CONCEPTS, IDEAS, VISIONS: THEMATIC CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC PLANS AMONG ELITE, INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES by ADAM THOMAS MCLEAN WYATT (Under the Direction of Erik C. Ness) ABSTRACT Universities operate in an increasingly global and complex environment. Limited academic and financial resources force institutions to choose goals that allow them to remain competitive. Such behaviors require the use of strategy - a process borrowed from the corporate world and actively studied beginning in the 1980s in higher education. This study builds the idea of strategy and applies it to the study of elite, international higher education institutions. This study specifically looks at strategic plans and the representation of strategic choices in those plans. For higher education institutions like colleges and universities, strategic plans present ideas, concepts, and themes that provide a direction for the institution. Meaning, what each university chooses should theoretically help move them into a more prestigious position in the higher education market. The purpose of the study is to understand how institutions present themselves in their international objectives through their strategic plans and in what ways they compete. I examine this issue by asking three main research questions. The first question asks what are the ideas or concepts that institutions communicate in their strategic plans? The
Transcript
CONCEPTS, IDEAS, VISIONS: THEMATIC CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC
PLANS AMONG ELITE, INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
by
ADAM THOMAS MCLEAN WYATT
(Under the Direction of Erik C. Ness)
ABSTRACT
Universities operate in an increasingly global and complex environment. Limited
academic and financial resources force institutions to choose goals that allow them to
remain competitive. Such behaviors require the use of strategy - a process borrowed from
the corporate world and actively studied beginning in the 1980s in higher education. This
study builds the idea of strategy and applies it to the study of elite, international higher
education institutions.
This study specifically looks at strategic plans and the representation of strategic
choices in those plans. For higher education institutions like colleges and universities,
strategic plans present ideas, concepts, and themes that provide a direction for the
institution. Meaning, what each university chooses should theoretically help move them
into a more prestigious position in the higher education market.
The purpose of the study is to understand how institutions present themselves in
their international objectives through their strategic plans and in what ways they compete.
I examine this issue by asking three main research questions. The first question asks what
are the ideas or concepts that institutions communicate in their strategic plans? The
second research question asks to what extent do institutions within the same tier ranking
differentiate themselves from each other? The third research question asks to what extent
do institutions between ranking tiers differentiate themselves from each other?
This study uses quantitative, computer-assisted content analysis to answer these
questions. Word frequency counts generated five major themes based on a sample of fifty
strategic plans drawn from a representative sample of the top 200 institutions listed on the
Times Higher Education rankings report. The five themes are (1) research, (2) students,
(3) faculty, (4) academics, and (5) internationalization. These themes were then analyzed
through a series of descriptive statistics to determine the degree of variation between
institutions based on assigned quintiles and then through a one-way analysis of variance
based on the sample tiers. Qualitative findings were then used to show how institutions
might interpret individual strategies. The findings show that the sample institutions, while
exhibiting some degree of variation, are relatively homogeneous with respect to
Table 4.9: Analysis of variance across all quintiles by theme…………..……………….67
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CHAPTER ONE
UNIVERSITIES AND THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
Introduction
Higher education institutions operate in an increasingly complex and competitive
environment. A quick search of university websites reveals the multifaceted arenas in
which these institutions engage.1 Whether promoting a novel breakthrough in medical
research, a lecture by a visiting delegate, or its historical prominence, universities
continually strive to display their relevance in a rapidly changing global environment.
Such displays of accomplishments are often merited, as the achievements are often the
result of goals a university pursues.
Goals come, in one form or another, from the planned courses of action that
higher education institutions choose. Such planned courses of action are usually
explicated in a university’s action or strategic plan.2 While not often obvious or
straightforward, the university’s identity plays a key role in the directions it selects for
each goal in its strategic plan. The goals can conversely play into the institutions identity.
In effect, how observers understand any identity of the university becomes a question of
1 Scholars use the term higher education institution to mean two-year and four-year institutions in a range of institutional types. In this study, the term is used interchangeably with university to prevent monotony in prose and is meant to apply to the classic definition of university as a research intensive/extensive institution. 2 Action plan and strategic plan are the same term used depending on the regional location of a higher education institution. In the United States and Europe, strategic plan is the more common term. In Asia, action plan appears more commonly in association with an institution’s strategic direction.
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“which came first.” Does institutional identity drive strategic plans and their subsequent
goals or do strategic plans and their subsequent goals drive institutional identity?
This duality creates a fulcrum on which universities operate and present
themselves to their external audiences. Morphew and Hartley (2006) tackle a similar
problem with their examination of mission statements in public and private higher
education institutions in the United States. In their study, they ask if “missions statements
are, in fact, accurate depictions of organizational reality or whether the differences among
mission statements are the products of recognized differences or aspirations” (p. 460).
Their conclusion is especially relevant to understand the role of strategic plans in the
competitive environment in which universities operate. The authors conclude:
The elements that make up college and university mission statements suggest that our thinking may need to be updated. Simple assumptions about mission statements (e.g., they are meaningless, self-aggrandizing documents; they are essential to the planning process, etc.) may need to be rethought. While there is evidence that mission statements are used to signal and symbolize, it seems more likely that the subject of college and university mission statements is more complex and that institutions are using these documents to communicate their utility and willingness to serve in terms that are both normative and politically apt (p. 469).
The study at hand takes these premises of Morphew and Hartley’s conclusions on
mission statements - that they are complex documents that communicate general yet
specific messages - and applies them to the study of university strategic plans. The
purpose of the study is to understand how institutions present themselves in their
international objectives through their strategic plans and in what ways they compete.
The emphasis on strategic plans over strategic planning should be noted well
before proceeding. Cohen and March (1986) state that “planning is a primary
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responsibility of executive leadership” and that a “fundamental value of planning was
asserted by all [referring to organizational executives or presidents]” (p. 112). The
authors base this claim that there are two points with respect to planning:
(1) A primary responsibility of leadership is that of providing broad, general direction to the organization; and
(2) Orderly direction requires a clear specification of objectives, an identification of alternative routes to those objectives, and a choice among those alternatives (p. 112).
Further, Cohen and March found that “strategic plans should be comprehensive in nature
and involve academic, fiscal, physical, personnel, research, and organizational planning
as a consistent master plan” (p. 112). Despite the multifaceted nature of planning, the
authors found little evidence of planning being done in American universities. Thus, the
act of planning and the subsequent plans produced represent something else.
Cohen and March (1986) state that the plans become four things. The first is that
plans become symbols. They symbolize that they can support actions that will make them
seem more valuable than they may really be. Secondly, the plans become advertisements.
The authors state “plans are really investment brochures and are attempts to persuade
private and public donors of the attractiveness of the institution” (p. 115). The tertiary
objective is that plans become games. What the authors mean by this is “in an
organization which goals and technology are unclear, plans and the insistence on plans
become an administrative test of will” (p. 115). Finally, plans become excuses for
interaction. With this, March and Cohen suggest that planning and the process of
planning yield results more important than the actual plan.
Thus, strategic plans, in the simplest concept, provide a direction for an
organization to pursue. The plans, however, only present the strategy an institution
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wishes to pursue and do not necessary decide what is ultimately pursued. With the case of
a larger and more complex organization, such as a college or university, multiple
strategic directions are possible. One need only pull up the strategic plan for their local
higher education institution to realize the breadth of directions an institution feels
necessary to guide itself over a period of years. Further, these directions change from
institution to institution and from location to location. That is to say, the directions that
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may pursue are different, but not always, than
an institution like Boston University where both institutions are located in the same city,
Boston, Massachusetts. Similarly, an institution like Yale University and an institution
like Stanford University, while both well-respected private institutions, may pursue
different strategic directions based on their location. In this case, Yale University is
located in the New England town of New Haven, Connecticut, and Stanford University is
located in the “high tech” zone of the west coast of the United States in Palo Alto,
California.
Further complications arise when one examines the global competitive
environment of higher education institutions. Competition is not necessarily local, often it
may be global in nature. Thus, Harvard University’s primary competition and its focus of
strategic directions may be against Oxford University or Cambridge University. In this
instance, the oldest and arguably most prestigious university in the United States is
competing against the oldest and most prestigious universities in the United Kingdom,
and possibly Europe.
The extent of the higher education marketplace extends well beyond the United
States and Europe. Countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have begun to compete
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on the global stage as well. This means an understanding of strategic directions cannot be
confined to the United State or Europe alone. Considerations for other institutions in the
non-Western, non-English speaking world must be included.
But how does one attempt to understand the strategic directions institutions put
forth in their strategic plans? This study examines this phenomenon and seeks to
understand the ways institutions show their ways to compete in a global market. Further,
this study examines the correlates between institutional characteristics and their stated
strategic directions. Ultimately, this study seeks to answer the question: how do
institutions envision their strategic directions with regard to international competition
based on their institutional characteristics? To answer this main question, I ask three
research questions.
RQ #1: What are the ideas or concepts that institutions communicate
in their strategic plans?
RQ #2: To what extent do institutions within the same tier ranking
differentiate themselves from each other?
RQ #3: To what extent do institutions between ranking tiers
differentiate themselves from each other?
Universities Today
On September 22, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article
entitled “Southern Illinois U. Strategic Plan May Have Been Plagiarized” (Smallwood,
2006). In it, Scott Smallwood writes about the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
plagiarizing its strategic plan entitled Southern at 150 from the Texas A&M University
strategic plan called Vision 2020. He explains that each institution uses, “the same two-
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page list of ‘critical concerns,’ and a nearly identical eight-point list of ‘primary gaps,’
including ‘low research dollars in the sciences’ and a ‘less attractive community than
larger metropolitan areas’” (p. A29). Smallwood mentions further that the chief architect
of the two strategic plans was the same person, who had just moved as an executive
assistant to the president at Texas A&M University to vice chancellor of planning at SIU-
Carbondale. Whether or not the administrator who oversaw the development of both
strategic plans should be found as plagiarizer is of no concern here. The situation,
however, notes some merit about the competitive nature of higher education institutions.
From an initial perspective the dual use of a strategic plan at two institutions may
indicate the generic and even a possible boilerplate or formulaic nature of the documents.
With a deeper glance, however, the event above illustrates greater concerns within higher
education institutions – legitimacy and differentiation. Legitimacy comes from the need
to be constantly recognized by peer institutions as performing the appropriate duties and
functions. In the case of Southern Illinois, the vice chancellor had a larger vision that
would provide more legitimacy to the institution based on his previous work at an
institution of higher regard. On the other hand, the need to be dissimilar or to differentiate
is also important for a variety of environmental factors. Differentiation comes from the
need to constantly attempt to capture multiple markets such as students, faculty,
administrative staff, and funding sources. Combined, these concepts provide a very real
concern when choosing the most appropriate paths to pursue given today’s realities.
With the example of Southern Illinois, the larger vision for SIU, possibly borrowed from
Texas A&M, shows a need for legitimacy
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Universities today operate in an increasingly complex and competitive
environment. In their research on the economic realities of higher education, Slaughter
and Leslie (1997) promote the theory of academic capitalism. Simply put, the theory
explains the profit and entrepreneurial-oriented nature of higher education institutions, in
particular, research institutions. The entrepreneurial shift of universities is due, at least in
part, to shifts in traditional bases of financial support and the need to find other resources
to continue institutional operations.3 At least in part, the entrepreneurial shift comes on
the heels of resource dependence. In the follow-up to the original research that formed
the foundation of academic capitalism, Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) push their theory to
individual areas of the university – examining areas of patent policies and their effects on
students, faculty, and institutional policies as well as the effects of academic capitalism
on the administrative roles, departments, governing boards, and sports.
During the same time period that Slaughter, Leslie, and Rhoades researched and
expanded their theory of academic capitalism, other higher education scholars examined
other efforts by universities to operate within the new market environment. Zemsky,
Wegner, and Massy (2005) examined the way American universities changed their
operational strategies. One key aspect of their research focused on the transformation of
missions from one of teaching to one of increased and sponsored research productivity.
The premise these authors engage supports realignment of higher education institutions
towards means that enhance the scholarly – but not necessarily academic – caliber of
universities.
3 Many of the economic realities and market policies analyzed by Slaughter and Leslie (1997) and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) come from neoliberal theories of the market. David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) provides a solid base to understand the fundamentals of modern neoliberal economic policy.
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In Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, Kirp (2003) uses specific case
examples to show the varying ways institutions respond to market changes. These
changes often come from reorientation of mission to serve the multiple purposes of a
newly realized public agenda (Zemsky, Wegner, & Massy, 2005). The sample cases Kirp
(2003) uses center on what many consider to be the “elite” colleges and universities in
the United States as the author states, “how the pull and tug of competition plays out
across the landscape of American higher education” (p. 7). The competition he speaks of
plays out on multiple levels. The most obvious to the public perception of higher
education rests in the options prospective students have when choosing an institution of
higher learning. The example Kirp uses is that of Beaver College, where a name change
to Arcadia University coupled with administrative changes facilitated by KPMG – one of
the big four consulting firms – revived the institution. Name changes and rebranding
aside, Kirp finds more significant strategic shifts linked to market competition. At the
University of Virginia, the author shows a shift from public monies to support the Darden
Graduate School of Business Administration to a holistic use of private funds, giving the
school more flexibility in its operation outside the realm of the state legislature. With
New York University, Kirp analyzes what he calls the “star wars” – faculty hires of
superstar quality (p. 66) and the inter-institutional wars waged to hire the best and
brightest faculty members from one research institution into another often for higher
salaries and better benefits. Kirp goes on to examine many more institutional changes
driven by the market, but returns to show that almost all decisions are driven by strategic
goals and the ultimate means of achieving these goals compared to monetary value.
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Zemsky et al. and Kirp’s research echoes previous scholars sentiments toward a
new paradigm for higher education. Kerr (2001) revisits years of his research on higher
education institutions, going back to 1963, to reconsider the university. He states:
The “Idea of a University” was a village with its priests. The “Idea of a Modern University” was a town – a one-industry town – with its intellectual oligarchy. “The Idea of a Multiversity” is a city of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some rise to the top within it; most fashion their lives within one of its many subcultures. There is less sense of community than in the village but also less sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose than within the town but there are more ways to excel. There are more refuges of anonymity – both for the creative person and the drifter. As against the village and the town, the “city” is more like the totality of civilization as it has evolved and more an integral part of it; and movement to and from the surrounding society has been greatly accelerated. As in a city, there are many separate endeavors under a single rule of law (p. 31).
The term of the multiversity aptly describes the university today, as does the statement of
“many endeavors under a single rule of law.” Kerr’s insights into the future prove to be
one of the most stunning examples of predicting what the future will hold. Media and
scholarly research show multiple examples of failed reforms, mission drift, struggle for
federal research funds, increasingly harder choices on who and what to include or
exclude from the aims of the institution, and changes to the intellectual nature of the
academy. Henry Rosovsky takes these principles and applies them, in a looser narrative
format, to the challenges of running a research university. His The University: An
Owner’s Manual (1990) both playfully and seriously shows the decisions that come along
with constraints. Whether they are justifying the core or general education requirements,
deciding to repaint classrooms in the summer, or understanding the place of the
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university and its endowments compared to other institutions, the decisions that come
along in guiding universities today are complex and fraught with complications.
Prior to his death, George Keller, one of the most prominent higher education
scholars, released his personal reflections on the future of institutions. Keller (2008)
points out current and impending transformations with students, faculty, research,
teaching, technology, funding, and disciplinary structure. While fairly encompassing, as
one would expect from a culmination of research into one’s final scholarly piece, he
integrates how the new society affects higher education. The concept of the new society
brings in the concept of the global environment and its effects on higher education
institutions.
The Global Environment
Researchers, politicians, and administrators banter about two key terms that
encompass changes higher education institutions experience in the global environment:
globalization and internationalization. Globalization is described as “a dynamic that has
economic, political, social, and cultural ramifications” (Schugurensky, 2003, p. 294).
This dynamic quality implies a push and pull coupled with a give and take atmosphere
among multiple actors and constituencies. Internationalization, on the other hand,
described as “the process of integrating international, intercultural, and global dimensions
into the purpose, functions – teaching/learning, research and service – or delivery of
higher education” (Knight, 2010, p. 208; Knight, 2004, p. 9); the process of
internationalization operates as an indication of intentional effort. To compare the terms
leads to a useful analysis of globalization versus internationalization and their effects on
higher education institutions.
