Tony McNeill

Module 4: Approaches to the Analysis of Education Policy

Essay title: 'Don't affect the share price': Social media policy in higher education as brand management

Introduction

This study considers the social media policies of ten universities in the United Kingdom. It addresses some of the ways in which HEIs are responding to both the positive potential of social media as well as its perceived threats. It argues that the development of social media policies has been taken in response to both the promise of social media in promoting university brands as well as the threat to institutional reputation. The creation and implementation of social media policies have therefore played a key role in helping universities manage both the risks and benefits of social media in the context of a marketised HE environment in which the defence of institutional reputation has become an increasing priority.

Researcher positionality

I am currently Principal Lecturer in Learning Technology at Kingston University, a medium-sized post-'92 university in the south of England. I am based, not in a faculty, but in the Academic Development Centre, a central department dedicated to academic staff development and to the making and

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implementation of the Kingston Universitys Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy. I have played some role in developing this strategy - a kind of policy if you like - especially the sections relating to educational technologies. Although I have not been directly involved in developing institutional social media policy, I am in regular contact with colleagues notably those from both Information Services and Marketing and Communications - who are. As such, I might be said to enjoy something of the epistemological privilege of being an insider researcher and am therefore able to gain insights which, as Colin Lankshear and Michel Knobel (2006) remind us, are sights from the inside (247-8).

I should also add that I am, for primarily professional purposes, a regular user of social media; I have both Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/) accounts which I use for work- and study-related purposes. I also have accounts on Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/), Prezi (http://prezi.com/), Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) where I store and share images, papers and presentations. Finally, I have active accounts on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/) and Academia.edu (http://academia.edu/) for additional professional networking purposes.

When I use social media am I representing myself or my institution? My initial answer is, of course, myself. However, is it really possible to blog or to tweet in a wholly individual capacity that does not invoke in any way ones institutional affiliation? When I post an off-the-cuff and uncomplimentary tweet

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about current HE policy (see Fig. 1), I do so as an individual academic expressing a personal opinion to those who follow me.

Fig. 1: tweet articulating personal opinion

However, might my tweet be perceived to be representing an institutional (Kingston University) or possibly departmental (Academic Development Centre) viewpoint? In using social media to articulate a position hostile to a government policy that I may - perhaps will - later have to help implement, am I not undermining the work of my department or institution? Its an ambiguous area that, as I will argue, clearly-defined social media policies seek to address.

My research for this essay adopts a more deductive approach insofar as my insiderness has allowed me to develop the hypothesis that the making of social media policy in higher education is a response to the perceived threat of reputational damage to institutions caused by unregulated and unsupervised social media use by both staff and students. Although I will also argue that advising staff of IPR, copyright, liability, data protection issues and general good practice are also an important part of social media policy, for

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many institutions the main - but often hidden - purpose is to protect universities reputation in the context of a competitive HE market in which brand value is key. Derek Morrison, associate head of e-learning at the Higher Education Academy, in an exchange quoted in the Times Higher Education Supplement, offers the following advice to academics considering using social media: [t]he simple rule for everyone should be don't affect the share price, no matter what technology you are using (Corbyn 2008). As I will argue in more detail later, it is the metaphorical share price, brand value or reputation that enables universities to recruit students and, in the context of differential tuition fees, to charge the maximum possible. This is why the brand or reputation needs to be carefully managed.

What is social media and why does it matter to HE?

Social media is the term used to designate online services characterised by a high degree of collaboration, interaction and content sharing. Social media tends now to be the term used in preference to Web 2.0 and encompasses such varied technologies as blogs, wikis, social networking sites like Facebook and media sharing services like YouTube and Flickr.

Social media has greatly lowered the threshold technological barriers to creating online spaces, facilitating dialogue and sharing resources. However, with this ease comes potential threats. Could online spaces and digital communication tools allow academic staff to stray 'off message' and articulate

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statements or publish media at variance with institutional policy or in some way detrimental to institutional reputation? Of equal concern, could online social media sites become spaces in which staff and students - past, present and potential - post defamatory or inflammatory comments also harmful to a universitys reputation?

