model

Abstract

This paper is aimed to discuss the actual commitment of Italian universities towards

their third mission of economic and social development, providing an innovative perspective of

analysis. We apply Critical Discourse Analysis to assess how Italian universities engagement with

the stakeholder community is interpreted, implemented, communicated and disseminated within and

outside the academic organizations. One of the most significant points in the evolution of

organizational studies is the growing interest in language, whose construction is a key, alternative to

traditional, to understand the organizational and inter-organizational phenomena. Critical Discourse

Analysis is based on the assumption that language is not neutral with respect to organizational and

inter-organizational dynamics, but it contributes to their production. In management studies,

discourse analysis is a new heuristic strategy for those who are interested in the processes of social

construction of organizational phenomena that have as their central element the text.

Critical Discourse Analysis tries to unite, and determines the relationship between, three levels

of analysis: (a) the actual text; (b) the discursive practices; and (c) the larger social context that

bears upon the text and the discursive practices.

We made our survey focusing on the texts published by each one of the 84 Italian universities on

their websites. The first level of analysis was a lexical-statistical study of the texts with the main

aim of observing the adopted terminology (vocabulary). At a second level, and on the basis of the

previously performed analysis, we employed multidimensional statistic techniques, in order to study

the discursive practices. Discourse study starts from concordances analysis, that deals with the

identification of some local contexts containing word-types of specific interest. The final result is

the reconstruction of the major sense behavior models. At a macro level, an exploratory study of the

social context has been realized in order to link the texts and the discursive practices to the

background conditions.

Such analysis partially contributed to fill a gap in the literature, that is the study of the

entrepreneurial university model from the discursive profile in the specific Italian context.