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Globalization is a world force that operates outside any boundaries of institutional
control. Universities have no control over their participation in the globalization process.
Rather, the process affects them regardless of their willingness to engage in the dynamic.
Internationalization, however, is a chosen participation in the dynamic of globalization.
Higher education institutions may choose to engage in the process of internationalization
or reject it. In effect, the institution has options.4 For higher education scholars,
internationalization is the term more commonly employed (Knight, 2010).
Portnoi, Bagley, and Rust (2010) offer a keen observation that “the competitive
forces that accompany the global free-market economic system impact every level of the
higher education subsector in significant ways” (p. 1). Ilon (2010) reverberates the
sentiments through a comparative analysis of changes to higher education. In her piece,
she examines the changing quality of higher education students and the growth of
inequality and income, the shifts in funding between countries, regions, and disciplines,
and growing internationalization of research. In particular, she brings up the prominence
of newly formed international rankings or league tables and their importance in priority
shifting for institutions.5 These shifts signal a growing change in higher education and the
way institutions approach them. Globalization is an ever-present force and universities
are internationalizing themselves to respond to it. A need exists to understand how higher
education institutions are strategically aligning themselves and through what mechanism
to remain globally competitive.
4 The realities of this typically come down to that a higher education institution must engage in internationalization or will otherwise lose its competitive advantage. 5 To date, there are only two notable international ranking systems - The Time Higher Education and the Shanghai Jiaotong Academic Ranking of World Universities. The US News & World Report rankings are the most common in the United States.
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Significance and Organization of Study
The significance of the study is three fold. First, it takes the issue of strategic
planning into account as a major driver of institutional objectives. Second, it is the first
study that analyzes differences and/or similarities between higher education institutions at
a global level – previous studies have concentrated on institutions within the boundaries
of a single country. Finally, it sets a course of action for future research on the role of
strategy and strategic plans in universities and how they play in the organizational life of
higher education institutions.
This study consists of five chapters, including the introductory Chapter One.
Chapter Two examines the literature of 1) corporate strategy, 2) strategy and higher
education, and 3) neo-institutional theory. Every attempt is made in this chapter to
present a comprehensive and comparative perspective, where appropriate, due to the
global nature of the study. Chapter Three presents the research design and three questions
examined in this study. Chapter Four presents the data and findings and how they relate
to the research questions. Chapter Five presents discussion, conclusions, and implications
of the research. Directions for future research are also presented.
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CHAPTER 2
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
As illustrated above, it is easy to understand the complex, global environment in
which higher education institutions operate. The need to think and act strategically, in
order to achieve specific institutional objectives, is not only important but also necessary.
This review of the literature starts with the first disciplinary uses of strategy known as
business policy or corporate strategy. From this base comes the development of higher
education strategy as a management mode. Finally, I relate the use of strategy in higher
education from the perspective of institutional theory.
Foundations of Corporate Strategy
Strategy, as a concept, developed from what scholars described in the 1950s and
1960s as business policy. Business policy represented an area where corporate ideals and
goals were shifted purposively to create better revenues for individual enterprises.
Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel (1998) outline ten schools of strategic thought into
three major conceptual groupings. The first group, prescriptive, was the original
foundation of corporate strategy in the 1960s and 1970s. Prescriptive forms of strategy
describe how they should be and not how they actually are. Prescriptive strategies present
theoretical over practical as the base argument. The second group is descriptive and plays
on the actual deployment and uses of strategy in the corporate environment. The third,
and most recent group, is the configuration camp. Configuration strategies form a
stepwise approach to strategic planning. This might be commonly seen as a, "once we
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achieve objective one, we can then do two, and once two, then three." The use of
configuration strategies is common in the higher education realm as they provide
benchmarks and goals for institutions to assess themselves against.
The authors of Strategy Safari (1998) also talk about the five “Ps” of strategy –
plan, pattern, position, perspective, and ploy. While not specific to any one of the schools
or camps, the Ps are portions of each, picked and chosen as it applies to the strategic
question at hand. Plan acts as the intended mission or goal of the strategy. Patterns are
emerging trends that help form a corporation’s base strategy. Position is the desired or
intended market. Perspective is the viewpoint from which a corporation intends to take
their strategy. Ploy is deception and the use of strategy to confuse or throw off
competitors. Without being overly specific, the five “Ps” help strategists understand the
possibilities in any of the schools or camps. The corporate strategies that scholars study
or corporations use take pieces of each school, camp, and each of the five “Ps.”
Industry structure also plays an important role in strategy. Porter (2008),
considered a grandfather of competition and strategy, outlines five forces that affect
industry structure.6 These forces include supplier power, barrier to entry, threat of
substitutes, buyer power, and degree of rivalry. Supplier power is the degree to which a
supplier of goods has the ability to change the dynamics over a producer. Barrier to entry
is when a corporation must worry about a rival company or start-up company entering the
production market of a specific good or set of goods. Threat of substitutes is when a
similar good in another industry may affect the supply and demand of a corporation’s
6 It should be noted that Porter’s take on industry competition are more economically driven. This is not to say that higher education institutions are not economically driven, in fact, I could argue it as extremely plausible, but non-economic factors also drive higher education institutions in their pursuits.
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good (e.g. plasma television versus LCD television). Buyer power is the impact
consumers have on a given corporation or industry. If there are multiple suppliers and
one buyer, this creates a more powerful situation for the purchaser to realize their
intended goals. The last area, degree of rivalry, is the market of a given industry and the
associated costs to compete in that market against rivals. It is degree of rivalry that
provides the basis for much strategy in higher education as the other four areas help
inform the degree of rivalry.
The degree of rivalry can lead companies to create strategies that change the
industry dynamics or cause industry transformation (Porter and Rivkin, 2000). One such
example from the corporate community is the threat of low cost airlines in the airline
industry. During the late 1970's to the early 1990's the airline industry increasingly saw
their passengers change from business travelers to “civilian” passengers who used
airlines for basic travel (Rivkin, and Therivel, 2004). With limited funds compared to
business travelers, airlines saw the opportunity to increase capacity for the emerging
market of travelers. Low cost airline companies like JetBlue and Southwest grew up over
night, posing a significant threat to a major market. In response, companies like Delta
created Song, a low-cost, “non-airline” airline (Rivkin and Therivel, 2004). The goal of
Song was to provide a fun, enjoyable travel experience to a target market. In this case,
women of a certain age were targeted through their desire for style and affordability. The
entire strategy behind Song Airlines was to provide the experience of comfortable travel
without the hassle of big corporate airlines. In the end, however, the strategy was not
enough. Airlines such as JetBlue and Southwest had already attained a market share that
would prove difficult for Delta to compete in.
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A secondary area of strategy is through competition and differentiation. In Good
to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Other’s Don’t (2001), Collins
outlines the factors of competition that cause stellar performance compared to others in
the same industry. Ghemawat and Rivkin (1998) describe competitive advantage as the
ability to provide superior goods at lower costs. Collins builds on this by talking about
competitive differentiation and being good at a specific service or industry. For example,
there is a reason why Kroger is a grocery store with a pharmacy instead of a Wal*Mart
Supercenter. Collins (2001) outlines seven areas that make great companies. The first
area is having level five leaders. Leaders in this category care about the future success
and sustainability of the corporation and not their own glorification. The second area is
“the who, then what.” This concept derives from getting the right people in the jobs first
and then crafting strategy around those people. You want individuals who care about the
larger picture of the organization rather than their own desires. The third area is brutal
facts. Collins emphasized that knowing the reality of the situation no matter how dire it
may be crucial to organizational success. The fourth area is the hedgehog concept an idea
that asks three overlapping questions: What makes you money? What could you be the
best in the world at? And what lights your fire? The intersection of these questions
provides the area to which an organization should concentrate its resources and focus its
goals. The fifth area is the culture of discipline. Here, organizations must stay within their
boundaries and remove things that are not core to its focus. The sixth area is bounded
technology accelerators. Collins uses this term to explain the use of technological
advantages to help you compete but only if they fit within your hedgehog. The seventh
area is the flywheel. With the flywheel, companies should use minute staged changes to
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accelerate the goals of the company. The overarching effect should be compounding,
driving the organization to even further success.
Ducati motorcycles provide an example of competition and differentiation
(Mitchell & Cassiman, 2006). With sales of their motorcycles dropping, Ducati’s
president reinvented the corporation and dropped its tangential products to focus solely
on what it had been known for, the motorcycle. Ducati decided to reinvent their
motorcycle to become a high end product. Instead of competing with regular motorcycle
manufacturers such as Kawasaki and Suzuki, Ducati decided to launch a more luxurious
motorcycle that identified with a particular lifestyle – in many ways, a playboy, James
Bond-esque vibe. In addition to changing their motorcycle styles, Ducati changed their
market through advertisements in specific magazines to target audiences and through
event sponsorship that would draw the same target audience. As a result, Ducati grabbed
a larger share of the affluent motorcycle market and increased their sales exponentially.
Related corporate strategies come through expansion, integration, and
diversification – areas similar to Collins’s use of technology and flywheel accelerators
(Porter, 1987; Collis & Montgomery, 1998; Collins, 2001). The points of these strategies
are simple enough. Expansion is the increased capacity to do more under the corporate
umbrella. Integration is the incorporation of market resources into the corporation.
Diversification is moving into additional, related markets through products that are easy
to produce with existing resources. Celulosa Arauca, a Chilean pulp and wood company
provides an example of these three principles. Celulosa Arauca had the necessary
industrial supplies to continue making pulp through their ownership and maintenance of
forests (Casadesus-Masanell et al., 2005). The company, however, saw the opportunity to
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expand and produce timber products and also more pulp factories to continue producing
construction materials. With these capacities, the company faced a decision to also create
paper products with its supply of goods that would allow it to enter a new market. Such a
move would allow Celulosa Arauca to position itself in multiple markets and create
competitive advantage by harnessing its own supplies.
A final generic set of strategies focuses on branding. Branding allows a company
to focus in on individual consumer groups and associate those groups with the intended
brand (Keller, 2000; Holt, 2002). The development of a brand becomes a partnership with
consumers to keep the same goods relatively constant compared to other goods of the
same type which might become more appealing if quality, price difference, or style
changes (Keller, 2000). Volkswagen provides an excellent example here. In the late
1990s, Volkswagen launched its new identity and brand focusing on principles of historic
standards coupled with future intentions (Lal, 2000). The new product launch was the
revitalized Beetle car brand. The branding and marketing focused on a target audience
that could use the new design to define and promote their real selves. Their ability to
brand themselves and sell that image to a specific group allowed them to maintain strong
market positions and attain customer loyalty, a necessity for creating competitive
advantages.
Strategy and Higher Education
The previous section explained the basic arenas that comprise corporate strategy
Specific example of how it applies to the actual corporations through case studies were
given. How these areas apply to higher education, a primarily not-for-profit industry in
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contrast to profit generating corporations, presents a different conundrum.7 Modern
literature focuses on the pursuit of prestige. The historical literature on higher education
strategy focused on the technical aspects of strategy.
In her treatment on the relationship of strategy and higher education, Chafee
(1985) surveys the major works on strategy in business from the 1960s through late
1970s, their primary domains, and how they relate to the study of higher education
institutions. After a thorough review, she contends that strategy, while not necessarily a
deliberate process, affects the welfare of the multiple levels of the organization. Further,
she elaborates that strategy is a holistic endeavor that seeks to align multiple moving
parts of an extremely complex organization.
Around the same period, Hearn and Heydinger (1985) explored the concept of
tensions in the environmental assessment. Using the University of Minnesota as a testing
ground, they developed twelve tensions. These tensions focus on (1) credibility within the
organization versus quality by those who have a higher degree of commitment to the
organization, (2) management of issues versus issue identification through appropriate
analysis, (3) interpretation of organization versus rational and factual approaches to
organizational understanding, (4) diversity of those involved in organization assessment
versus a homogenous group, (5) voluntary versus staff contribution, (6) group
involvement versus individual appointments, (7) passive versus active attention to
organizational issues, (8) the emphasis on the process and the validity of products to
7 Recent works (Hentschke, Lechuga, & Tierney, 2010; Tierney & Hentschke, 2007) show that an increasing number of proprietary or for-profit institutions are entering the picture. As actual enterprises, in the classic business sense, their use of strategy has the potential to change how strategy and strategic decisions take place in not-for-profit colleges and universities.
20
organizational understanding, (9) the size and scope of environmental assessment, (10)
centralized strategy versus centralized coordination, (11) governance versus management,
and (12) direct versus indirect connections to the organization’s purpose. Of particular
importance to this study is the scope of environmental assessment and the product of
environmental assessment. Strategic plans are the result of these two principles.
Hearn and Heydinger’s work builds upon Kim Cameron’s work on organizational
effectiveness and life cycle. In his work, Cameron focused on the multiple dimensions of
the universities and how institutions responded to these dimensions (Cameron, 1978;
Cameron, 1984). Their work highlights the fact that competing areas exist in universities.
The authors conclude that “no single profile is necessarily better than any other, since
strategic constituencies, environmental domain, contextual factors, etc., help determine
what combination is more appropriate for the institution” (Cameron, 1978, p. 625).
These conclusions underscore Bryson’s work on strategic planning in non-profit
environments. While instructive in nature, Bryson’s (1995) book on strategic plan
explicitly states the need to understand the environmental factors both inside and outside
of the institution and how they impact planning. Kezar (2001) picks up on these
principles and applies them to the higher education realm. She terms these processes
organizational change rather than strategic planning. The decision here is that strategic
processes should facilitate effective organizational change along intended strategic
directions. These change according to organizational beliefs and structures. The belief of
what is important to an institution forms the foundation of what an institution chooses to
pursue, and subsequently realized in a strategic plan.
21
More recently, higher education scholars have become reasonably curious and
concerned about the concept of “leveling up,” a phenomenon which causes mission creep
and ever greater commitment of resources to endeavors unrelated to the core educational
mission of an institution8. In recent higher education studies, scholars have referred to the
leveling up phenomenon as an arms race (Toma, 2010; Winston, 2000), positioning
(Toma, forthcoming), and striving (O’Meara, 2007). The terms are used as antecedents to
the elusive search for prestige – an unquantifiable attribute (Brewer, Gates, & Goldman,
2002; O’Meara, 2007; Toma, 2008, 2010, forthcoming). The fact that prestige can be
perceived in terms of generators but not in terms of quantifiable facts produces a scarcity
of literature in this area.
O’Meara (2007) begins to outline areas of institutional operations that are
pertinent to striving environments. For the most part, the areas of institutional operations
are divided along classic lines and organizational areas. For example, she lists students,
faculty and faculty roles such as research, curriculum, external relations and resource
allocation. Table 1 shows these general areas as well as some indicators related to each
area. She further outlines the multitude of perspectives that striving can come from such
as historical, economic, ecological, sociological, political, and the nature of faculty
careers. Table 2 shows the perspectives and how they inform striving behavior. In this
study, I focus more on the sociological factors, through the use of institutional theory as
explicated below.
8 The dedication of resources to unrelated endeavors as a departure from the core educational mission is an often-stated assumption that has not been proven empirically. Multiple scholars have explored various concepts of the phenomenon and labeled them differently (see O’Meara 2007).