Although social media offer many great opportunities to connect and engage with a range of users, the senior management of some institutions regard it with a degree of caution. This is because blogs or Facebook pages, for example, tend not to be hosted on institutional systems such as the university intranet (e.g. the many university intranets that use Microsoft SharePoint), the institutional VLE (e.g. Moodle, Blackboard Learn) or official university web sites. Social media therefore fall outside of the institutional policies and management control mechanisms. Theres a sense amongst some senior staff in departments of human resources, information services and marketing/communications that academic staff using social media are circumventing university controls in ways that may present themselves, their students and, perhaps most important of all, their institution with unacceptable levels of risk. The need to manage the risks attendant upon such uncontrolled and decentralised uses of social media services informs, to a large degree, the making of social media policy in higher education. Although other policies relating to the use of internet-based technologies exist - around university computing and telecommunications facilities, data protection, intellectual property rights and staff and student disciplinary policies to name just a few examples - some institutions have responded to both new challenges and

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new threats by developing an explicit social media policy for staff and, in some the cases, for students too.

Going rogue: one case study of maverick social media use

The most high-profile case of an academic using social media in a way that was perceived to cause reputational harm took place in 2006 when Erik Ringmar, then a lecturer in government at the London School of Economics (LSE), came into conflict with his employers over comments he had made in his blog. In one of his blog posts, Ringmar made the claim that LSE students would receive as good a quality education and academic support from London Metropolitan University - a pre-'92 institution far less prestigious than the LSE - than they might receive at the LSE where the majority of full- and part-time academic staff devote their energies to research. Although the claim would be uncontroversial to many - especially those working in pre-'92 universities - it attracted the disapproval of senior management who felt that the institution's reputation was being unfairly maligned. After an uncomfortable period during which a number of attempts were made to reprimand him for his conduct, Ringmar resigned from the LSE in 2006 claiming that the university authorities had made his life unbearable. In an account published later, Ringmar claimed that:

My mistake was to use the freedom of speech to discuss the institution itself the LSE and English academia. Freedom of speech is fine, everyone including Sir Howard Davies was endorsing the idea, but only

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as long as speaking freely did not deter prospective students from applying. In an era of commercialized education, the limits to freedom of speech are set by the market. (Ringmar 2007:44)

Ringmars description of his conflict with LSEs senior management is an inevitably one-sided account designed to present himself in the best possible light as a valiant defender of free speech in the face of the depredations of managerialist culture and appears reluctant to acknowledge instances in which he might legitimately be seen to have acted unprofessionally. However, he makes a valid point in describing academic freedom of expression as circumscribed by the market. That teaching comes a poor second to research at elite institutions such as the LSE is only a controversial claim in the context of an institution competing for students in a global marketplace in which reputation counts and where statements damaging to reputation must be removed from the public sphere. The example of Ringmars conflict with the LSE - although an extreme case - highlights some of the possibilities of social media to stage debates and construct arguments in public that cause discomfort to institutions senior management.

What drivers inform the development of social media policies?

Shattock (2006) has argued that from the late 1970s onwards, higher education policy has been driven exclusively from the 'outside inwards' with internally-generated policy making being increasingly sidelined as the state takes over the lions share of its development. He argues that the state has

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taken over policy making because the insider organs that once generated policies have been weakened or no longer exist (138). To summarise this tendency, Shattock uses the example of two reports of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education from different decades to claim that [i]f Robbins [1963] was quintessentially the voice of the universities, Dearing [1997] was much more the voice of Government (139). The context of higher education policy making in the UK then is very much driven by the priorities of government; its drivers are external rather than internal.

The main driver behind the development of a range of policies in UK HEIs has been successive governments - Conservative, New Labour and Coalition commitment to restructure higher education provision along market or, if you prefer, pseudo-market principles. The principal national HE policy driver informing policy - including micro policies such as an institutions social media policy - is, therefore, the marketisation of higher education. Ringmars claim - cited earlier - that the limits of the publicly sayable are set by the market is not without justification when placed in the context of this dominant policy driver.

