Elite Business Schools and the Uses of Visibility

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).