All different? All equal? differentiation of universities’ mission statements and excellence initiatives in Germany

Jens Jungblut and Marc Jungblut

Science and Public Policy, 2017, vol. 44, issue 4, 535-545

Abstract: German universities have traditionally been characterized as homogenous. However, recent policies such as the excellence initiative were supposed to introduce differentiation and incentivize universities to develop more specific missions. This study analyzes the mission statements of German universities using a quantitative content analysis. It focuses on the question, whether the mission statements of German universities can be clustered in different groups and if so, whether the membership in one of these groups correlates with a university’s success in one of the initiatives or other organizational characteristics. The results show that German universities today have somewhat differentiated mission statements focusing either on research or education. Additionally, half of the universities created significantly longer mission statements with more diverse profiles. However, the characteristics of a university’s mission statement are found not to be related to the university’s success in the excellence initiative, the Competition for Teaching Excellence or the type of institution.

Keywords: mission statements; Germany; excellence initiative; universities; institutional theory; computer-assisted text analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/scipol/scw082 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:scippl:v:44:y:2017:i:4:p:535-545.

Access Statistics for this article

Science and Public Policy is currently edited by Nicoletta Corrocher, Jeong-Dong Lee, Mireille Matt and Nicholas Vonortas

More articles in Science and Public Policy from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().