22
Table 2.1: Characteristics of Striving Environments (As published in O’Meara, 2007) Areas of Institutional
Operations Indicators of Striving
Student Recruitment and Admissions
• Institution increases selectivity over recent years, including high school rank, SAT & GPA
• Increase in use of early decisions in admissions • Institution invites more National Merit Scholars
and fewer Pell Grant Recipients
Faculty Recruitment, Roles and Reward Systems
• Greater attempt to hire “faculty stars” with research emphasis, increase in faculty salaries and in start up research packages
• Faculty teaching load decreasing; increase in discretionary time, loosening of institutional ties; increased emphasis on disciplinary ties
• Faculty report expectations for research in tenure and promotion have increased
• Rise in faculty grants, awards, prestigious fellowships
Curriculum and Progress • Shift of emphasis and funding away from remedial and developmental programs & towards honors and programs for academically talented students
• Institution is adding graduate programs, shift in emphasis from undergraduate to graduate programs
• Focus among faculty on making programs more rigorous and on preparing students for graduate school or prestigious career placements
External Relations and Shaping of Institutional Identity
• Institutional actors use language, speeches, websites, and symbols to shape the external image of the institution as more prestigious or “on the move”
• Institutional actors also work to shape an internal, institutional narrative about striving and use the language and rhetoric of striving to frame major decisions, goals statements, and directives
Resource Allocation • Increased spending on infrastructure and administrative support
• Shift in resources from instruction to administrative support
• Investments made in competitive amenities
23
Table 2.2: Perspectives on Forces that Compel Striving (As published in O’Meara, 2007)
Perspectives from… View Striving as… History • A natural organizational evolution for institutions
• Embedded in the context of institutional saga • Influenced by contemporary local, regional, and
national events and conditions • The work of visionary leaders • A result of available resources and societal
constraints at that point in time
Economics • The result of supply and demand, and competition in the higher education market
• An effort to obtain an intangible resource that will be exchanged for tangible resources
Ecology • Involving institutions of similar types within an environment responding to the same set of scarce resources, supply and demand of students, and government regulation. Institutions become more or less similar over time as the environment chooses organizations that will survive
Sociology • Driven by isomorphic pressures to obtain legitimacy; specifically, coercive, mimetic, and normative forces
• A balance for organizations between external pressures and their institutional core
Politics • The result of institutions seeking out sources of power that will allow them to achieve desired goals
• A process of bargaining and negotiating to gain advantage in an arena where prestige is a valuable resource
Nature of Faculty Careers • Impacted by academic reward systems, professional norms, and the nature of disciplinary careers
• Part of a system that values disciplinary ties and activities more than institutional commitments
24
While O’Meara begins to categorize and outline perspectives for issues related to
institutional strategic behavior, it is important to understand that the concept of strategy
as a managerial tool has been prevalent for quite some time.
George Keller broached the topic in the early 1980s. In Academic Strategy: The
Management Revolution in American Higher Education (1983), he explains the process
of crafting or planning in higher education.9 Keller states, “the notion of strategic
planning strikes many as something reserved for West Point generals and executives of
multinational corporations, and an activity that restricts and confuses leaders of good
judgment, strong vision, and wide experience” (Keller, 1983, p. 140). Thus, he gives six
points to indicate exactly what an academic strategy is not.
Keller’s (1983) first point is that strategic planning, and subsequently strategic
plans, are not blueprint documents. Simply stated, they are not documents to be followed
to exact specification, bur rather general guidelines in which future thinking should be
framed. The second point is that strategic plans “are not a set of platitudes” (p. 140).
Here, he means that the items put forth in a strategic plan should be specific rather than
vague. The example he uses is a kin to institutions including the creation of critical
thinkers as a goal. He attributes this to the equivalent of someone “saying they have
liberty or faith” (p. 141). The third point is that a strategic plan should not be the personal
vision of the president or board of trustees. Rather, the plan is “based on calculations,
about the markets for your services and probable external conditions such as the
economy’s vitality, population changes, and the preferences of political leaders and state
9 While today, with all the subsequent management fads present in and forced upon institutions, the idea of planning seems mundane, the concept was borrowed – as most management fads are – from the corporate world (Birnbaum, 2000; Keller, 1983).
25
board of higher education officials, as well as your institution’s traditions, academic
strengths, and financial ability” (p. 141). The fourth point Keller mentions is that it
should not be a compilation of department plans. The strategic or academic plan should
present a long-term picture for the entire institution. He does warn that it may not, and
probably should not, serve all the needs of individual organizations within the institution.
The fifth point is that “planning is not done by planners” (p. 141). The planner’s role is to
ask questions to the others involved and help guide the process. Keller’s final point
alludes to the use of quantifiable metrics in planning. Quantifiable metrics help guide the
planning process but should not be used to replace human judgment.
Keller’s book represented a first attempt to guide colleges and universities on the
use of strategy. Almost 30 years later, the principles outlined were updated from strategic
planning to strategy making. Strategy making moves beyond the traditional
organizational and environmental analysis to include competitive analysis and innovation
(Martinez & Wolverton, 2009). The goal of strategy making is to provide creative
behaviors necessary to compete in a rapidly changing global environment. The use of
strategy making, though, considers higher education as an industry and thus subject to
competitive economic forces such as those mentioned by Porter.
A large part of these economic forces comes from the consumers or users of
higher education. The consumers are not specifically undergraduate or graduate students,
but also parents, politicians, and companies. The need to continually attract the users
causes higher education institutions to purposefully pursue objectives and activities that
increase institutional attraction or prestige, often at greater costs.
26
In Ehrenberg’s Tuition Rising (2000), he examines the potential causes of why
institutional costs, as realized through tuition increases, keep rising. His findings suggest
that higher expectations of facilities, well-recognized faculties, and the need to recruit
and retain the brightest students and faculty correlate to a need for more revenue sources
to sustain the institutional processes.10 He further elaborates that much of this is driven by
external ranking mechanisms (Ehrenberg, 2000, 2003). Said rankings have become an
increasingly complex part of the marketing dynamics of universities and the ways in
which they react strategically (Bok, 2003; Geiger, 2004).
The ratings game provides an interesting venue to explore how higher education
institutions compete. Meredith (2004) examined the effects of ranking systems on
colleges and universities. His study showed that rankings do matter, especially for issues
of admission in public schools and those institutions rated in the top twenty-five or first
quartile of his sample. He states that being seen on the first page of the rankings matters
greatly (p. 459). Further, Meredith found that this impacted the Pell Grant recipients who
applied and thus caused a fluctuation in the pricing policy of the top institutions. Pricing
colleges to achieve the right mix or a certain population becomes part of the rankings
issue for many institutions.
In a series of similar studies, Bastedo and Bowman (2009, 2010) and Bowman
and Bastedo (2010, 2011) found the effects of rankings weighed heavily on
organizational operations in colleges and universities. The researchers found a number of
explicit correlations between rankings and behaviors affecting higher education
10 These are general areas. Multiple literature sources exist for each category and are further delineated under each subcategory. For the sake of brevity, they are excluded here.
27
institutions. Bastedo and Bowman (2009) found that upward and downward movements
on rankings had significant consequences for admissions applications the following year,
especially if the institution was ranked as a top 25 college or university. The results of a
follow-up study found that previous peer assessment rankings influenced subsequent peer
rankings, regardless of any quality changes made in the organization to better it (Bowman
and Bastedo, 2010). A third study continued the study of peer assessment rankings, but
with the Times Higher Education rankings as the base. Similar to their previous study,
reputational scores mattered on subsequent years, even if not evident in the following
year (Bastedo and Bowman, 2010). Bowman and Bastedo’s (2011) most recent study
examined the assumption that rankings bias institutional operations. The analysis proved
that administrators, alumni, faculty, and students are significantly influenced by rankings.
Such influence of rankings on key constituents in the higher education arena may
be explained in part by the concept of prestige. As stated earlier, prestige is an elusive
concept. For higher education scholars, it presents an especially problematic situation as
researchers attempt to explain and study the concept.
Toma (forthcoming) begins to understand how prestige comes in to play for
higher education institutions. For him, prestige begins with the acknowledgement of
aspirations. He states, “institutions know there is a ‘next level’ and understand fairly well
the steps required to reach it” (p. 7). Such acknowledgement leads to the creation of a
“prestige ladder” (p. 9) that may be tentatively climbed through a number of approaches.
Toma sees these approaches as seeking more academically prepared students, creating
special academic programs such as honors colleges or study abroad programs, and with
28
newer student athletic facilities that boast water slides like Georgia Tech or luxury, loft-
style apartments like Georgia State.
Aspirational approaches work best, according to Toma (forthcoming), “when it
causes institutions to differentiate themselves” (p. 13). In fact, he firmly states, “the
foundation of competitive strategy is differentiation” (p. 13). Toma supports this
statement through the examination of five principles of competitive strategy, with many
of them coming from the corporate strategy or business policy realm. He says,
Writing on competitive strategy considers matters such as: (1) positioning, whether through pursuing different activities or similar activities in different ways – and avoiding straddling multiple positions; (2) deciding whether to diversify or expand based on the fit among various activities; (3) considering how favorable the structure of a given industry is before entering; (4) increasing competitive advantage through increasing the willingness of consumers to pay or lowering the costs of production; (5) developing a brand and realizing the equity that comes with a strong one (p. 13).
He further cautions that the ideas above:
can conflict with network influences, legitimacy and efficiency, isomorphism, and rational myths and satisficing. But even with these forces, universities and college must compete in relevant markets. Doing so pushes them toward differentiation – or, at least, its appearance (p. 13).
Toma’s final remark that institutions must compete and differentiate even if
appearance leaves doubt about concretely defining prestige. He does, however, leave
open the possibility that prestige might be best described in the context of institutional
theory and thus understand how institutions attempt to differentiate themselves through
competitive behaviors for better positioning in the market.
29
Institutional Theory
Institutional theory derives from two forms. The first form is historical or old
institutionalism, which holds that institutions, organizations, and its actors move along a
rationally guided path for their choices. Political science, public policy, economics, and
international affairs draw their primary source of reasoning on organizations from this
model. These disciplines are primarily concerned with the observation of large-scale
behaviors of both actors and organizations over periods of time. Scott (2008) outlines the
origins of historical institutionalism. This form of institutionalism can be traced back to
the Marx’s study of social classes, Weber’s study of bureaucratic structures, and
Durkheim’s study of labor divisions. The goal of historical institutionalism was to
examine what is termed path dependence. Simply put, path dependence cares about the
decisions one has made historically as the cause of the decisions one faces today. For
example, decisions of an organization to launch a technology transfer operation may be
the result of prior decisions that lead to losses in revenues from the ability to capture
intellectual property created at the university over time (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). This
form of institutionalism, however, bounded organizations together as a set of formal rules
and regulations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2008). The
theory failed to give the structure and agency that an organizations and its actors posses
(Scott, 2008).
Neo-institutional theory or the new institutionalism provides an alternative
paradigm to view organizations and its actors (Greenwood et al., 2008; Scott, 2008;
Wooten & Hoffman, 2008). In its basic form, it is the sociological study of the interaction
of organizations and society. In the context of this study, it is specifically the interaction
30
of universities and the market, where universities are organizations and the market is the
expectations of society.
At the core of the theory lies the concept of isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell,
1991). Isomorphism is the movement of organizations toward similar structures. Four
major areas of new institutionalism are present in new institutional theory, with the fourth
being a fairly recent development. Normative or sociological institutionalism is the area
most used in the study of higher education organizations in the United States. Normative
institutionalism posits the concept of isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell,
& DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2008). The second area is rational choice institutionalism. This
form of institutionalism presumes that actors are constrained by institutions and best
realize their goals by mindfully going through the restrictions of the institutions (Powell,
& DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2008). The third area is historical institutionalism, similar to
above, yet with a critical distinction. Instead of paying attention to only the formal
structures, it also pays attention to the informal structures (Powell, & DiMaggio, 1991;
Scott, 2008). It theorizes that crises can shift the path dependence model by creating a
new set of beliefs and structures. The final area is known as discursive institutionalism.
Developed by Vivien Schmidt, this form takes the stance that ideas and discourse play a
crucial role in understanding the dynamics of institutional change (Schmidt, 2008;
Schmidt 2010a, Schmidt 2010b, forthcoming). This form of new institutionalism is
rapidly gaining hold in areas of international affairs and policy development where
political discourse has the power to alter and change significant outcomes, especially in
developing areas of the world.
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Normative or sociological institutionalism is the major form of institutional
inquiry into the organizations and structures of higher education systems. In this vein of
theory, scholars are interested in the study of organizations as it relates to ceremony,
intentionally begin to mimic the structures and functions of others. Mimetic behavior
provides a basis for examining issues like mission creep, a move to Division-I athletics,
or the creation of technology transfer offices.
These three forces working together form the base of the “iron cage” (Powell &
DiMaggio, 1991). Viewing these forces in tangent makes it easy to perceive why higher
educational institutions are static and why colleges and universities become increasingly
similar. Without succumbing to external pressures the institutions risk losing their
legitimacy as a specific higher education organization. But, this view takes organizations
into a collective of similar organizations regardless of societal or mission function.
Higher education provides an excellent example of the needed realization of separation of
organizational types instead of the general hypothesis that all organizations seek to be the
same.
Birnbaum (1988) identifies four organizational archetypes of higher education
institutions: collegial, where power is shared among equals; bureaucratic, which exhibits
rational structures and decision making; political, where actors compete for power and
resources; and anarchical, where shared meaning may or may not be found between a
collective of autonomous actors. In using these archetypes as examples, the general claim
can be made that “iron cage” does not bind all these institutions similarly. It is true that
33
many have some of the same coercive, normative, and mimetic factors, but those factors
are generally going to be within the archetypal group and not between.11
The degree of mimetic behaviors and the degree of yielding to normative
behaviors will not be the same between all institutions. Liberal arts colleges (collegial)
are not trying to become research-extensive universities. They may seek to realize
normative behaviors between their peer liberal arts institutions, but they will not seek
validation from those outside their institutional realm, for the most part. This is because
the value systems are different between each institution. Normative behaviors are also
limited, to some degree, to the organizational plane of an institution. The expected
behavior of a research-extensive university (anarchical) may be the same as a research-
intensive university. However, the normative behaviors of these institutions will rarely be
placed upon that of a community college (bureaucratic). Community colleges are
expected to teach more than provide research; conversely, research-extensive universities
are expected to provide research and possibly teach, if they have not bought themselves
out. The examples here show that the linkages between normative behaviors and mimetic
behaviors break down when you consider organizational types rather than organizational
collectives. The exception may be coercive behavior, but even then differences may exist
between Birnbaum’s archetypes. This hypothesis may also break down at the conjunction
of institutional type.
Bastedo (2007) tries to reconcile these differences in his discussion on policy
research and policy studies in higher education. In his overview, he examines the issue of
11 An exception here is regulatory statutes from federal and state governments or organizations such as accreditation entities that apply regulations equally across all institutions.
34
organizational stasis within the institutional theory framework, proving that what
researchers do know provides little insight into organizational change. The little research
higher education scholars do have provides insight into how resisting or manipulating
organizational pressures may provide evidence of breaking the iron cage hold. An
example Bastedo gives of this research is Covaleski and Dearsmith’s (1988) examination
of budget categories at the University of Wisconsin. In order to resist statutory
regulations (coercive), they created a new budget category (non-normative or mimetic),
which allowed them to use resources more effectively and efficiently. But understanding
how policy affects strategic choices in higher education is limited.
Bastedo (2007) postulates two main areas for research. The first area considers
policy as strategy and the second area considers policy as entrepreneurship. The
framework of policy provides an interesting background at first glance. How can policy
be used in either of these capacities? Upon further examination, it is clear that strategy
and entrepreneurship are both outgrowths of what the management field considers
business policy. Porter (2008) reminds us that business policy is simply the changing of
an organization’s actions to create better opportunity for resource acquisition. In other
words, policy changes create and open up potential markets and revenue streams to
support endeavors. This mimics resource dependency theory, which may be considered a
part or subset of institutional theory, as resource dependency examines the ways in which
institutions find, cultivate, and exploit additional revenue streams. This is similar to the
same actions in which institutional theory sees strategic change through the manipulation
of coercive, mimetic, and normative forces (Child, 1972).
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The most compelling support for Bastedo’s argument on institutional theory as an
avenue for strategic change may come from Christine Oliver’s framework on institutional
responses to its various environments. Oliver (1991) offers five frames that institutions
may use to compete with their environment. The first is acquiescence – an institution
yields to environmental pressures. This is similar to coercive forces in institutional
theory. The second frame is compromise. Here, an institution seeks to balance the needs
of the institution with any externalities that may exhibit force. The third frame is
avoidance – an organization will change the way it operates or conceal its operations in
an effort to buffer itself from any external demands by constituent groups. In the forth
frame, defiance, an institution will actively attack, challenge, or dismiss imposing
externalities in its environment. The final frame is manipulation. In this situation, the
organization actively seeks to take control over any external environmental forces. As
outlined, the first frame is more accepting of any external forces, yielding to pressures to
ensure legitimacy and survival. The last frame is an outright war against any external
forces, which may cause the organization to risk legitimacy and survival. Thus, one is
passive; whereas, five is active.
