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This article considers the role of affect in university branding in a context of neoliberal higher education, by way of examining the semiotic landscape of the Singapore Management University concourse. Contemporary branding often involves stimulating stakeholder/audience investments of meaning and affect into the brand, thereby appropriating consumers’ affective labour for brand‐building and communications. Adopting a discourse‐analytic approach, I examine how linguistic, visual and spatial modalities are utilized to evoke and semiotize particular affective meanings and orientations in the emplaced discourse within the university's brand space. This discourse, which includes organizational branding discourse as well as more organic student‐generated texts, becomes part of the affective regime, helping to encourage and enjoin what is deemed to be normative affective sensibilities and practices in that context. Consequently, the article also considers the kinds of affective subjectivities that are valorized, and how stakeholder/student‐subjects are interpellated in a context of neoliberal‐oriented higher education.

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Corporate organizations, in their corporate branding efforts, often associate or imbue themselves with values and attributes like dynamism, competitiveness and empowerment, which are reflective of post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalist ideology. This article examines how such values are semioticized by a particular group of organizations -Singapore's corporatized universities -as they enact their corporate brands both verbally and visually, specifically through metaphor and modality. In doing so, these organizations and their corporate brands are conceived of as nodes of neoliberal governmentality, where they are subject to the regulatory influence of both the state and capital, while at the same time potentially exercising influence over brand recipients. The organizations' governmentalizing potential is actualized when stakeholders and brand supporters appropriate these corporate brands as symbolic and cultural resources in fashioning their individual subjectivities, making themselves amenable to the workings of capital, which in turn helps to sustain the prevailing neoliberal order.

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