The marketisation of higher education

Im using the term marketisation to designate the movement towards the commodification of academic education, a movement that seek to refashion the relationship between academics and students along the lines of a service

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provider and a consumer. Marketisation is, as Frank Furedi (2011) points out, as much a political/ideological process as an economic phenomenon (2) insofar as it is symptomatic of the neo-liberal weakening of the state and the concommitant stress on the value of higher education to the individual (as consumer who expects a return on his/her time but also financial investment) than to the collective (democratic entitlement, social justice, learning for its own sake as an innate good). The knowledge developed or acquired at university is now less a public good and more a commodity to be capitalized on or traded in on the employment market.

Kathleen Lynch (2006) provides a useful summary of neo-liberalism and its impact on higher education: The corporatisation and marketisation of the universities has its origins in neo-liberal politics that is premised on the assumption that the market can replace the democratic state as the primary producer of cultural logic and value. Neo-liberalism offers a market view of citizenship that is generally antithetical to rights, especially to stateguaranteed rights in education, welfare, health and other public goods (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Tooley, 1996, 2000). The citizen is defined as an economic maximiser, governed by self-interest. There is a glorification of the consumer citizen, construed as willing, resourced and capable of making market-led choices. In this new market state, the individual (rather than the nation) is held responsible for her or his own wellbeing. The states role is one of facilitator and enabler of the consumer and market-led citizen (Rutherford, 2005). (3)

Roger Brown (2011) provides a more detailed and structured account of marketization. He identifies four features that define marketisation: i) institutional autonomy, ii) institutional competition, iii) price and iv) information. (13). Although not all of these characteristics are directly relevant to my argument, the importance of competition, price and information most certainly 9

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are. The provision of information about a university, its course and employment record of its graduates has become an increasingly important part of the work of universities. One exemplification of this is the recent national policy published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) requiring all universities to produce Key Information Sets, or comparable sets of standardised information about undergraduate courses (HEFCE 2011) by September 2012 (Fig. 2). The policy driver here is, of course, marketization but more specifically the market-driven necessity for the consumer (i.e. the potential student) to have the information on which to base his/her choices as a customer.

Fig. 2: mock-up of a Key Information set

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However, as Brown points out, marketisations stress on providing consumers with information does not translate well to the context of higher education: According to market theory, quality is protected automatically as consumers use the available information to select the product that is most suitable for them: suppliers that do not provide goods that are suitable go out of business. In higher education the difficulty is that the product is not visible and the opportunities for repeat purchases are limited (Cave et al. 1992). This does not of course stop either commercial publishers or government agencies from producing information to guide students and funders in the form of institutional rankings and league tables.

Brand or reputation management

The reference to league tables in the above extract from Brown makes clear the growing importance of competition and the need to stand out from institutional competitors. This can be done through raising ones scores in the exercises that inform league tables such the annual Student Satisfaction Survey (NSS 2012). However, promoting ones institutional brand is another means of differentiating oneself from competitor universities (Chapleo 2005, 2006). Brown (2011) argues that the growth of marketing functions is inevitable and essential (36) and that, over the last decade or so marketing and communications departments have seen their influence grow:

The last decade has, in particular, seen a strong momentum in this direction. A study of marketing activity in universities in the early 1990s (Smith et al. 1995) showed that although all were engaged in marketing, comparatively few were organised in a strongly professional way, using professionally qualified marketing staff, and operating at the strategic core of the university. Todays pattern is very different. All

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universities have expanded their operational marketing functions, and few are worried about using the M word in the everyday language of the institution. And at strategic level, marketing has a key place in the management and leadership of the UKs universities. Most now have a specific appointment at second tier level (Pro Vice Chancellor) to lead marketing and/or external relations activities, and heads of institutions increasingly focus on the role of surveying, shaping and responding to the external environment and markets. (36) From a US perspective, Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) argue more strongly that:

[t]he theory of academic capitalism moves beyond thinking of the students as consumer to considering the institution as marketer. When students choose colleges, institutions advertise education as a service and a life style. Colleges and universities complete vigorously to market their institutions to high-ability students able to assume high debt loads. Student consumers choose (frequently private) colleges and universities that they calculate are likely to bring a return on investment and increasingly choose majors linked to the new economy, such as business, communications, media arts. (1-2) In this context, its clear why some senior management feel that the use of social media needs to be professionally managed to protect and enhance institutional reputation and its brand value in the marketplace. Its also unsurprising that it is often the case that marketing departments have led on the development of policy.