Regardless of frame, however, each level shows a degree of choice, in many ways
strategic choice where actors in the organization mindfully decide on their options. This
is what is referred to as strategic choice theory (Bastedo, 2007; Child, 1997; Deephouse,
1999; Oliver, 1991). The ability of organizations to choose their actions within the
institutional framework and decide how to address issues related to normative, coercive,
and mimetic forces shows that the viewing institutional theory as only able to explain
36
stasis is wrong. Oliver (1991) provides the critical missing link to use institutional theory
as an agent of organizational change efforts.
This is an important point when considering the role legitimacy and prestige in
higher education. As mentioned previously, prestige is an allusive and intangible metric
that is closely linked to prestige. Deephouse and Suchman (2008) explore legitimacy and
create two categories: illegitimate and legitimate. Inside each of these two categories are
three rankings of high, middle, and low status. To achieve high legitimacy, there must
also be a social recognition that is favorable to the institutions. This recognition leads to
higher status and greater reputation. The higher status and greater reputation in turn lead
to greater prestige.
Prestige, then, is a positive consequence of higher legitimacy, higher status, and
higher reputation. Deephouse and Suchman (2008) state,
prestige denotes an organization’s capacity to achieve objectives by virtue of enjoying a favorable social evaluation. Without legitimacy, prestige will be low, regardless of the organizations’ status or reputation. However, legitimacy alone is rarely enough to achieve much beyond the most mundane tasks. Rather, legitimacy empowers the organization to enunciate claims based on both status and reputation – and status and reputation further augment one another through visibility, credibility, and mobility effects (p. 66).
Understanding the effects of legitimacy and prestige on higher education institutions is
limited given the level of research. As mentioned above, rankings provide some
mechanism to at least understand how prestigiously institutions are viewed, and by proxy,
give some insight into their legitimacy. How this is then explained circles back to
institutional theory, or better, strategic choice theory, where organizations are perceived
as actors with agency. It is from this stance that this study is realized.
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CHAPTER 3
RESEARCH DESIGN
In this study, I use computer-assisted content analysis to examine strategic plans
from internationally ranked universities. The previous chapter illustrated three key
domains of previous research related to strategy in higher education. The first domain is
the basic foundations that shape the study of strategy in a very broad sense. The second
domain showed the extension of strategy research into higher education and the limits of
and opportunities for research in this area. The final domain, institutional theory,
illuminated the ways institutions function as organizations and compete through
isomorphic behaviors. Broken down into further categories, these include mimetic,
normative, and coercive behaviors by institutions. Such behavior by organizations leads
to three questions when considering strategic planning, as realized through strategic
plans, in higher education. To reemphasize, this study seeks to answer the larger
question: how do institutions envision their strategic directions with regard to
international competition based on their institutional characteristics?
Research Questions
RQ #1: What are the ideas or concepts that institutions communicate
in their strategic plans?
Research Question #1 examines the commonly held assumption in higher
education studies that institutions continually strive toward higher ends with regard to a
certain set of parameters. O’Meara (2007) begins to outlay these parameters based on
38
student qualifications, faculty roles and responsibilities, and curriculum and programs
just to name a few. Similarly, Toma (forthcoming) contends that such parameters put
institutions in better positions to be competitive within the market. Such positioning
resonates well with Porter’s (2008) view of competition within an industry. With regard
to strategic plans, however, it is difficult to assume what these areas of competition might
be. Research Question #1 seeks to answer this problem.
RQ #2: To what extent do institutions within the same tier ranking
differentiate themselves from each other?
Research Question #2 builds upon the ideas and concepts found in the strategic
plans to determine if there is any degree of similarity or difference between institutions in
in each tier group. Rather than looking at the institutions in their entirety, I am interested
in how institutions position themselves within their own tier. Bastedo (2007) and Oliver
(1991) argue that institutions are free to make choices outside the rigid framework of
institutional theory. Thus, instead of conforming or complying with the conventions of
other institutions, universities are free to make their own strategic choices. These
strategic choices, however, will not be in areas that compromise the legitimacy of the
institution (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008). Research question #3 seeks to understand
how institutions differentiate themselves from each other.
RQ #3: To what extent do institutions between ranking tiers
differentiate themselves from each other?
The final research question analyzes the concepts and ideas presented in the
strategic plans to determine if there is any degree of similarity or difference between
institutions in the top tier versus the lower tier. Institutional theory tells us that
39
institutions will continually become similar to each other through isomorphic processes
(DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). These processes include normative, mimetic, and coercive
Powell, 1983). Together they represent the “iron cage” framework – where institutions
cannot risk differentiating themselves too much without the loss of legitimacy (Powell
and DiMaggio, 1991). Research Question #3 takes into account the isomorphic principles
and seeks the degree of similarity among the strategic plans based on tier classification.
Sample Selection
Ranking systems. To answer the individual research questions, strategic plans
were chosen from a sample of globally-ranked higher education institutions. The Times
Higher Education rankings were chosen as the base to select the sample institutions.
Many ranking systems exist today that attempt to measure institutional reputation and
prestige. The three most common systems that look at institutions from around the world
are the Times Higher Education rankings out of the United Kingdom, the Academic
Ranking of World Universities produced by Shanghai Jiaotong University in China, and
the Quacquarelli Symonds from the Netherlands. Until 2010, the Quacquarelli Symonds
and Times Higher Education Rankings were the same rankings. Starting with the 2011
rankings, the two ranking systems split into separate entities. While placing universities
in different ranks due to unique methodologies, all rankings include the same institutions.
The use of a ranking system allows for a degree of objectivity that might not be
approached if the researcher chose individuals institutions to include in the study. The
choice of the Times Higher Education rankings comes from the length of time the
40
rankings have existed, beginning in 2004 and the methodological stability over the years
compared to other rankings.
The current ranking scheme for Times Higher Education includes five, weighted
portions made up of related subsections. The largest portion is citations, which accounts
for 32.5% of the total rankings. The citation impact is normalized by average citations per
paper. Research and teaching each comprise 30%. For research, reputation via survey
accounts for 19.5%, research income explains 5.25%, the number of papers per academic
and research staff cover 4.5%, and the percentage of public research income as a total of
all research income makes up 0.75%. Teaching also has a reputational survey that covers
19.5%. The number of PhDs awarded per academic is 6% and the number of
undergraduates admitted per academic 4.5%. Also included for teaching is the income per
academic at 2.25% and the ratio of PhD awards per bachelor’s awards at 2.25%. The
degree of internationalization comprises 5% with those totals coming from the ratio of
international to domestic staff at 3% and ratio of international to domestic students at 2%.
The smallest portion of the rankings is the amount of income from research per academic
staff at 2.5%.
The Times Higher Education rankings differ from the other two ranking systems
in some startling ways. For the Quacquarelli Symonds rankings, six scoring mechanisms
are used. The largest measure is academic reputation at 40%. The next largest measures
are citations per faculty and the faculty student ratio at 20% each. The employer
reputation accounts for 10% with the proportion of international students and
international faculty each comprising 5%. While not dissimilar to the Times Higher
Education rankings, the Quacquarelli Symonds rankings rely more heavily on reputation.
41
The Academic Ranking of World Universities is vastly different than the previous
two. Quality of faculty and research output each encompasses 40% of the ranking system.
Quality of faculty is further broken down into the number of staff in an institution
winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals at 20% and highly cited research in 21 broad
subject categories also at 20%. For research output, the number of papers published in
Nature and Science cover 20% and the number of papers indexed either in the Science
Citation Index-expanded and the Social Science Citation Index at 20% also. Quality of
education as defined by the number of alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals
account for 10%. Per capita performance cover the final 10%. The over reliance on the
Nobel Prizes and the Fields Medals skews the rankings toward science and engineering
oriented institutions. Given the specific orientation of the Academic Ranking of World
Universities and the relatively new entrant of the Quacquarelli Symonds rankings, the
Times Higher Education rankings make the most stable choice to pull data from.
Sample selection. To obtain the sample, all institutions were pulled for each year
the rankings existed minus the first and last year. This includes the years 2005, 2006,
2007, 2008, 2009. The decision to exclude the first year, 2004, rests in the need for a new
rankings system to calibrate and fully flesh out its methodologies and include all the
proper institutions. A look at overall data trends shows a significant rearrangement of
rankings between 2004 and 2005, with rankings stabilizing after 2005. The decision to
exclude the last year, 2010, rests in the split between the Times Higher Education and
Quacquarelli Symonds partnership splitting into two distinct rankings, as mentioned.
After pulling the institutions and their individual ranks for each year, I cleaned the
data. For most of the institutions data, this meant identifying the correct name for the
42
institution in its native language and the version used by the rankings. For example, many
German universities were listed by University of Freiburg or Universiteit Frieburg
depending on the year they were included in the ranking. Cleaning the data allowed for
discrepancies and duplicative universities to be eliminated as the Times Higher Education
made no justifications for name discrepancies between each ranking year. This resulted in
an initial sample size of N=378 institutions.
Once cleaned, I used a second sampling stage. To be included, the institution had
to appear in the rankings at least four out of five times during the 2005-2009 period. This
created an initial secondary sample of N=167 institutions. For a few cases, this meant that
the institution was not ranked. The institutions were then averaged across their ranked
years to determine an average ranking for the time period. The average rank was then
sorted from one until the lowest ranked value in the sample of 167 institutions. I then
divided the institutions into quintiles to give greater variability in the data for
comparisons. Many ranking systems use the convention of separating institutions into
separate tiers. One such example is in the U.S. News and World Report that ranks
universities in tiers of 100 institutions per tier. Because the Times Higher Education
rankings only list the top 200 institutions in a given year, the choice of quintiles gives an
artificial breaking point of how institutions might be grouped together based on rank. The
use of quartiles seems to give too little variability with nearly 40 institutions per tier,
while a use of deciles may give too much variability with nearly 17 institutions per tier.
Thus, I made a conscious choice to use quintiles. This broke the institutions down into
groups of 33 or 34 universities per quintile. Appendix A lists the 167 institutions and
their respective quintiles.
43
After sorting institutions by quintiles, I made a third reduction in the sample to
achieve 10 institutions per quintile for a total sample of N=50 institutions. I made three
considerations in the selection of the 10 institutions per quintile. The first consideration
was that the strategic plan had to be made publically available online. The ease of access
to strategic plans comes from the assumption that higher education institutions engage in
environmental scanning to keep pace with and position themselves against aspirational
and competitor institutions. A second consideration was that the strategic plans had to be
available in English. The assumption here is that English provides a universal academic
language in which institutions engage with to communicate globally. The third
consideration I made was to include geographic variation among the institutions. For
example, there were more institutions in Europe and the United States than in Australia
and Asia. A final consideration was to include variation in institutional control such as
public and private universities. For example, if a country had three institutions with two
being public and one being private for the quintile, I included at least one private and one
public. Tables 3-7 show the final selection of institutions by quintile.
Types of strategic plans. The final sample of fifty strategic plans show great
variation. In size, the strategic plans vary between 2 pages with succinct concepts and
goals to large 80 page documents that spell out higher level goals all the way down to
executable endeavors to reach a particular goal. A degree of accessibility also exists.
Several institutions placed their strategic plans as webpages in hypertext markup
language (HTML). Others used portable document format (PDF). While they are both
free to use around the world, the PDF format allows for more illustrative and dynamic
presentation of strategic plans. The strategic plans that use PDF formats tended to have
44
more illustrations of the campus and activities related to specified strategic areas. For
example, when talking about building a world-class educational facility, the University of
British Columbia included pictures of their beautifully landscaped campus. Surprisingly,
no common thread was seen based on region with relation to page length or style of
presentation. Understanding the scope of choices in presenting the strategic plan is
outside the scope of this study.
45
Table 3.1: Quintile One Sample Institutions by Average Rank and Country Location
Institution Location 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Avg. University of Oxford England 4 3 2 4 5 3.6 Imperial College London England 13 9 5 6 5 7.6 Cornell University United States 14 15 20 15 15 15.8 Australian National University Australia 23 16 16 16 17 17.6 University of Tokyo Japan 16 19 17 19 22 18.6 McGill University Canada 24 21 12 20 18 19 University of Hong Kong China -- 33 18 26 24 25.25 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Switzerland 21 24 42 24 20 26.2 National University of Singapore Singapore 22 19 33 30 30 26.8 University of California, Los Angeles United States 37 31 41 30 32 34.2
46
Table 3.2: Quintile Two Sample Institutions by Average Rank and Country Location
Institution Location 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Avg. University of British Columbia Canada 38 50 33 34 40 39 University of Queensland Australia 47 45 33 43 41 41.8 London School of Economics England 11 17 59 66 67 44 Chinese University of Hong Kong China 51 50 38 42 46 45.4 Boston University Unites States 54 66 47 46 54 53.4 University of Auckland New Zealand 52 46 50 65 61 54.8 Osaka University Japan 105 70 46 44 43 61.6 University of Wisconsin United States 73 79 55 55 61 64.6 Trinity College Dublin (The University of Dublin) Ireland 111 78 53 49 43 66.8 University of Washington United States 88 84 55 59 80 73.2
47
Table 3.3: Quintile Three Sample Institutions by Average Rank and Country Location
Institution Location 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Avg. University of Glasgow Scotland 101 81 83 73 79 83.4 University of Western Australia Australia 80 111 64 83 84 84.4 Tokyo Institute of Technology Japan 99 118 90 61 55 84.6 Utrecht University Netherlands 120 95 89 67 70 88.2 Helsinki University Finland 62 116 100 91 108 95.4 Pennsylvania State University United States 64 99 90 105 120 95.6 Vanderbilt University United States 114 53 82 101 140 98 University of St Andrews Scotland 136 109 76 83 87 98.2 Uppsala University Sweden 180 111 71 63 75 100 Eindhoven University of Technology Netherlands 70 67 130 128 120 103
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Table 3.4: Quintile Four Sample Institutions by Average Rank and Country Location
Institution Location 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Avg. University of Southern California United States 124 101 119 102 112 111.6 Georgia Institute of Technology United States 147 145 97 83 86 111.6 Nagoya University Japan 129 128 112 120 92 116.2 Cardiff University Wales -- 141 99 133 135 127 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Korea 143 198 132 95 69 127.4 University of Waterloo Canada 159 -- 112 129 113 128.2 Wageningen University Netherlands 108 97 148 142 155 130 University of Minnesota United States 150 187 142 87 105 134.2 Queen Mary, University of London England 112 99 149 160 164 136.8 University of Lausanne Switzerland 133 89 -- 161 168 137.7
49
Table 3.5: Quintile Five: Sample Institutions by Average Rank and Country Location
Institution Location 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Avg. University of Massachusetts United States 68 124 175 191 139.5 Newcastle University England 168 133 129 162 158 150 City University of Hong Kong China 178 154 149 147 124 150.4 Free University of Brussels Belgium 76 165 154 183 191 153.8 University of Oslo Norway 138 177 188 177 101 156.2 University of Western Ontario Canada 191 -- 126 159 151 156.7
5 University of Notre Dame United States 179 152 155 168 199 170.6 University of Twente Netherlands -- 115 185 200 200 175 KTH, Royal Institute of Technology Sweden 196 172 192 173 174 181.4 University of Reading England -- 190 180 194 191 188.7
50
Analysis
The use of strategic plans as the primary source of data warrants an analytical
technique that takes into account the unique nature of textual data. Content analysis best
fits the needs of the study. Content analysis is defined as the process of discerning
meaning from text or images through rigorous, structured analysis (Holsti, 1969;
Krippendorf, 2004; Neuendorf, 2002). For this study, I use computer-assisted content
analysis. Diefenbach (2001) gives three reasons for the use of computer-assisted content
analysis over the more traditional hand-coded approach. The first is that computers can
produce perfectly reliable word counts or frequencies and can do so every time with same
data set. This eliminates potential counting errors done by various researchers. The
second reason is that it forces the researcher to review all data before moving to the
coding stage. Such an examination eliminates biases in choosing whether or not to
include something in the coding structure prior to running word or frequency counts. The
third reason Diefenbach gives is that removing the hand coding and data entry aspects of
traditional content analysis methods eliminates double possibility of errors.
