Selling Sociology. A Comparison of Online Marketing to Prospective Students at English and Polish Universities

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the institutional on-line presentation of sociology degrees to prospective students in the UK and Poland. I consider the extent to which the nature of sociological knowledge is being altered to meet the perceived expectations of student customers within the context of an increasingly marketised higher education environment. My analysis suggests the discipline is responsive to a range of external drivers: in particular, the needs of the labour market. Sociology appears susceptible to the pressure on academic disciplines identified by Bernstein (2000) to turn outwards and respond to external economic and social demands thereby transforming purely academic subjects into more applied or multi-disciplinary areas of study.