New Managerialism
Related to the marketisation of higher education is the development of what some researchers (Deem 1998; Deem & Brehony 2005) have termed the new managerialism of public sector institutions such as universities. New managerialism is the term used to designate practices that are commonplace in the private sector, in particular the imposition of a powerful management

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body overriding professional skills and knowledge. New managerialism is also characterised by an emphasis on discipline, performance measured against set criteria, efficiency, external monitoring, and an emphasis on standards. Deem (1998) argues that higher education is no longer a gentlemans club in which collegiality presides and academics are expected to self-manage. Rather, she argues that we have seen a shift from both the collegium and from professional autonomy and discretion (50) towards a much more tightly managed higher education sector in which academic autonomy and freedom of speech - such as the right to claim that students might receive as good an education at London Metropolitan University as they would at the LSE - are constrained by the overriding priority to protect institutional/employer interests. Deem goes on to argue that: 'New managerialism', if it exists in universities, is likely to place considerable pressure on roles and individuals, especially where tensions between the logic of managerial control and the conventions of professional autonomy become especially acute. (52)

The case of Eric Ringmar and his conflict with senior management at the LSE is a good example of this tension.

Methods and methodology

This study of social media policy documents broadly adopts the analytical approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA). I was drawn to CDA because it represents an analytical method whose primary focus are the ways in which power, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in particular social and political contexts. My starting hypothesis -

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that policy was a response to senior managements anxiety about unregulated social media use that sought to manage or control academic freedoms - drew me towards this type of analytical approach.

I was also influenced by Norman Fairclough, one of CDAs leading practitioners, work and, in particular, his use of the theme of the language of what he termed new capitialism in Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Researchers (2003). This had some similarity with my interest in the ways in which the discourses of both marketisation and new managerialism inflected the social media policy texts under consideration. My arguments are also informed by his definition of discourse in Language and Power (1989) and Discourse and Social Change (1992) as somewhere closer to the more expansive definition of socially-situated language informed by a specific ideology or culture than the more limited definition of discourse as a stretch of language in use. To quote Fairclough, discourse is a practice not just of representing the world but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning (Fairclough 1992: 64).

CDA often presents itself as a dissident research form insofar as critical discourse analysts adopt an explicit political or ideological position when seeking to understand, expose by making the tacit explicit, and ultimately resist power. In this study, Im adopting a stance that is critical of both the marketisation of higher education and of the new managerialism. I want to highlight the potential difficulties that the more prescriptive policies might pose, in particular, those which might be interpreted as constraining

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academic autonomy and circumscribing the possibilities for innovation which almost always involve a degree of risk.

Sampling method

All sampling is, to some degree, convenience sampling and my sample comes from the ten social media policies currently available online that I was able to locate between early October and late November 2011. My search involved inputting a number of search strings - e.g. social media policy HE, Web 2.0 policy HE, social networking policy HE, social media guidelines into the Google search engine and following up the relevant search results. I also used my main Twitter account, that is to say, the one I generally use for professional networking (http://twitter.com/anthonymcneill), to tweet a request for information on and links to social media policy documents from UK-based HEIs (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: tweet requesting examples of social media policy

By chance rather than by design, my convenience sampling has the appearance of purposive, nonprobability sampling (Ritchie & Lewis 2003: 77-

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108) insofar as the ten institutions with publicly-accessible policy documents represent a broad cross-section of the different types of university in the UK: those chartered in the 19th century (e.g. University of Durham; University College, London) through to red brick (e.g. University of Bristol), plate glass (e.g. University of Essex; University of Surrey) and new or post-92 universities (e.g. University of Central Lancashire, University of Huddersfield). I was not able to locate any social media policy documents from an ancient university such as the University of Oxford or the University of Edinburgh so the sample cannot be said to be wholly representative of the HE sector in the UK. It would be interesting to conduct further research into the apparent absence of social media policies from ancient universities - in the main elite institutions with a view to exploring the degree to which they feel they do not require the sort of brand management other universities do.