To aid in the computer-assisted content analysis used in this study, I use the
qualitative research software package Atlas.ti. The first stage of content analysis is to
code the data. This is a process known as unitizing (Holsti, 1969; Krippendorf, 2004;
Neuendorf, 2002). The units may be individual words, sentences, or entire paragraphs
that illuminate the intended theme. Thus, Morphew and Hartley (2006) use the term
element to describe the unit and amount of data being coded. For the purposes of this
study, the first round of data coding is to generate a word frequency count for each
strategic plan. Within Atlas.ti, the word frequency generator produces a table of every
51
word present in the document and the number of times it is present. For example, if the
word “international” appears, it will be added to the list of words appearing in the
document. For each successive time the word shows, the system adds a count of one to
that word. So if the word “international” is in the text 157 times, it receives a count of
157 in the table.
The second stage is to thematically group data elements (Holsti, 1969;
Krippendorf, 2004). Thematically grouping data elements allows for the researcher to see
the proportion of elements that appear more or less in the document. Grouping creates a
vision of the more relevant or common feature of the elements because the word
frequency technique does not automatically combine common words or themes. For
example, the words “curriculum” and “curricula” both refer to academic characteristics of
an institution. An institution may state in their strategic plan to enhance the engineering
curriculum or talk more broadly about improving their curricula. These items have
similar meanings and thus should be grouped together as they pertain to academic issues.
The third stage is inference (Holsti, 1969; Krippendorf, 2004; Neuendorf, 2002).
With inference, the researcher is linking elements together to form a holistic picture of
the elements based on patterns that emerged through groupings. The inference stage links
to prior hypotheses, propositions, or research questions regarding the study. Due to the
nature of this study with three separate research questions, I used a three-stage approach.
For research question #1, word frequency generations were run on all 50 strategic
plans in the sample. Using word frequencies allowed me to determine what the actual
concepts and ideas were presented by the sample. Using contingency analysis techniques,
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the ideas were then classified into thematic areas according to O’Meara, if applicable,
and into other themes when they seemed appropriate.
The words generated from the frequency count were then cleaned to ensure that
identical words and their plurals were counted as a single item. For example, “students”
was combined with “student” because they are the same data element. Further, I removed
the words generated from the frequency count that are considered common phrases.
These include common articles, prepositions, and conjugated helping verbs like to be
(Lambert, 2001).
In addition to cleaning up pluralizations and common word elements, I grouped
common data elements together by theme. At this point, I linked together terms that
seemed appropriately related to each other. The primary theme that came out of the 50
strategy plans was “research.” In total, research was mentioned 3,846 times out of a total
of 308,565 total words. I made the decision to include only the top five themes once
common themes were combined. This decision aligned with other authors (e.g. Morphew
and Hartley, 2006).
The final step for research question #1 was to standardize the data elements to
account for the variation in strategic plan size. The documents in the sample ranged in
size from 252 words at the University of Reading to 20,187 at Pennsylvania State
University. To account for the variation, I calculated a proportion to determine how many
times each theme appeared in each strategic plan. I accomplished this by dividing the
number of mentions per theme in each institution’s strategic plan by the total number of
words in the strategic plan. This standardizes the number of mentions of each theme by
plan and creates a percentage. For example, Imperial College London mentions research
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162 times in its strategic plan. Their plan contains 9,461 words. This yielded a 0.017% of
mentions of research. Because this number is inaccessible to talk about a percentage of a
word, I multiplied the number of mentions in the sample to talk about whole words. This
practice is similar to Coe and Reitzes (2010) study of President Obama’s campaign
speeches. In their study, the authors also calculated the frequency each theme appeared in
each speech per 1,000 words to account for variation in speech length. The equation
below outlines how the standardized percentage gets the theme mentions per 1,000
Equation one above shows the number of mentions of a theme per 1,000 words.
Appendix B lists the actual numeric count and the mentions of each theme per 1,000
words for each institution’s strategic plan with regard to their quintiles.
For research questions #2, I ran descriptive statistics to check for the mean,
standard deviation, variance, and minimum and maximum value of each theme for each
quintile. These statistics were calculated using the values created in research question #1.
The mean shows the average number of mentions per 1,000 words of text for all sample
strategic plans in Quintile 1. For example, in Table 4.3, the research theme had a mean of
13.85 mentions per 1,000 words of text in the Quintile 1 strategic plans. Using the same
example, the number of mentions per 1,000 words deviated 6.04 times on average from
the mean and had a variance of 36.44. The variance represents the squared standard
54
deviation from the mean. The minimum and maximum values are used to show the upper
and lower boundaries of each theme for each quintile.
Particular attention is paid to the standard deviations for each theme in each
quintile grouping. A large standard deviation indicates that the institutions mention of
each theme matter more to a particular institution than another. A smaller standard
deviation indicates the opposite where institutions see more similarly to each other on a
given theme. It is important to note that the degree of being larger or smaller depends on
the other themes in the quintile also. Using Table 4.3 to illustrate this point, a larger
deviation exists on the research theme (s = 6.04), especially when compared to
internationalization (s = 3.14) or students (s = 3.89), which are almost half the value of
research. Cross quintile also matters to a degree, as it is apparent that the mentions of
research has greater variation in quintile 4, where s = 9.33, compared to quintile 1.
For research question #3, I examined the themes by quintile to see if a difference
exists between each theme and quintile. To perform this task, I used a one-way analysis
of variance (ANOVA). ANOVAs compare the means of one variable across at least two
or more groups. The ANOVA assumes four key components. The first is that the
expected error values are zero. The second assumption is that there are equal variances or
errors. The third is that the errors are independent. The final assumption is that the errors
are normally distributed.
Because this study has five tiers or quintiles, the ANOVA allows the means of the
themes to be compared by use of the F-test statistic. The F-test is calculated by dividing
the variability between the individual themes by group and the variance within the
individual themes by group. The calculated is then compared to a standard F-distribution,
55
which is a continuous probably distribution measure. To obtain whether or not the
calculated F-statistic is significant, it is compared to the F-distribution at a set probability
level. The probability significance level for this study is set at α = 0.05.
For example, Table 4.9 shows the international theme with the ANOVA statistical
test. The test shows that variance between the quintiles is 56.9 and the variance within the
quintiles is 88.5. This produces an F-statistic of 0.64. The F-distribution shows that for a
(4, 49) is equal to 2.561. The null hypothesis in this situation is that there is no difference
between the means of the groups. Because the F-statistic of 0.64 is less than the F-
distribution of 2.561 at the α = 0.05, we fail to reject the null hypothesis and conclude
that there is no statistical difference between the theme in the tiers.
Methodological Limitations
A few methodological limitations exist for this study. Language always presents a
barrier to international and comparative research. While many institutions actively
communicate in English, other institutions, whether for historical or legal reasons, choose
to communicate in the maternal language. The conscious decision to choose from
institutions that communicate solely in English limits diversity in the pool and may
potentially exclude wider themes.
Another possible limitation is the disregard for the environment and way in which
the strategic plans were created. This is outside the scope of this study. The purpose of
this study is to do a systematic analysis of the text in strategic plans. The environment in
which they were developed is inconsequential to understanding what is ultimately
presented in each plan. Future research should examine the way in which strategic plans
are developed.
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CHAPTER 4
DATA FINDINGS
In this chapter, I present the findings from the three research questions presented
in the previous chapter. The data findings here are divided into three parts. The first
section examines the first research question and provides the main themes present in
strategic plans. The second section considers the themes generated in question one as
they pertain to individual quintiles. The third section uses analysis of variance to
statistically test if a difference exists among the themes for the sample institutions.
Qualitative examples are used in the third section to explain how each theme differs by
quintile.
Research Question #1
The first research question asked: what are the ideas or concepts that institutions
communicate in their strategic plans? Using contingency analysis and word frequency
counts, the data resulted in five major themes: (1) Research, (2) Faculty, (3) Students, (4)
Internationalization/Globalization, (5) Academics.12 The research theme represents topics
related to faculty, graduate, and undergraduate research. It also includes topics related to
research funding and strategic endeavors to increase research through programmatic
initiatives. The students theme represents various levels of student engagement within the
jurisdiction of the university environments. Faculty as a theme represents a broad range 12 The themes listed emerged from word count frequencies based on similar words. Research and faculty are both the theme and the keyword. Students included the term student, pupil, learner, undergraduate, and graduate, and their plural counterparts. Internationalization/ globalization included these terms as well as global and international. Academics included more programmatic areas such as initiative, curriculum, degree, academic, and the plural counterparts.
57
of issues that touch on recruitment, retention, and supporting faculty from the best
institutions. The internationalization/ globalization theme represents topics that deal with
increasing global presence either outside or inside the campus. The final theme,
academics, considers more programmatic aspects of education such as academic
programs and academic initiatives that fulfill the educational missions of the institutions.
The word frequency count was run for each theme and each quintile. For the
entire sample (N=50), five themes emerged. For each theme, the word frequency count
was divided by quintile. Table 4.1 shows the summative information for each theme by
quintile. Tables B.1 – B5 in Appendix B show the breakdown by institution of each word
frequency and then its proportional representation of the total word count.
For Quintile 1, the research theme had 938 counts or represented 13.09 mentions
of the theme per 1,000 words in the strategic plans. Internationalization/globalization had
515 counts or 7.19 mentions, students had 653 counts or 9.11 mentions, faculty had 701
counts or 9.78 mentions, and academics had 469 counts or 6.54 mentions.13 For Quintile
1, this means that research is the number one theme, followed by faculty at number two,
students at number three, internationalization at number four, and academics at number
five.
For Quintile 2, the research theme had 563 counts or 11.73 mentions of the theme
per 1,000 words in the strategic plans. Internationalization/globalization had 452 counts
or 9.42 mentions, students had 630 counts or 13.13 mentions, faculty had 320 counts or
6.67 mentions, and academics had 273 counts or 5.69 mentions. For Quintile 2, this
13 The count average denotes that for each theme in each quintile, the keywords for each theme are the average number of times that theme appears per 1,000 words given the entire word count of the institutions included in the study sample.
58
means that the students theme accounted for the number one theme, followed by research
at number two, internationalization at number three, faculty at number four, and
academics at number five.
For Quintile 3, the research theme had 874 counts or 10.91 mentions of the theme
per 1,000 words in the strategic plans. Internationalization/globalization had 588 counts
7.34 mentions, students had 1031 counts or 12.87 mentions, faculty had 729 counts or
9.10 mentions, and academics had 583 counts or 7.28 mentions. For Quintile 3, this
means that students theme ranked number one, followed by research at number two,
faculty at number three, internationalization/globalization at number four, and academics
at number five.
For Quintile 4, research theme had 960 counts or 14.59 mentions of the theme per
1,000 words in the strategic plans. Internationalization/globalization had 632 counts 9.60
mentions, students had 659 counts or 10.01 mentions, faculty had 542 counts or 8.24
mentions, and academics had 458 counts or 6.96 mentions. For Quintile 4, this means that
the research theme ranked number one, followed by students at number two,
internationalization/ globalization at number three, faculty at number four, and academics
at number five.
For Quintile 5, research theme had 510 counts or 11.86 mentions of the theme per
1,000 words in the strategic plans. Internationalization/globalization had 357 counts or
8.30 mentions, students had 538 counts or 12.51 mentions, faculty had 404 counts or 9.39
mentions, and academics had 344 counts or 8.00 mentions. For Quintile 5, this means that
students ranked number one, followed by research at number two, faculty at number
three, internationalization/ globalization at number four, and academics at number five.
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The bottom row in Table 4.1 reports the theme counts as if the sample of all
institutions acted as one giant group. The research theme has 3846 total counts or 12.46
mentions of the theme per 1,000 words in the strategic plans. The internationalization/
globalization theme has 2544 total counts or 8.24 mentions. The students theme has 3511
total counts or 11.38 mentions. The faculty theme has 2696 total counts or 8.74 mentions.
The academics theme has 2127 total counts or 6.89 mentions. If ranked as a group, the
following ranking order applies: (1) research, (2) students, (3) faculty, (4)
internationalization/ globalization, and (5) academics.
Table 4.2 shows the movement of each theme by rank across quintile. The
movement across quintiles for each of the themes shows some intriguing patterns in how
the sample institutions in each quintile perceive the themes. When compared with
quintile 1, quintiles 2, and 3 have research as the second ranked theme whereas quintile 1
has it as the primary theme. The instance that students is the primary theme for
institutions in quintiles 2 and 3 may mean that these institutions are trying to capitalize on
the student quality achieved in the quintile 1 institutions. For quintiles 4 and 5, which
place a heavy emphasis on research as the primary theme and students as the secondary
theme, they most closely resemble the theme structure of quintile 1 institutions.
A second point to note is the fact that internationalization/globalization as a theme
never moves above the third rank for any of the quintiles. As globalization increases, it
may make sense that more emphasis is placed upon it as a guiding strategic principle. The
emphasis on the internationalization theme over faculty in quintile 2 is of interest. For
quintile 2, where it outranks faculty, the institutions may concentrate more on student
60
recruitment and growing their research profile at an international level rather than the
recruitment of faculty.
Finally, the last place ranking of the academics theme may be explained in two
ways. The first is that academics theme has less emphasis in strategic plans, as the
concentration is more on research, students, and faculty who contribute to high quality
academic programs. The second is that academics theme simply does not matter to
globally-ranked research institutions. Having well known programs such as curriculum or
programmatic initiatives does not bring higher rankings. The root cause of this lies in the
fact that rankings are based on research dollars and faculty, not academic programs.
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Table 4.1: Total Counts and Standardized Mentions per 1,000 Words for All Quintiles by Themes
Rank One Rank Two Rank Three Rank Four Rank Five Quintile 1 Research Faculty Students International Academics Quintile 2 Students Research International Faculty Academics Quintile 3 Students Research Faculty International Academics Quintile 4 Research Students Faculty International Academics Quintile 5 Research Students Faculty International Academics
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Table 4.3: Theme Means and Standard Deviation by Quintile
Research question two asks to what extent do institutions within the same tier
ranking differentiate themselves from each other? The findings here report means and
standard deviations. The descriptive statistics show the mean of the quintile sample
(n=10) and the standard deviation around that mean. The existence of a standard
deviation indicates that there is variation in the data in the quintile on that specific theme.
Table 4.3 above summarizes the mean and standard deviation for each quintile.
In Quintile 1, represented in Table 4.4, the research theme has an M =13.85 and a
SD = 6.04. The student theme has an M = 8.60 and a SD = 3.89. The faculty theme has an
M = 8.88 and a SD = 5.03. The international theme has an M = 8.02 and a SD = 3.14. The
academics theme has an M = 7.49 and a SD = 5.24. Quintile 1 represents the highest
ranked universities in the sample. The standard deviations show that the highest deviation
exists around the research theme. This is almost twice that of the
international/globalization theme and slightly less than twice the amount of deviation
from students. This indicates that for the quintile 1 institutions research is the most
widely ranging variable on which institutions build their strategic plans. This is discussed
more fully in research question #3.
Table 4.4: Quintile 1 Descriptive Statistics N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Variance Research 10 1.92 22.42 13.85 6.04 36.48 Students 10 1.43 13.27 8.60 3.89 15.13 Faculty 10 0.39 19.50 8.88 5.03 25.30 International 10 4.65 12.67 8.02 3.14 9.86 Academics 10 0.64 17.94 7.49 5.24 27.46
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In Quintile 2, represented in Table 4.5, the research theme has an M =14.10 and a
SD = 6.72. The student theme has an M = 13.54 and a SD = 3.86. The faculty theme has
an M = 8.79 and a SD = 5.23. The international theme has an M = 13.21 and a SD = 7.36.
