Academic Reputation: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Concept in Russian Social Practice in 2000-2011

The conception of this article is twofold: to consider the concept of academic reputation as an object of theoretical explanation and to analyze the use of the academic reputation concept in Russian social practices during the period of 2000-2011. Based on social constructionist explanations of discursive and social phenomena, the article discusses academic reputation in the framework of social practice. Reputation is considered as an attribute or resource that confers status and distinction. It is a special sort of social information about past actions and behaviour that constructs credibility and reliability of a person/institution. Past records signal future expectations. Academic reputation is currently defined in terms of evaluation of research quality and quantity measurable through journal impact scores, citation counts. Now it is a key component of university rankings and one of the drivers of institutional marketing in higher education. Against these assumptions, the article highlights crucial aspects of understanding the concept in Russia’s public space. What the present study adds to the existing debates on academic reputation is discussed in the following framework. Firstly, it is a new insight due to the choice of research object - reputation is examined and described as a linguistic representation of social practice in Russia. Secondly, the investigation used a new methodological approach and applied corpus-assisted discursive analysis that enables the demonstration of the academic reputation word-group functioning in Russian social discourse. Thirdly, there are new findings due to the use of corpus linguistics instruments - the analysis is based on the Russian Web 2011 (ruTenTen11) corpus, managed by the Sketch Engine system, which allows carrying out instrumental analysis in accord with the research aim. Following this trajectory, the main results and observations are introduced. The corpus findings lead to a conclusion that in 2000-2011, the concept academic reputation appears vague and unsteady, functioning in the Russian society on an intuitive perception level. In the most typical contextualisations, it moves away from its core features in the conceptional distinctions. This notion appears as a representative of social situations and practices external for Russia. The corpus-based findings fix the use of the academic reputation concept in the Russian context by 2011 in the higher and secondary education sphere. This concept is connected with competition and ratings. Academic reputation in Russian practice is mainly instrumentalized in the way it makes educational institutions emotionally attractive and shapes a positive public opinion for their promotion. Reference to academic reputation defines a competitive advantage that pushes up sales and works as an instrument of the social practice of consumerism. The presented analysis is merely the first step in exploring academic reputation in Russian discourse on the part of its society and academic community.

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