The location of policy making

A key question I wished to consider when analysing policy was the location of that policy making. Which department or unit has primary responsibility for creating policy? What are the forms of consultation - if any - with staff from other parts of the institutions? What other types of policy document or broader policy context does the policy link to or form part of?

With the exception of two universities, most policies were accessed from either the human resources pages or the marketing pages of the universities

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web sites (Fig. 4). At three universities - the University of Central Lancashire, Durham University and the University of Surrey - the social media policy was accessed via the Human Resources pages of the external-facing website; at five universities - University College London, the University of Glamorgan, the University of Huddersfield, the University of Leicester and Oxford Brookes University) - marketing (and communications) hosted the policy. At Heriot Watt University the social media policy was developed by and published on the pages of the Web team and at the University of Essex the policy - or guidelines as they are called - were developed by the universitys Social Media Overview Group which reported to the Communications Sub-group of the ICT Steering Group.

Marketing (5/10) University College London University of Glamorgan University of Huddersfield University of Leicester Oxford Brookes University

HR (3/10) University of Central Lancashire Durham University University of Surrey

Other (2/10) Heriot Watt University University of Essex

Fig. 4: the location of social media policy

The location of policy is a clear indicator of which department has the strongest strategic interest in developing social media policy. Its obvious from the admittedly small sample that the marketing and communications teams currently have the largest stake in developing social media policy. This is because these teams are more actively engaged in protecting or adding to institutional brand value. Marketing and communications services appear to

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have a better grasp of how to use social media as it increasingly an integral part of how private-sector companies develop their brand.

Where policy was produced by marketing and communications departments, the influence of marketing discourse was, predictably, most prevalent. For example, the University of Leicesters social media policy states that: Social media presents an opportunity but also a challenge for brand and reputation management [emphasis mine]. Moreover, a sidebar to the left of the policy text links to a page on the University's Brand Proposition which explains to readers the need for an underpinning market proposition to differentiate the University of Leicester from other institutions in a competitive marketplace. We can discern then, in these policy documents, use of a discursive repertoire drawn from marketing and the underpinning concept of the university as a brand to be bought into.

Equally interesting are the three institutions whose human resources departments were responsible for policy making. Unlike marketing departments, it is not immediately clear to me what claim to expertise HR departments might have in the area of social media. However, HR departments are generally the originating source for disciplinary policies and, as such, tend to contextualise social media use in terms of potential misconduct. Theres a stress in the policies emanating from HR departments on compliance and managerial structures.

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For example, the University of Surreys social media policy is a two-page PDF document that adopts a defensive stance and stresses reputational risks. This policy is clearly about defining acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and offers - in contrast to most of the other policies - little advice to staff on good practice:

serious misuse of Social Networking sites that has a negative impact on the University may be regarded as a disciplinary offence. An individual is free to talk about the University. However instances where the University is brought into disrepute may constitute misconduct or gross misconduct and disciplinary action will be applied.

However, what might a negative impact be? For example, to adapt Erik Ringmars case, suppose I were an academic at the University of Surrey and posted to my public blog that my department had a poor record in recruiting students from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. I might be blogging as part of a genuine attempt to raise awareness of an issue of concern to me and to seek advice from others. However, the university might interpret the post as having a negative impact on the institution and cause it to be brought into disrepute (at worst as racist and at best as negligent in addressing the issue). The policy raises more issues than it can answer but would certainly appear to conflict with the academic ideals of free speech and transparency.

Although I had neither the time nor the expertise to develop skills in concordancing, I thought it might be productive to use an online concordancing tool (http://www.spaceless.com/concordancer.php) to help analyse this particular document. A concordancer allows users to input a text and identifies the frequency of individual words. This particular online

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concordancer also offers the ability to produce a list of sentences that use a selected word in context and lists the frequency of words as a either list or a word cloud (a frequency weighted list or a kind of textual histogram in the style of many social media sites such as Flickr). Setting the concordancer to remove the 1,000 most common words and to display only words which appear on four or more occasions, I produced the following word cloud (Fig. 5):

content disciplinary employees employment manager networking

personal policy services site sites social staff

university

working

Fig. 5: University of Surrey social media policy word cloud

The dominant word is university, suggestive of a document whose purpose is to protect institutional interests above all else. Moreover, other frequentlyused terms invoke institutional hierarchies - employees and manager - and also contractual obligations (employment and disciplinary). This is a document redolent of the discourse of the new manageralism: there is a stress on compliance with policy, process following and seeking permission or advice from ones line manager before acting.