The academics theme has an M = 7.01 and a SD = 5.00. An interesting point to note here
is the deviation around the international/globalization and research themes. Compared
with the other themes in the quintile, these themes exhibit higher deviations. The student
theme has the least deviation out of all the themes. The conclusion here is that the
mentions of students per 1,000 words means that institutions in quintile 2 have a similar
view of students as a strategic endeavor.
Table 4.5: Quintile 2 Descriptive Statistics N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Variance Research 10 5.41 25.72 14.10 6.72 45.18 Students 10 8.30 21.03 13.54 3.86 14.88 Faculty 10 3.42 20.34 8.79 5.23 27.35 International 10 5.14 26.29 13.21 7.36 14.88 Academics 10 1.35 19.94 7.01 5.00 24.97
In Quintile 3, represented in Table 4.6, the research theme has an M =16.90 and a
SD = 8.79. The student theme has an M = 15.58 and a SD = 7.94. The faculty theme has
an M = 9.54 and a SD = 6.61. The international theme has an M = 11.07 and a SD = 6.23.
The academics theme has an M = 8.81 and a SD = 8.81. Research and academics show
the highest deviation in quintile 3. Relative to each other, however, the deviations for
each of the themes in quintile 3 are relatively similar. With the international theme as the
lowest standard deviation for the group, internationalization on a whole may be similarly
conceived in the strategic plans across the institutions in quintile 3.
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Table 4.6: Quintile 3 Descriptive Statistics N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Variance Research 10 5.75 32.10 16.90 8.79 77.30 Students 10 2.44 30.91 15.58 7.94 62.96 Faculty 10 2.64 25.48 9.54 6.61 43.66 International 10 3.32 22.76 11.07 6.23 38.76 Academics 10 2.37 30.44 8.81 8.81 77.66
In Quintile 4, represented in Table 4.7, the research theme has an M = 17.50 and a
SD = 9.33. The student theme has an M = 9.69 and a SD = 5.78. The faculty theme has an
M = 9.69 and a SD = 4.85. The international theme has an M = 13.55 and a SD = 17.40.
The academics theme has an M = 7.73 and a SD = 5.69. The research and
internationalization themes in quintile 4 show the highest degree of deviation overall for
any of the quintiles. While low deviations exist among the students, faculty, and
academics themes, the large deviations across research and international themes further
indicate that quintile 4 institutions are actively jockeying to determine the best strategic
endeavors to pursue. For the other themes in quintile 4, the lower deviation indicates they
pursue at them with the same amount of variation.
The startling high degree of deviation with the internationalization/globalization
theme shows that some institutions value this strategic pursuit more than others. The
mentions for this theme, as shown in Appendix Table B.8, illustrates why a high degree
of variance exists. Nagoya University has 61.23 mentions per 1,000 words. This score
represents one of the most extreme deviations when compared to the other themes in
quintile 4 and the other quintiles for the internationalization theme. The wide dispersion
shows that for the internationalization/globalization theme, the institutions in quintile 4
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have the widest viewpoint on its emphasis in their strategic plans. In this particular
instance, Nagoya acts as an outlier and causes a high standard deviation and variance.
Table 4.7: Quintile 4 Descriptive Statistics N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Variance Research 10 6.57 40.05 17.50 9.33 87.07 Students 10 1.33 15.78 9.69 5.78 33.43 Faculty 10 1.48 19.34 9.69 4.85 23.48 International 10 1.54 61.23 13.55 17.40 302.71 Academics 10 1.40 20.08 7.73 5.69 32.35
In Quintile 5, represented in Table 4.8, the research theme has an M =13.96 and a
SD = 7.58. The student theme has an M = 12.04 and a SD = 4.12. The faculty theme has
an M = 9.13 and a SD = 4.88. The internationalization theme has an M = 9.42 and a SD =
6.07. The academics theme has an M = 7.04 and a SD = 5.51. The highest degree of
deviation in the quintile 5 institutions is with the research theme. Students shows the
lowest deviation for quintile 5 institutions indicating that they pursue students as a
strategic theme relatively similarly when compared with research and
internationalization.
Table 4.8: Quintile 5 Descriptive Statistics N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Variance Research 10 5.21 33.78 13.96 7.58 57.47 Students 10 2.03 22.52 12.04 4.12 17.01 Faculty 10 3.75 17.99 9.13 4.88 23.86 International 10 2.03 22.52 9.42 6.07 36.87 Academics 10 0 17.36 7.04 5.51 30.33
Research Question #3
Research question #3 considers the sample (N=50) as a combined group to
determine if the differences found by quintile matter when looking at all the institutions
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as an entire group. The specific research question to what extent do institutions between
ranking tiers differentiate themselves from each other? Each theme that emerged in the
previous process was run through a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). For each
theme, there is a standard null and alternative hypotheses. The null hypothesis (H0,Theme)
here is that there is no difference among the themes in the sample. The alternative
hypothesis (H1,Theme) is that a difference exists among the themes in the sample.
Table 4. 9: Analysis of Variance across Quintiles by Theme Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig. Research Between Groups 127.3 4 31.8 0.52 0.72
Within Groups 2731.2 45 60.7 Total 2858.4 49
Students Between Groups 320.3 4 80.1 2.79 0.04* Within Groups 1290.9 45 28.7 Total 1611.2 49
Faculty Between Groups 6.3 4 1.6 0.06 0.99 Within Groups 1292.9 45 28.7 Total 1299.2 49
International Between Groups 227.7 4 56.9 0.64 0.63 Within Groups 3981.0 45 88.5 Total 4208.7 49
Academics Between Groups 21.6 4 5.4 0.14 0.97 Within Groups 1734.6 45 38.5 Total 1756.3 49
p < 0.05*, p < 0.01**, p < 0.001***
The ANOVA showed no statistical significance for the research, faculty,
internationalization, and academics theme, when considered at the standard p = 0.05. This
results in a failure to reject the null hypothesis for these themes. Thus, the conclusion is
that no statistically significant difference among the tiers with regard to these themes.
The ANOVA reveals a statistically significant relationship among the tiers for the
students theme. At a p = 0.05, the students theme reveals a p = 0.04. This results in a
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rejection of the null hypothesis and an indication that a difference does exist between the
tiers in relation to the students theme. Upon further examination, and as presented in
Table 4.3 above, it becomes apparent that quintiles 1 and 4 are the outliers for the student
theme. The means for quintiles 1 and 4 on the mentions per 1,000 words is 8.60 and 9.69,
respectively. These represent 4-5 mentions per 1,000 words lower than the other
quintiles. In quintiles 2, 3, and 5, the mentions are 2-3 mentions different from each
other, with 13.54, 15.58, and 12.04, respectively. The higher number of mentions in
quintiles 2, 3, and 5 compared to quintiles 1 and 4 show that the student theme varies
more between tiers than with the other themes between tiers. The reason for this may rest
in the fact that, while international schools are controlled for, more institutions from the
western geographic regions are present than the Asian geographic regions. These
institutions have a historically more student-centered focus in education (e.g. liberal arts)
than the technical and research-orientation of the Asian schools. The difference between
regions as a concept is discussed more fully in Chapter 5.
The multiple statistical conclusions that no difference exists among four of the
themes by tier and that a difference exists for the students theme by tier creates a need for
further analysis. This variation is at least presented in the shear count that a theme exists
and its association proportional average. This is because the ANOVA considers the
means based on mentions per 1,000 words of text. To understand the differences, as they
may exist in expressing given strategic goals, qualitative analysis is used. Qualitative
analysis illuminates how the themes might substantially differ from each other rather than
as a whole among the tiers.
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Research. The research theme is the most prominently featured theme across all
five quintiles. As Table 4.2 shows above, research is consistently ranked one or two in
the five quintiles. Such a result is not surprising given the research-oriented nature of this
elite group of institutions. A common thread for the institutions is their desire to point out
the research status. The University of Southern California (Quintile 4) gives this example,
“USC intends to become one of the most influential and productive research universities
in the world” (USC, 2004, p. 2).
Building upon this principle is the definition of what research means to individual
institutions. The individual nature of each institution shows the variation that arose from
research question number two. While all the institutions pursue research as a primary
goal, such efforts really depend on the values of the institution. Cornell University
(Quintile 1) states,
The aspiration articulates the centrality of research, scholarship, and creativity to a research university, yet implies the importance of interconnections between the creation of fundamental knowledge and use of that knowledge to have a positive impact on the world (Cornell, 2009, p. 11).
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Quintile 1) picks up on a similar theme. Yet,
the institution goes further with the meaning of why the institution should pursue
research:
Fundamental research deals basically with the extension of our knowledge about the principles which govern the world around us and permit our physical and spiritual existence, and explain the origin and destiny of the universe, nature and humanity (ETZ Zurich, 2008, p. 8).
The University of British Columbia (Quintile 2) offers a similar meaning, but harkening
back to the purpose of its founding:
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UBC’s research excellence is a key economic driver, a draw for the world’s greatest minds and an impetus for societal transformation – all that the University’s founders foresaw (UBC, 2009, p. 12).
Institutions are not bound, however, by a purely idealistic pursuit of research to “explain
the origin and destiny of the universe” or the respond to founders alleged foresight. For
many of the sample institutions, articulation of specific goals to come from research is
prominent. The University of Twente in the Netherlands (Quintile 5), for example, sees
research as a motivation for higher financial recognition levels:
The University of Twente wants to lead a campaign with our strategic partners in order to ensure greater recognition and remuneration of multidisciplinary research and group performance in the Dutch financing system, in particular at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (UTwente, 2009, p. 19).
The focus on specific goals is not primarily financial, however, as illustrated by
Eindhoven University of Technology (Quintile 3), also in the Netherlands:
In the research area, TU/e prefers to focus on those fields of engineering science & technology in which it can play a significant role in the international scientific world (science for science) and where it can provide meaningful impulses to solving the major societal issues (science for society) and strengthen knowledge intensive industry (science for industry) (TUEindhoven, 2011, p. 9).
The Eindhoven example above shows the multiple specific avenues that institutions
pursue. For Eindhoven, this breaks down into goals that relate to science for science,
society, and industry. It is arguable here that an institution must pursue directions in all of
these areas with research in the globalized world. The point to be made is the delineation
of each characteristic of research as important to the institution.
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In a related thought, the multiple streams relates to the multidisciplinary nature of
research. Interdisciplinarity features prominently in the research theme. The University of
Hong Kong (Quintile 1) provides an example:
Each theme provides a platform for fostering and advancing research excellence by drawing together interested researchers from different departments and units, and creating interdisciplinary synergies (Hong Kong, 2009, p. 21).
The University of Minnesota (Quintile 4) echoes with a similar statement related to the
importance of interdisciplinary research:
We believe interdisciplinary institutes provide a flexible, responsive model for conducting research and attracting support in the future (Minnesota, 2007, p. 36).
The above examples show how research can be thought of as a strategic theme
across the sample universities. Depending on the institution, the strategy of research may
be ethereal or extremely concrete. Further, the research theme highlights that institutions
emphasize the concept of research in different ways, with multidisciplinarity playing a
large role.
Students. The concept of students in institutional strategic plans is the second
most common theme. The student theme represents attributes related to graduate and
undergraduate students at each of the sample institutions. The primary theme within this
category is the recruitment of students. Oxford University (Quintile 1) illustrates this
principle by stating, “the University is committed to recruiting the most able students,
regardless of background” (Oxford, 2008, p. 20). Pennsylvania State University (Quintile
3) reiterates the same principle with an international flair when it states in reference to
already highly qualified students, “this success should be built upon further through the
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active recruitment of additional international undergraduate students” (Penn State, 2008,
p. 28). The University of British Columbia (Quintile 2) also invokes the international
dimension of students by stating, “expand recruitment of outstanding students and faculty
from around the world” (UBC, 2009, p. 23).
The University of Auckland goes beyond just the recruitment of students,
however, with its concern for retention and also a more international student mix:
Manage the recruitment, retention and support of students so as to achieve a student body in which international students compromise a maximum of 20 percent of undergraduate students, and a minimum of 20 percent of postgraduate students; and no single country to provide more than 25 percent of the total international student body (Auckland, 2005, p. 3).
Here, we see a specific institution both set a strategic goal and a way to achieve that
strategic aim. The distinction for Auckland is interesting. The maximum of 20 percent for
undergraduates shows a stance toward keeping undergraduate education more New
Zealander specific. The opposite is true for postgraduate students, where the University
wants no less than 20 percent. The minimum boundary alludes to the possibility of a
strategic position that would allow all postgraduate education to be entirely international.
The internationality of the students provides an interesting perspective as all
sample institutions mention the need for international students and to prepare for an
increasingly global world. The University of Glasgow mentions, “we’ll prepare students
for political and social environments worldwide, and develop international partnerships
and alliances” (Glasgow, 2010, p. 5). The University follows this up with the need for
international students at the campus because of what they can offer to both the university
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and the city: “international students can enrich university and city life with their different
experiences and perspectives” (Glasgow, 2010, p. 31).
This sentiment resonates with other institutions, as well, especially ones located in
the United States. At Vanderbilt University (Quintile 3), the belief is that their
commitment to students is an advantage:
Finally, in every corner of Vanderbilt there is a commitment to teaching and nurturing students that remains one of Vanderbilt’s distinctive advantages (Vanderbilt, 2002, p. 4).
Internationalization is not limited to just purely altruistic reasons. The KTH Royal
Institute of Technology (Quintile 5) in Sweden sees the internationalization of students as
a financial opportunity:
KTH works in a goal-oriented manner to become an internationally attractive university so that large numbers of paying students also apply (KTH, 2010, p. 10).
For the student theme, the focus on students lies mainly around recruiting the best and
quality students, internationalization, and the affects of that internationalization. Neither
students nor research are the sole focus for these institutions, however. Faculty play an
important role in the strategic directions.
Faculty. The theme of faculty represents a significant portion in the strategic
plans of the sample institutions. While in some quintiles, faculty as a theme find
themselves representing a larger percentage of the plan, for the most part faculty rank
third and fourth. The representation of faculty comes with the recruitment of and
providing research facilities for faculty and academic staff. Tokyo Institute of
Technology (Quintile 3) represents this strategic concept well:
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Create university-wide guidelines for selecting and recruiting faculty, and instill a common understanding of recruitment activities throughout the Institute to ensure that outstanding faculty is selected from a global perspective and a multifarious staff is assembled (Tokyo Tech, 2009, p. 7).
At the University of Notre Dame (Quintile 5), the desire for faculty that fit in with the
institution and its goals is important. They state,
First, we must increase the number of truly distinguished faculty. Every new faculty member we hire, whether at the senior or junior level, must display the capacity for significant scholarly engagement and bring an established record of achievement (while at the same time contributing to Notre Dame’s distinctiveness as a Catholic university and as a center for teaching excellence) (Notre Dame, 2003, p. 12).
These two exemplars best represent what the faculty concept of strategy stands for
in the sample institutions. In many respects, it is finding internationally recognized and
talented scholars that can bring talent and diversity to the faculty ranks while also
maintaining ties to the mission and values of the institution. An interesting point to note
is the lack of addressing faculty areas. While recruitment is the key component related to
faculty, little is stated on the areas these faculty will enhance. The University of
Washington (Quintile 2) states its desire to “attract and retain an outstanding and diverse
faculty and staff to enhance educational quality, research strength, and prominent
leadership” (Washington, 2007, p. 4). This sort of statement resonates through many of
the strategic plans in the sample. Such a general statement may be the result of wanting to
improve all areas of the institution or may be the result of the use of generalized language
to appease multiple stakeholders and members of the university community.
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Faculty roles also tie into the academic agenda of an institution. After these first
three themes, however, the two remaining major themes have fewer mentions in the
strategic plans as summarized by the counts present in Table 4.1. The fact that the first
three themes are mentioned more may reside in the fact that research, faculty, and
students are the components that drive the composition academic programs. For
internationalization, the fewer mentions rests in its omnipotence across all the themes.
Academics. The academic theme represents the educational functions of the
institutions as they are communicated in their strategic plans. A primary theme within
this category is the academic challenging of students. Oxford University (Quintile 1)
gives a prime example:
The University remains committed to providing highly challenging and intensive academic courses which encourage students to explore their disciplines in depth (Oxford, 2008, p. 10).
