Branding in business schools: academic struggles with the management of reputation

This chapter focuses on how brands and branding activities feature as a locus for faculty members’ sensemaking around organizational and professional identity. The chapter begins with an overview of key insights in the branding literature, which offer important definitions, concepts and insights into corporate branding strategies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, an analysis is developed of the interaction of branding practices with the organizational characteristics and the internal culture of higher education in relation to academic faculty. This is followed by an exploratory empirical study of a business school in the United Kingdom. This reveals that the strategic development and implementation of branding in the case study school has been loosely implemented in line with the dominant organizational culture. Equally, the nature of the brand and responses to the brand are shaped by individual agency and the organizational structure and culture of the school.