Social media policy as reputation management

In seven of the ten policy documents analysed, reference was made to the importance of institutional reputation at or near the very beginning of the text: 20

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This guidance is designed to bring your attention to the measures within the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) which are designed to protect you from abuse by a colleague via a social networking site and to protect the reputation [emphasis mine] of your employer. (UCLan) The purpose of this guidance is to protect the reputation [emphasis mine] of employees of Durham University and the University as a whole from abuse via staff usage of social networking and personal internet sites. (Durham University) Heriot-Watt University encourages staff to make appropriate use of Web 2.0 technologies in work and private life. In order to promote student and staff safety and reduce legal, operational, financial and reputational risk [emphasis mine] to the University, all staff who use Web 2.0 services are responsible for compliance with this policy. (Heriot-Watt University) Social media presents an opportunity but also a challenge for brand and reputation management [emphasis mine]. For this reason, policies and guidelines exist outlining the rules when engaging in social media on behalf of the University. (University of Leicester)

Other policies avoid direct use of the term reputation, preferring instead alternatives (e.g. interests) or near synonyms (e.g. integrity) as in the example below: The purpose of the social media policy is to promote the interests [emphasis mine] of the University of Glamorgan within the realms of social media whilst protecting the integrity [emphasis mine] of the University and maintaining a consistently high standard of communication with internal and external users. (University of Glamorgan)

The idea of institutional reputation is something invoked by the perceived threat of social media being used in ways which bring the university into disrepute as in the following examples:

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An individual is free to talk about the University. However instances where the University is brought into disrepute [emphasis mine] may constitute misconduct or gross misconduct and disciplinary action will be applied. (University of Surrey) Anybody is free to talk about the University on social media sites. However, please be aware that disparaging or untrue remarks which may bring the University, its staff or students into disrepute [emphasis mine] may constitute misconduct and disciplinary action may be applied. (University of Huddersfield)

Three policies - from Oxford Brooks University, University College London and the University of Essex - do not refer to reputation as such although the concept is implicit in the verbs used. For example, the Oxford Brookes University social media policy begins: The university is keen to encourage its staff to actively engage in the use of social networking to promote [emphasis mine] and communicate on behalf of Oxford Brookes.

The verb promote invokes the marketing possibilities of social media use and therefore may be interpreted as strengthening or enhancing the Oxford Brookes brand or reputation. In the general usage policy section there is explicit reference to the [u]se of the Oxford Brookes Brand and to staff requirement to comply with the corporate branding guidelines. There is very clear evidence in this policy, therefore, of marketing discourse. The University of Essexs social media policy uses another verb in its opening paragraph: The purpose of these social media guidelines is as follows: y y to encourage good practice to protect [emphasis mine] the University, its staff and students

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y y

to clarify where and how existing policies and guidelines apply to social media to promote effective and innovative use of social media as part of the University's activities

The University of Essexs social media policy is much less inflected by marketing discourse than that of Oxford Brookes. However, what is less clear are the threats from which the university needs protecting. The reader is left to infer meaning and my interpretation is that the threats are both legal but also reputational. Damage to reputation then, is the tacit threat from which the University requires protection.

What are the levers employed to support policy implementation?