Most of the sample institutions state the need for higher levels of learning that push
students to excel in their educational pursuits. These educational pursuits, however, are
not without cause or balance toward prevalent issues. City University of Hong Kong
(Quintile 5) states,
This new approach to professional education emphasises [sic] the connectivity between society and knowledge, the interntaionalisation [sic] of curriculum design, innovative problem-driven research, and the multicultural diversity of faculty and students (City University, 2009, p. 4).
The emphasis here on professional education permeates many of the sample institutions
in the study. Georgia Institute of Technology (Quintile 3) talks on further ways to change
the curriculum that suits modern educational environments and student learning:
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Faculty and students have called for more interaction with each other, more problem-oriented courses and curricula, the adoption of electronic learning technologies as supplements rather than replacements for student-faculty synergy, continuing our efforts in globalizing the Georgia Tech experience, and increasing flexibility in curricula to allow students to explore more areas of knowledge and prepare for a wide variety of careers (Georgia Tech, 2009, p. 10).
Georgia Tech’s emphasis on the problem-oriented courses and curricula highlights the
ideas expressed in the sample strategic plans and larger trends in higher education toward
a more career and heuristic educational experience. Contrary to emerging calls for career-
oriented training in academic programs, the Georgia Tech example represents where the
idea stops with the institutions. While heuristic, a conscious effort exists to make sure
graduates are not trained for a specific area but for a “wide variety of careers.”
Pennsylvania State University (Quintile 4) addresses the issue of student learning
but in a different light – the capacity to support excellent educational programs.
Program and support unit reviews must take into account five principles: (1) unnecessary duplication or specialization are grounds for consolidation; (2) programs that serve regional and workforce demands must be viable; (3) appropriate facilities and resources are essential for achieving and sustaining excellence; (4) a critical mass of full-time faculty, staff and students is essential for excellence; and (5) resource efficiencies can be achieved through collaboration, consortia, interdisciplinary cooperation, and alternative modes of educational and service delivery (Penn State, 2008, p. 21).
The Pennsylvania State University example above highlights many concerns reflected in
strategic plans. For example, that they meet changing social demands for what higher
education programs should be. Pennsylvania State also represents an atypical example in
that it gives specific guidelines for how academic programs should be monitored and
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modified, if necessary. The above shows that resources are critical factors to educational
success and expresses alternative ways to reach that educational success while also
capitalizing on other resources such as consortia and alternative models of educational
and service delivery.
The four themes above, research, students, faculty, and academics, relate to
distinct areas of institution. The final theme that emerged, internationalization, speaks to
all of these areas. Within all sample institutions, the international theme partnered with
every endeavor pursued by the institution. For example, emphases on international
research, international faculty, international students, and international academic
programs permeate each institution’s strategic endeavors. The last section shows how this
theme materializes in the strategic plans.
International. The theme of internationalization/globalization has been present in
the previous four themes. Each of the examples above shows an emphasis on the
international nature of competition among the institutions. The uncertainty of this
environment also factors into the development. As such, the international imperative is
important. The University of Southern California (Quintile 4) leads with this statement,
No one can foresee how these trends will unfold in the coming years. Furthermore, circumstances outside higher education, such as changing international conditions and unexpected economic and technological developments, may undermine the long-term feasibility of specific strategies that make sense today (USC, 2004, p. 1).
The ability for an institution to remain competitive in an international
environment is a hallmark of nearly all the strategic plans. Across all of the strategic
plans, nearly half of them mention the changing international economic conditions in one
form or another. Naturally, this includes both institutions in the United States, as the
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University of Southern California is above, European institutions, and Asian institutions.
Cardiff University in Wales (Quintile 4) highlights the competitive nature in relation to
research that attracts international students: “this is likely to be an increasingly important
consideration as the global market in higher education becomes even more competitive”
(Cardiff, 2006, p. i). The City University of Hong Kong echoes with a similar sentiment
with regard to its entire strategic plan:
The Plan reflects the University’s strategic direction in spearheading new approaches to professional education to reflect the reality of our increasing global interdependence, and the rapid development of the Mainland and the region (City University, 2009, p4).
In order to compete in this competitive environment, universities are establishing
measure in order to ensure that they remain competitive. The University of Helsinki
(Quintile 3) signals such a measure by stating, “the University will sign research
agreements based on scholarly cooperation with leading international higher education
institutions and research organisations [sic]” (Helsinki, 2007, p. 78). For Helsinki,
partnerships with leading institutions are a way to ensure they are seen favorably. While
not explicitly stated, one can assume that many of the institutions would be those it sees
as its peers and aspirational institutions – many of which appear in the top 200
institutions from which the study sample was pulled. The idea resonates from northern
Europe to continental Europe with the Swiss institution of Lausanne. The University of
Lausanne (Quintile 4) states,
UNIL enjoys an internationally known presence and participates in a network with several international institutions (translation by author).
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The importance of this network comes through with all of the institutions in the
sample. Every institution mentions in the need for international partnerships. It is this
need that is the hallmark for the internationalization and globalization theme. All
institutions acknowledge the undeniable need to participate in a competitive, international
market full of highly regarded institutions. Universities that acknowledge this need to
participate in the markets and its subsequent relationship to every other strategic aim
have also acknowledged that success in the international arena is only possible by
partnerships with other internationally renowned institutions.
In effect, no institution is an island. To remain competitive it must also remain
participatory. Thus, from a strategic standpoint, institutions must try to find ways to
remain competitive across the thematic areas while also joining forces to assure they are
competitive. For globally ranked higher education institutions, this leaves institutions to
handle a double-edged sword.
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CHAPTER 5
DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, AND CONCLUSION
The previous chapter illustrated the major themes that emerged from a
quantitative content analysis of the sample institution’s strategic plans. Further,
qualitative differences were presented to show how those themes, based on contingency
analysis and word frequency counts, emerged. In this final chapter, I show how the
findings presented in chapter 4 relate to the overall research question of the study: “how
do institutions envision their strategic directions with regard to international competition
based on their institutional characteristics?”
Review of Study
This study builds upon the principles originally put forth by Morphew and
Hartley’s (2006) study of mission statements. In their study, they ask if “missions
statements are, in fact, accurate depictions of organizational reality or whether the
differences among mission statements are the products of recognized differences or
aspirations” (p. 460). The conclusion of their study was that mission statements
communicate both general and specific plans. With this in mind, the study applies a
similar principle to the study of strategic plans at globally-ranked colleges and
universities around the world.
Using this conclusion, the current study draws upon three literatures to define the
areas pertinent to strategic planning in higher education. The first area includes literature
related to corporate strategy. It traces the development of strategy as a field from business
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policy to its current form. Particular attention in this area was paid to how the
foundational areas of corporate strategy related to specific case studies. The second area
examines how strategy has been conceived in higher education. As a burgeoning area in
the study of higher education, very few authors have contributed recently to a fuller
understanding of higher education and strategy, though many began to study the process
in the 1980s. For this study, I placed particular emphasis upon the recent works in
strategy in higher education by Toma (2008, 2010, forthcoming) and O’Meara (2007).
The final area of literature reviewed works related to neo-institutional theory. Drawing
upon the foundational works DiMaggio, Powell, and Scott, the theoretical base of the
study was created. This theory considers how isomorphism in its three forms –
normative, coercive, and mimetic – affects institutions. These three areas lead to three
research questions.
RQ #1: What are the ideas or concepts that institutions communicate in
their strategic plans?
RQ #2: To what extent do institutions within the same tier ranking
differentiate themselves from each other?
RQ #3: To what extent do institutions between ranking tiers differentiate
themselves from each other?
To answer these three questions, a sample of 50 institutions was drawn from the
top 200 institutions as ranked by the Times Higher Education rankings. To obtain the
sample, the average ranking over a period of 5 years from 2004-2009 was created. The
final list was broken into quintiles. Institutions were chosen to achieve an equal
dispersion of institutions across the quintile and in geographic regions.
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Themes were then generated from the strategic plans of the 50 institutions in the
sample. These themes were generated from a word frequency counts across the sample
institutions. Five main themes came out of the word frequency generation. The most
common theme was research, followed by students, faculty, academics, and
internationalization. The themes were standardized as counts per 1,000 words in the
strategic plans. Descriptive statistics were then used to answer the first two research
questions.
The first research question generated the themes listed above. The second
research question looked at the median and standard deviation of each theme in each
quintile. The final question used a one-way analysis of variance to see if any differences
existed across the sample group. The conclusion was drawn that no statistical difference
existed across the sample institutions and thus the conclusion that the 50 institutions
pursued the same strategic goals. Qualitative analysis was then done to address how they
may be slightly different or expressed in various institutions.
Discussion
The study of strategic plans for the globally-ranked universities in this sample has
lead to four very interesting observations. The first area is the identification of markets by
colleges and universities as strategic drivers. These markets are synonymous with the
themes generated from research question one. Homogenization forms the second area.
Looking at the institutions as a single unit, the statistical analysis shows that the
institutions are a homogenous group. Differentiation forms the third observation area.
Even though the statistical analysis shows homogenization, the qualitative follow-up
shows that some differences do exist among institutions. The final area considers the
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international perspective from the strategic plans and what similarities and differences
come from the multiple geographic representations in the sample.
Markets and Themes. Five themes emerged out of this study. The largest theme
was research. Students and faculty created the second and third theme, respectively.
Academics comprised the fourth theme and internationalization or globalization was the
fifth theme. While originally considered themes, these areas may also be considered
markets in which institutions choose to pursue given strategic objectives.
If we invoke Mintzberg et al. (1998), it is possible to see that the five “Ps” of
strategy are in play with regard to strategic plans at colleges and universities. The first
“P” is the plan. Plan acts as the intended mission or goal of the strategy. For strategic
plans, these are the market areas that emerged. Each thematic area acts as a target goal for
the overall mission of each institution. Coupled with the second “P,” pattern, the themes
also act as emerging trends to consider. While the thematic areas may come across as
generalized functions of an institution, they also present emerging opportunities given the
larger landscape. The pattern of these five themes signals the importance of maintaining
strong courses of action.
A counter example to illustrate the point is the rise of sustainability in higher
education literature. While sustainability is a growing and emerging topic, as it has been
for the past five to ten years, very few of the strategic plans made mention of it as a
strategic direction. Thus, there are some emerging patterns and trends that institutions
ignore. A noted exception, though not in the sample institutions, is the University of
Georgia strategic plan, which includes a provision for advancing campus sustainability
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and environmental stewardship. Future years will show whether or not this continues to
gain traction with strategic plans at universities or if it is simply a “sign of the times.”
Position is the third “P” and represents the desired or intended market. Positioning
is what strategic planning really is all about. Toma (2008) indicates that positioning is
about finding better prestige. O’Meara (2007) would place her concept of striving under
the positioning aspect of Mintzberg and his peers. The positioning aspect of strategic
plans allows institutions to negotiate their way to better resources based on assigned
targets. For the sample institutions, faculty and students represent tangible human capital
resources for which to strive. This requires positioning the institution in a way that it can
receive the best possible people. For research and academic programs, which can be
considered nontangible, their success lies with the human capital component of strategic
planning. Thus, it is not hard to see the primacy placed on the first two markets or themes
in the strategic plans.
Perspective as a concept is harder to understand with respect to higher education
institutions. Perspective is the viewpoint from which a corporation intends to take their
strategy. It may well be that the overarching perspective for universities is to become the
leading or most well recognized institution in the world. Thus, the fifth market or theme
of internationalization/globalization enters the picture. If we consider this angle, then the
perspective each of the top 200 ranked institutions in the world has at its core an
international perspective and a drive to be even more international. How this may
ultimately be accomplished will be interesting to watch.
Ploy is deception and the use of strategy to confuse or throw off competitors. For
higher education institutions, no evidence is found that would show how individual
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institutions might throw off or confuse other higher education institutions. Given the
heavily public nature and networks of administrators, faculty, and students, it may be
harder for institutions to hide special endeavors from the gazing eyes of other
institutional strategy makers.
The strategic plans do give credence to O’Meara’s (2007) thoughts on striving,
especially related to faculty, students, and academic programs. Concrete evidence in the
strategic plans shows that institutions are, in fact, competing for the best faculty members
they can find, regardless of origin. The same principle applies to students, though no
mention is made of obtaining specific target scores by incoming applicants. The
academic programs are more professional and career oriented, as she predicted.
For Toma (2008), the strategic plans may be an inappropriate avenue to examine
how institutions pursue strategy. The question of prestige and positioning for prestige
cannot be ascertained directly from the strategic plans. What may be inferred is that the
markets identified to pursue are the avenues to position a given institution. That given
avenue is no different, at least on the outset, than any other institutions in the top 200
globally ranked universities. This leads to questions about the degree of homogenization
between the institutions.
Homogenization. Research question three showed that among the sample
institutions there was no real statistical difference among the institutions across the five
themes that emerged. This lead to the conclusion that, to at least some extent, there is a
degree of homogenization among the institutions in the sample and the overall
institutions they represent. This relates directly to DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) review
of isomorphism and its three related areas – normative, coercive, and mimetic. Based on
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the study, the coercive and mimetic frameworks are hard to tease out. Institutions in the
higher ranked quintiles certainly pursue research more than their lower quintile
counterparts. Table 4.2 shows the movements of the theme groups between quintiles. The
mimetic hypothesis might show a stepwise pattern to institutions pursuing the same
agendas and objectives. Research would be in rank two or below fore many of the lower
quintile institutions. But in practice, it does not come across this way. That does not mean
mimetic behavior is not in play. It is just hard to ascertain for the way this study was
organized and pursued. Based on theory, we can assume mimetic behavior exists simply
because every institution pursues the same basic agendas to one degree or another.
Coercive actions are also hard to ascertain based on the way this study is
organized. However, it is easy to hypothesize that coercive action working if we accept
that each institution is jockeying for higher prestige. Toma’s concept of positioning for
prestige meshes well with DiMaggio and Powell’s assumptions on coercive actions.
Higher education institutions have no choice but to follow their peer counterparts in order
to maintain a viable position in the markets. For example, the University of Southern
California must also pursue biomedical sciences like Stanford if it is to attract and retain
associated resources. While USC may not want to pursue this avenue, it is coerced into
doing so due to its perception of one of its main competitors.
The strongest argument for the actions of these institutions comes from the
normative explanation of neo-institutional theory. The normative behavior states that
institutions pursue objectives because of reasons of legitimacy. This pursuance may be in
name only and not an actual objective that the institution pursues. Thus, for these
strategic plans, institutions could include strategic aims that are acceptable to institutions
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as legitimating them as peers, but not actually carried out in practice. An educated guess
that this is taking place with many institutions where strategic endeavors are outside their
typical scope. Vivian Schmidt (2008, 2010a, 2010b, forthcoming) attempts to address this
with her theories of discursive institutionalism. She posits through this theory that what
institutions say and actually do are two different items. This is an area for future research
to determine if institutions actually follow their strategic plans.
Differentiation. Counter to homogenization is the differentiation argument that
surrounds the argument for strategy. Bastedo (2007) and Oliver (1991) look at the
concepts of strategy under the form of institutional theory. Oliver (1991) offers five
frames that institutions may use to compete with their environment. – acquiescence,
compromise, avoidance, defiance, and manipulation. The first is acquiescence – an
institution yields to environmental pressures. For the institutions in this study,
acquiescence seems to be a normal state. If we assume larger political and economic
forces are at play, due to national policy agendas or the like, then we can see that
institutions respond by crafting strategies related to survival within those environmental
pressures. This is similar to coercive forces in institutional theory.
The second frame Oliver states is compromise. Here, an institution seeks to
balance the needs of the institution with any externalities that may exhibit force against
the institutions objectives. The compromise approach for institutions with regard to
strategic planning may realize itself through the generalized tactics it states and pursues.
