Abstract
Elite business schools use ensembles of images, texts, video, and audio not only to shape how others see them, but to teach students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds how to recognize one another as potential members of shared elite projects. Focusing on the website visibilities of two top-rated business schools in the United States, Harvard Business School (HBS) and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, this chapter examines how elite business schools use visibility ensembles to provide a “socially organized way of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group” (Goodwin 1994, p. 606), to “direct” the viewer “towards a meaning chosen in advance” (Barthes 2004, p. 156).
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Notes
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This slide-show was a key link from the school’s webpage in the summer of 2013. By 2015 there were no links to it, though at the date of this writing (November 2016) it remains accessible at URL http://www.chicagobooth.edu/phototour/hydepark/index.aspx.
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http://on.mash.to/2bgErrV; see also Blackman, 2011.
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Student testimonials are common at other elite business schools as well, such as MIT (http://bit.ly/2bxZ16Z) and the Wharton School (http://bit.ly/2bHMPyZ).
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“What Makes Booth Booth” – http://bit.ly/2bKir8j
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Note the “comments” for example, generated by this post on a MBA-focused website: http://bit.ly/22uiHLr
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Nespor, J. (2018). Elite Business Schools and the Uses of Visibility. In: Bloch, R., Mitterle, A., Paradeise, C., Peter, T. (eds) Universities and the Production of Elites. Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53970-6_11
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