Between Mission and Market Position: Empirical findings on mission statements of German Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• higher education policy/development
• mission
• management

Notes

1. The criteria being: the “date of birth” of the mission statement (1996, 2002, 2007), the organizational context and circumstances of the development and introduction of the mission statement (e.g. top-down vs. bottom-up, advice of consultants), the disciplinary profile of the university, the founding date of the university and, finally, the shape and form of the mission statements.

2. The analysis of the higher education policy discourse shows that the need for higher education mission statements is based on the fact that new methods and techniques that have been introduced in the context of New Public Management – strategic management and governance, quality assurance and evaluation, public relations and marketing – require a reference point in the organization. Strategic management presupposes the presence of missions of the university as well as a normative basis for action. Evaluation processes call for self-imposed standards, and marketing processes need collective self-images on which corporate images can be developed. These are all the aspects the university, as an organization, was clearly missing in the mid-1990s.

3. All these actors were successful lobbyists, agenda setters and resource providers, whereas mission statements were not explicitly required by political authorities. Especially the CHE has acted as a major advocate of the mission statement concepts and a conceptual consultant for their introduction and implementation in German universities. Likewise, the German Rector’s Conference was an important voice and advisor in this respect.

4. Connell and Galasinski (1998) come to the same result in their study on mission statements in British universities.

5. Common and traditional organizational self-descriptions of universities are constitutions, seals or descriptions of their history as well as diagrams of the organizational units. New, however, are organizational self-descriptions in the form of accreditation applications, (self-)evaluation reports, targets and accountability reports, as well as mission statements.

6. Three examples presented in the mission statement texts of selected universities (the English version of the three mission statements analysed by sequential analysis) illuminate this textual strategy: (1) “RWTH Aachen University sees the provision of further training opportunities as its duty. Scientific, artistic and professional further training opportunities open the door to lifelong learning” (Mission Statement of the [RWTH] Aachen), e.g. “further training”, a task demanded of German universities since the second version of the Framework Act for Higher Education in 1987 (HRG), is connected to “lifelong learning” in mission statements––a demand replacing older concepts and ideas of lifelong education and recurrent education of the 1960s and 1970s in UNESCO and OECD papers in the 1990s (Pongartz, 2006). (2) “Studying and teaching require two forms of commitment: a commitment to stay current with the latest advances in knowledge and to serve the needs of society. Therefore, the continuous critical revision of the content and types of curricula is an integral part of the Humboldt-Universität’s mission” (Mission Statement of the HU zu Berlin). Here, serving the needs of society is related to the continuous critical revision of the content and types of curricula, which takes on the form of evaluation of teaching and quality management on the recent higher education reforms (Schwarz & Westereheijden, 2007). The proliferation of evaluation quality assurance practices is one of the most salient indicators of an overall trend towards organizational accountability that replaces the former trust by the public in the self-steering mechanisms of science in academia (Krücken & Meier, 2006). (3) “At LU Hannover we consider academic teaching to be a unity of knowledge, reflection on the real world and moral responsibility. Theoria cum praxi means for us, as it did for Leibniz, a synthesis of research guided by insight and application, each benefiting the other” (Mission Statement of the LU Hannover). In this quote, the nature of academic teaching refers to a mode-2 of knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994), in which basic research, applied research and development/innovation do not follow a cascade model or linear model anymore, but rather are highly intertwined and feedback-loops, knowledge generation and the active search for economic applicability are now seen as parallel and substantially overlapping processes (e.g. Krücken, 2003; Laredo, 2007).