The term policy lever refers to the potential actions an organisation might take to influence behaviour. It is, Id argue, a rather offensive metaphor suggestive of a puppeteer pulling strings - or levers - in order to change the behaviours of individuals or groups. In the cases of some, although certainly not all of the social media policies, the lever is potential disciplinary action in cases of infringement or breach of policy (e.g. University of Glamorgan, Heriot-Watt University, University of Huddersfield, University of Surrey). A few examples will suffice to give a sense of the register used and sanctions invoked:

Staff whose use of Web 2.0 services, whether for work or private use, exposes the University to risk of legal liability, operational, financial or reputational loss may be subject to disciplinary sanctions. (Heriot-Watt University) 23

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Unless there are specific concerns about the nature of your job, you are free to talk about UCLan on your site. However, you must avoid bringing the University into disrepute in any way, as this may constitute gross misconduct as listed in the Disciplinary Procedure in the staff handbook. (UCLan)

Those institutional whose policies invoke formal disciplinary action, I would argue, exercise what Martin Trow (1994) calls hard managerialism characterised by more authoritarian language and by systems of rewards and sanctions accorded to staff based on their compliance or non-compliance with policy.

Another feature of these policies is the requirement to register social media use with either ones line manager or a central department (marketing, web team or information services) as in the following two examples:

If you already have a social networking site or intend to initiate one which indicates in any way that you work at UCLan you should inform your manager. (UCLan) All new accounts to be set up on social media sites including (but not exclusive to) Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, should be approved by the Web Team before they are created. This allows us to maintain consistency and high standards of use, alongside approving use of University of Glamorgan logos etc. Links from www.glam.ac.uk to unapproved Facebook or Twitter accounts will be removed. (University of Glamorgan) Such rules place social media use under strict managerial control or else under supervision of a specialist department. In some universities, a more collegial tone is taken with colleagues encouraged to register their social

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media use with a central university department as an option rewarded by advice and regular updates as in the following examples: Get in touch with us! Let us know what you've set up: we'll add you to the list of UCL social media users on this site, and also try to keep you up to date with central social media developments. Email digitalcomms [at] ucl.ac.uk. (UCL) Add your site to the record of all social media sites related to the university by emailing Chris Rice with the site address and details of the maintainer(s). (University of Leicester)

These policies might be seen as exemplifying what Trow (1993) terms soft managerialism insofar as they seek the agreement and consent of colleagues and are therefore more compatible with collegiality than hard managerialist approaches. Although the more collegial tone comes as something of a relief when compared to the more authoritarian discourse of other policy texts, the underlying aims are to influence the nature of staff interactions and to create a centralised list of social media use that may be monitored and, if deemed necessary, stopped.

Conclusion

An alternative title to this essay might have been 'the presentation of universities in everyday life'. The allusion to Goffmans (1959) dramaturgical theory is deliberate: his argument that individuals are engaged in what they hope to be a flawless and convincing performance to audiences whilst keeping the messy business of contradiction firmly back stage seems relevant

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to the ways universities seek to present themselves in the best possible light to a diverse audience including potential applicants, alumni, on-course students and employers. Social media - for better or worse - has the potential to trouble institutions attempts to project a unified and controlled image of themselves to the world. Therefore, many social media policies are about seizing control of what Goffman calls impression management imposing from the top-down as it were a repertoire of preferred presentational strategies (use of corporate branding, tone, disclaimers etc.).

I have not wanted to argue that producing social media policy is a bad thing per se. Indeed, I have learnt much from reading the documents, some of which have been full of constructive advice that I will share with interested colleagues. Also, it is unfair to present all social media policies as a homogeneous monolithic bloc; some (e.g. UCL, University of Leicester) adopt a more collegial register and offer support and advice whilst some others (e.g. UCLan, University of Surrey) wield the threat of disciplinary action. Rather, I have wanted to draw attention to the ways in which even a micro-policy is informed by a dominant policy driver such as the marketisation of higher education. Its revealing that half of the social media policies found were developed by institutions marketing and communications departments, illustrating the importance now of these functions to the lifeblood of universities.

Finally, I have also wanted to highlight the potential tensions between the academic ideals of openness and the freedom to act and to write as we see fit

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with social media policies that constrain our academic autonomy. Is perhaps the greatest risk posed by the more restrictive of the social media policies analysed that, in the name of maintaining the metaphorical university share price, they also inhibit innovation?

