Abstract

The purpose of this analysis was to understand how organizational logics of a fundamentally local institution – the US community college – change with shifts in sociospatial scalar relations. Data included a 3.26-million word, diachronic corpus consisting of 165 issues of the Community College Journal from 1960 to 2011. Textual prominence, collocation analysis, and concordance analysis suggest that the community college shifted from a commitment to local democracy to an emphasis on competitiveness in a global economy. Rank order correlations and log-likelihood statistics identify significant trends.