TY - JOUR

T1 - Between Mission and Market Position

T2 - Empirical findings on mission statements of German Higher Education Institutions

AU - Kosmützky, Anna

N1 - Funding Information: Mission statements became the basis of the process of state approval of private universities, were used in agreements on objectives between ministries and universities, and were demanded in accreditation processes of the quality assurance system of universities. Higher education policy actors—like the Germans Rector’s Conference, the public science foundations (Stifterverband, Volkswagenstiftung) and the German Council of Science and Humanities, which acted as advocates for a mission statement development—meanwhile took mission statements for granted in their reports and recommendations and based recommendations of further initiatives on them (e.g. HRK, 1/2006; Stifterverband, 2008; Wissenschaftsrat, 2006). Furthermore, mission statements as well as elaborated institutional strategies were required in the Excellence Initiative for Research by the German Research Foundation and the Excellence Initiative for Teaching by the Stifterver-band. The Excellence Initiative for Teaching has required building applications on the respective mission statements. Universities that have applied for the third funding line of the Excellence Initiative for Research have had to develop highly elaborated institutional strategies, which they have also done by updating their mission statements. But in the course of their political usage, mission statements have become widely used within universities’ internal governance documents as well. The detailed analysis of mission processes in three different universities and their use of mission statements shows that the statements were “solitaires” within the new managerial governance of the universities at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century. In 2002, however, other governance documents started to relate to mission statements: strategic plans, statements of account, developmental plans, corporate design plans, annual reports by the president, evaluation reports, accreditation applications, image brochures and other image material, etc. Furthermore, parts of mission statements are meanwhile part of the constitutions of German higher education institutions.

PY - 2012/3

Y1 - 2012/3

N2 - Higher education institutions on their way to quasi-markets have to identify their distinct characteristics and nowadays, most of the German universities have published a mission statement. But since the tasks and mission of German universities are set for them by state regulation, the paper analyses for what mission statements have been introduced and what universities are stating in their mission statements. Addressing this question, the article reveals that mission statements contribute to constructing corporate images. Instead of defining a single overarching organizational identity that is distinct from other universities, mission statements express the tasks and missions that are set for them by higher education law and supplement these missions with distinct images. An important implication of this symbolic profile-building is that the underlying intuitional models of these images are related to the history, subject profile and often geographical location of the universities and thus, contribute to creating competitive fields of universities.

AB - Higher education institutions on their way to quasi-markets have to identify their distinct characteristics and nowadays, most of the German universities have published a mission statement. But since the tasks and mission of German universities are set for them by state regulation, the paper analyses for what mission statements have been introduced and what universities are stating in their mission statements. Addressing this question, the article reveals that mission statements contribute to constructing corporate images. Instead of defining a single overarching organizational identity that is distinct from other universities, mission statements express the tasks and missions that are set for them by higher education law and supplement these missions with distinct images. An important implication of this symbolic profile-building is that the underlying intuitional models of these images are related to the history, subject profile and often geographical location of the universities and thus, contribute to creating competitive fields of universities.

KW - higher education policy/development

KW - management

KW - mission

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84857321641&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/13583883.2011.617466

DO - 10.1080/13583883.2011.617466

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84857321641

VL - 18

SP - 57

EP - 77

JO - Tertiary Education and Management

JF - Tertiary Education and Management

SN - 1358-3883

IS - 1

ER -