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References
Ball, S.J., Davies, J., David, M., & Reay, D. (2002). Classification and Judgement: social class and the cognitive structures of choice in Higher Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 32(1): 51-72. Bradwell, P. (2009). The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology. London: Demos. Brown, R. (2011). The March of the Market. In Molesworth, M., Nixon, E. and Scullion, R. (eds) (2011). The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. (11-24). London: Routledge Chapleo, C. (2005). Do Universities Have 'Successful' Brands? International Journal of Educational Advancement, 6(1): 54-64 Chapleo, C. (2006). Barriers to brand building in UK universities? International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 12(1): 2332. Corbyn, Z. (9 October 2008). By the blog: academics tread carefully. Times Higher Education Supplement. Accessed 26 October 2011 from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403827 Deem, R. (1998). 'New managerialism' and higher education: The management of performances and cultures in universities in the United Kingdom. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 8(1): 47-70 Deem. R. & Brehony, K.J. (2005): Management as ideology: the case of new managerialism in higher education, Oxford Review of Education, 31(2): 217235. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London & New York: Routledge. Furedi, F. (2011). Introduction. In Molesworth, M., Nixon, E. and Scullion, R. (eds) (2011). The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. (1-8). London: Routledge Gewirtz, S., Ball, S.J. and Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, Choice and Equity in Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. 28

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Gibbs, P. (2001). Higher Education as a Market: a problem or a solution? Studies in Higher Education, 26(1): 85-94. Gibbs, P. (2002). From the Invisible Hand to the Invisible Hand-Shake: marketing higher education. Research in Post Compulsory Education, 7(3): 325-335. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. HEFCE (2011). Key Information Sets. Accessed 26 January 2012 from: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/infohe/kis.htm HEFCE (16 June 2011). Universities and colleges to provide key information for students. Accessed 26 January 2012 from: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2011/kis.htm Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2006 2nd Edition). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning. Buckingham: Open University Press. Lynch, K. (2006). Neo-liberalism and Marketisation: the implications for higher education. European Educational Research Journal, 5(1): 1-17. Molesworth, M., Nixon, E. and Scullion, R. (eds) (2011). The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. London: Routledge Molesworth, M., Nixon, E. and Scullion, R. (2009). Having, being and higher education: the marketisation of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer. Teaching in Higher Education, 14(3): 277-287. Nguyen, N. & LeBlanc, G. (2001). Image and reputation of higher education institutions in students retention decisions. The International Journal of Educational Management, 15(6): 303-311. NSS (2012). Student Satisfaction Survey. Accessed 26 January 2012 from: http://www.thestudentsurvey.com/ Petroff, M. (2010). Social Media Policy Resource Guide for Higher Ed. edu.Guru blog. Accessed 26 January 2012 from: http://doteduguru.com/id6144-social-media-policy-resource-guide-fromsimtech10.html Ringmar, E. (2007). A Bloggers Manifesto: Free Speech and Censorship in 29

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the Age of the Internet. London: Anthem Press Ritchie, J. and J. Lewis (eds) (2003). Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers. London: Sage. Shattock, M. (2006). Policy Drivers in UK Higher Education in Historical Perspective: Inside Out, Outside In and the Contribution of Research. Higher Education Quarterly, 60(2): 130140 Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, States, and Higher Education. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press. Trow, M. (1994). Managerialism and the Academic Profession: The Case of England. Higher Education Policy, 7(2):11-18

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Appendix
List of publicly-accessible social media policies University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) http://www.uclan.ac.uk/information/services/hr/hr_guidance_employees/social _networking.php University College London (UCL) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-media/ Durham University http://www.dur.ac.uk/hr/policies/social/ University of Essex http://www.essex.ac.uk/digital_media/policy.aspx University of Glamorgan http://msr.glam.ac.uk/documents/download/52/ Heriot Watt University http://www.hw.ac.uk/webteam/about/service/social-media.htm University of Huddersfield http://www2.hud.ac.uk/shared/shared_vcowg/docs/policies/Social_Networking _Policy.pdf University of Leicester http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/marketing/marcomms/communications/social Oxford Brooks University http://www.brookes.ac.uk/staff/marketing/web/socialmedia/policy University of Surrey http://www.surrey.ac.uk/about/corporate/policies/social_network_policy.pdf

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