For most of the institutions in the study sample, strategic goals and objectives were
normative in nature and not highly detailed or specific. Keeping the communication at
this level helps institutions compromise among stakeholders as to what should be
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included or excluded in order to appease competing factions. The avoidance, defiance,
and manipulation frames are difficult to place inside the higher education institutional
framework. To what degree they may avoid, defy, or manipulate is hard to ascertain from
the strategic plans. These three key components would be areas where Schmidt’s
discursive institutionalism come into play and can give richer observations and insight
into that practice of strategic planning.
The third frame is avoidance – an organization will change the way it operates or
conceal its operations in an effort to buffer itself from any external demands by
constituent groups. In the forth frame, defiance, an institution will actively attack,
challenge, or dismiss imposing externalities in its environment. The final frame is
manipulation. In this situation, the organization actively seeks to take control over any
external environmental forces.
The fact that institutions have these options when crafting strategic plans can be
filed under strategic choice theory, where actors in the organization mindfully decide on
their options. It is strategic choice theory that holds the most promise for the study of
strategic planning at higher education institutions and the crafting of strategic policies.
Traditional neo-institutional theory holds organizational stasis too close to its core
ideologies. Strategic choice theory moves away from the so-called iron cage and places
institutions on the path to realizing their own agendas. The strategic plans used for this
study and presented with the qualitative findings support this idea. While the quantitative
data shows no real difference in themes except with students, the qualitative analysis
shows that variations do exist. They may not be drastic, but they are there. This is a signal
toward differentiation, even if to a small degree, and the case that strategy exists.
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This leads to an opportunity for institutions to really stand out with respect to their
markets and their strategic decisions. Such a decision cannot be made, however, without
considering unintended consequences. A prime example here is Rice University’s
decision to change their general education curriculum in the 1990s. The change severely
hampered their strategic decisions and the legitimacy of their educational pursuits with
peer institutions. Rice ultimately had to backtrack and drop their change of general
education at the university. This begs the question of whether or not institutions can
pursue strategic endeavors that really go against accepted conventions. If an institution
can, it will probably be one of the extremely elite institutions like Harvard, Oxford, and
Yale. The opportunities exist, if an institution can figure out a way to do it successfully.
International differences. Until this point, I have not talked about the
international differences that exist among the institutions in the sample. There are two
reasons for this. The first reason is that internationality was taken into account with the
sample size, trying to minimize any pull by one geographic region over another. The
second reason is that the theoretical boundaries of the study would presume that
international differences were minimal and that a high degree of normative behavior
would be present due to isomorphic forces. To a certain extent this is true. The avenues of
pursuits are very similar. But some remarkable differences exist that the literature does
not address. For this reason, I have chosen to address those issues in the discussion rather
in the findings section.
Regional differences do exist across the strategic plans. They exist both in style of
the plan and in the ideas communicated in the plan. The Asian institutions in the sample
tended to have fairly straightforward interpretations of strategic goals. Their aims
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reflected a desire for research and faculty. As a group, the Asian institutions stated goals
related to pursuing science and technology related goals. Students and academic
programs were of little consequence, though the ideas were present in the strategic plans.
This contrasts nicely with the institutions of the United States and continental Europe that
placed emphases on students. An interesting speculation can be made here about the
social nature of higher education institutions.
The value of research in science and mathematics in Asian societies has had a
heavier emphasis over the past 30 years than in the United States. This is due to the Asian
emphasis to catch up technological innovations compared to that of the United States and
Europe. Thus, research matters more than students. The reverse is true, especially in the
United States and Europe. Traditional curriculums in these areas have been on educating
the whole being in a liberal arts tradition. Yet, this is changing. Evidence shown in
chapter 4 illustrates that there is movement toward more professional and career-oriented
curriculums. Is this for competition against other social worries, even on other
continents? Are institutions drifting toward similar aims based on international worries?
These points are pure speculation. What they do form is the realization that
institutions and their strategic endeavors may cede to larger social demands, some that
are real and some that are perceived. Asian institutions and their strategic goals are not
antithetical to institutions in Europe and the United States. In fact, they are quite similar.
The historic perceptions of the regions, however, may play huge roles on how institutions
craft their strategies.
Oceanic institutions in Australia and New Zealand may provide examples of the
blend between the two regions. On average, the institutions in these regions pursue each
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strategic theme evenly. There is both concern for research, faculty, students, and
academic programs at the same time. The reason for this may also come from historic
tradition. Their proximity to Asian institutions may drive their strategic goals more
toward a closer competitive market. Is it easier to compete for research and faculty in the
region based on closer schools than say those in the United States, Canada, or Europe?
They reverse is also true. Their history is primarily Anglo-Saxon. With the liberal arts
emphasis and the education of the whole, they also cater toward students and academic
programs that provide those opportunities.
Then, there also remains the institutions that were not in the sample, but part of
the larger sample institutions from the Times Higher Education report. This includes
universities in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Where do they fall in the
strategic mix? Are they going to pursue avenues related to the sciences and technologies
in research, or possibly the applied arts, social sciences, and humanities? Are they also
competing for faculty and students? Does internationalization permeate their entire
strategies? Are they reframing academic programs to be more professional and career-
oriented? The answer remains a mystery due to the sample drawn for this study. But the
hypothesis is that they will follow these same strategic trajectories.
This leaves a place for the regional dynamics and their associated sociopolitical
and cultural dynamics in international and comparative research. While this study looked
at everyone on equal footing, it may well be served that strategy is looked at this historic,
social, economic, and political lenses to understand a fuller picture. It would be easy to
do this both qualitatively and quantitatively. It is also necessary to do to understand how
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these elite institutions, which are global in nature, strategize if for not other reason
because strategy drives the overall management of the institution.
Implications for Policy and Practice
The strategic management phenomenon is well documented. From its inception in
the 1950s as business policy to its more commonly used moniker of strategy today, the
use of corporate strategy techniques has penetrated higher education. While many may
disagree as to the place is has in the academy, it is important to note that it does exist and
that its existence is profound. I see three broad implications with regard to policy and
practice. The first implication is the push and pull effect of strategic planning. The second
implication is the increasing autonomy and decentralization of institutional subunits. The
final implication is the use and portrayal of strategic objectives by institutions.
Outside of the elite research universities used for this study, several thousand
other institutions rely on strategic goals and objectives to compete. These institutions are
subject to the push and pull effect of strategic competition. In the United States, technical
and vocational schools must consider their role in relation to the two-year community
college sector. A historic difference exists but this is gradually changing as the technical
schools form partnerships for transfer agreements with four-year institutions. Community
colleges themselves have changed in strategic ways to meet both growing demands in
certain fields and shrinking enrollments.
The example here is the creation of four-year education degrees at some
community colleges in Florida. Their reasoning is hard to dispute. Does one really need
to attend a four-year institution, in many cases at the costs of thousands of dollars, to
enter a K-12 setting to teach children? These needs can be met at the local level, where
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the locus of control over K-12 education historically resides. If this type of shift keeps
happening, both community college sectors will need to respond strategically to meet
new demands, the requirements for new faculty, and the possible shift of resources to
support new programs. The observation lies in that when new programs come on board
others often must go in order to support them. Education programs are at the forefront,
but other applied, and critically needed disciplines such as nursing, are not far behind.
The community college sector in this instance is pulling markets in their strategic
competition to compete with higher-level institutions.
Moving programs like teacher education and nursing to the community college
sector presents new challenges and opportunities to the four-year sector. For many
institutions, schools of education represent significant portions of their student
population. If these students decide to go elsewhere, less revenue could become an issue.
In a highly competitive market, the loss of students and revenue is a significant issue.
Thus, four-year institutions are then subject to a push effect in that their strategies are
then subject to other lower-level institutions. This is all to say that every institution is
subject to a pipeline effect on strategic competition. Regardless of institutional level,
some semblance of push and pull affects the strategic orientation.
The focus on research, faculty, and students in strategic plans will only continue
to grow as limited resources in times of economic recessions endure. Questions of
whether or not high-level research agendas can be sustained and to what degree certain
“star” faculty are needed will persist. The two go hand in hand. Strategic plans will focus
more and more on key areas that enhance institutional resources without draining
institutional resources at the same time. The prediction is most of these resources will be
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spent on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with biomedical fields added
in. This will be at the expense of the social sciences and humanities. However,
institutions may choose to focus more on the social sciences, humanities, and arts than
the sciences.
The competing strategy and competition among the various areas of higher
education institutions raises some serious policy concerns for the successful future of
colleges and universities. Can institutions really afford to be everything to everyone with
regard to their mission? Or, should emphases be placed upon institutions to provide
specific programs? Will this create more autonomy and decentralization among
institutions and their subunits? The answer here might lie in Europe with the division
among polytechnics, universities, and schools of art. A prominent example is the
University of Paris system – or more commonly thought of as La Sorbonne.
The historic core of this institution is the humanities and social sciences. They
have always maintained a strong position in the universities strategic direction, even
given the current economic climate. Other parts of the institution, incorporated as
separate institutions, such as the Ecole Polytechnique maintains the sciences,
engineering, and mathematics aspect. Further, the Ecole des Beaux Arts picks up the
architecture and studio art piece of an institution. All of the institutions have historically
been and remain leaders in their fields. The observation here is that the single-focused
approach to an educational environment proves fruitful in attracting and retaining the best
faculty and students and for generating high quality research. This has been accomplished
through a highly autonomous and highly decentralized structure under the umbrella of a
larger institution.
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My prediction is that many universities will head this way, where subunits of the
larger institutions are allowed to pursue separate and diverse missions in relation to their
field. By allowing actions like these, some institutions will see an increase in their pursuit
toward increased resources found in science, engineering, and medicine fields. Other
institutions will pursue the resources and values found in the humanities, social sciences,
and arts. A key, and often cited, example is the University of Virginia’s Darden School of
Business and School of Law that operate as autonomous units under the umbrella of
UVA. The autonomy has lead to higher ranking levels, more financial resources, and
increased ability to respond to market forces. The approaches of pursuing science or
humanities or higher levels of autonomy with professional schools are not necessarily
wrong and may lead to higher quality institutions. If higher quality, integrity, and
accountability remain key policy endeavors, the division among institutional types will be
the future. Europe and Asia will have the advantage here as their educational systems are
already shaped around these areas. The Anglo-based institutions, however, will have to
modify to reach the high degree of separation among institutional types.
Further, shifts in federal and state policy will affect the strategic plans at most
institutions. For universities that act as direct arms of their governments, they will be
subject to higher degrees of strategic shifts. This may lead to more or less agility. One
can only hypothesize about turning around a university on the whims of a political party
or leader. What it may hamper is the story arc of an institution and its move toward
greater heights through its strategic plan. These greater heights need not be prestige,
however. They can and should be defined in the historical context of an institution and its
environment.
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This leads to implications for the practice of strategic plans. I use the practice of
strategic plans because this study did not address how the act of strategic planning was
done at each institution. Though, this is also an area ripe for research. The practice of
strategic plans is more about how strategic plans are used as communicative devices for
external and internal stakeholders.
In searching for the strategic plans, I observed that there are three types of plans.
The first type is the bulleted list of objectives. These plans were often only two to three
pages in length and gave no background behind their strategic decisions. The University
of Reading is an example of such a plan. The second type is the word document with just
text. The typical format included an executive summary, a page on the mission of the
institution, and then several subsequent pages of major strategic theme and sub-points
that gave indications of successfully meeting the major theme target. The University of
Southern California falls into this category. The final category of strategic plans falls into
the “glossy-glossy, flashy-flashy.” These strategic plans are typically portable document
format (PDF) documents in full color with lots of pictures, quotes, and visionary
statements to point out key details. They are often inspiring based on their incorporation
of design and invoke a passion for the institutional endeavors. Further, they are supported
by highly developed web pages that expand the strategic plans out farther with sub-points
and indicators of success, leaving the main plan to present core concepts and ideas. The
University of British Columbia is an example of this.
From a management perspective, the third option serves the role of a strategic
plan the best. The nontechnical nature of these plans is accessible to both external
stakeholders who do not understand the specifics of higher education and to internal
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stakeholders that want reassurance in the quality of their institution. The “glossy-glossy,
flashy-flashy” aids in both. For those who want to consider future strategic planning, this
is the direction to pursue. Leave the technical side for a website that can be pursued if
interested and the face of the document as an inspirational source for the university
community.
Study Limitations
Strategic plans are the outcomes of strategic planning processes. In the academic
literature, as it pertains to higher education, that process is still a black box. How strategy
is crafted for liberal arts institutions or for universities may be a distinct process. It may
also not be. Understanding that process first would help understand the way in which
ideas of strategic plans are communicated to the world.
Universities are no longer institutions that serve just the local community or state.
This is particularly true for the institutions in this study. While this study used neo-
institutional theory as its base, ecological theory may prove more fruitful in the analysis
of how these institutions communicate with one another. Strategic plans are not just for
local stakeholders, but outward expressions to other institutions of higher learning. The
crafting of strategic policy may rest in determining what other institutions do first.
The final weakness is the focus on English. While the original sample size focuses
on English because of its use as the world language, it causes several institutions to be
left out of the proverbial strategic soup. The incorporation of other languages into a
similar study may cause vary different outcomes regarding the strategic themes or even
the markets higher education institutions choose to pursue.
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Conclusion
Strategy and strategic planning are key drivers to the modern management of
higher education institutions. Whether those institutions are globally-ranked institutions
like the ones in this study or community colleges and their international equivalents, they
must all determine what avenues to pursue to ensure their success and continual
operation. A failure to critically analyze, assess, and pursue the objectives most important
to their mission or future mission, will potentially lead to unintended consequences given
increasingly shrinking human capital and financial resources.
The need for further research on how institutions, at all levels, pursue their
strategic objectives is needed. At a macro scale, further knowledge needs to be generated
that analyzes changing demographics in higher education. The focus cannot remain
simply on historically underrepresented groups. New and emerging populations must be
thought of at a proactive level. The ability to predict through demographics the emerging
populations will help higher education institutions be prepared instead of their perceived
reactive stance. At a mezzo level, research needs to focus on the interplay between
institutions and their associated organizations such as public policy and advocacy
agencies like the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. The degree to which
institutions adjust or create strategy in relation to these institutions does not exist and
presents significant issues for how institutions may act as individuals or in block groups.
The micro level presents a major source of understanding strategy from the ground up
perspective. With major universities acting like loosely coupled organizations, how
departments, schools and colleges, institutions, and auxiliary academic entities negotiate
and create their own strategy creates a possible point of contention. Whose strategy
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matters more and can institutional strategy and sub-institutional strategy coexist
adequately remains unanswered. Yet, this will become a critical area as professional
standards and norms, and their regulation over academic programs becomes stronger.
Strategy remains a fruitful area. To understand how institutions perceive their
existing and new markets, research needs to be done. Be it through quantitative methods
or qualitative methods one chooses to use, any research will provide gradual answers and
understanding to this facet of institutional management and operation. It is crucial
because all areas of institutional functioning rest on the overall strategy a university
chooses to pursue.
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Assignment Harvard University 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 University of Cambridge 3 2 2 3 2 2.4 1 University of Oxford 4 3 2 4 5 3.6 1 Yale University 7 4 2 2 3 3.6 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2 4 10 9 9 6.8 1 California Institute of Technology 8 7 7 5 10 7.4 1 Imperial College London 13 9 5 6 5 7.6 1 Princeton University 9 10 6 12 8 9 1 University of Chicago 17 11 7 8 7 10 1 Stanford University 5 6 19 17 16 12.6 1 Duke University 11 13 13 13 14 12.8 1 Columbia University 20 12 11 10 11 12.8 1 University College London 28 25 9 7 4 14.6 1 Cornell University 14 15 20 15 15 15.8 1 Australian National University 23 16 16 16 17 17.6 1 Johns Hopkins University 27 23 15 13 13 18.2 1 University of Tokyo 16 19 17 19 22 18.6 1 McGill University 24 21 12 20 18 19 1 University of Pennsylvania 32 26 14 11 12 19 1 University of California, Berkeley 6 8 22 36 39 22.2 1 Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris 24 18 26 28 28 24.8 1 University of Hong Kong -- 33 18 26 24 25.25 1 University of Edinburgh 30 33 23 23 20 25.8 1 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) 21 24 42 24 20 26.2 1 National University of Singapore 22 19 33 30 30 26.8 1 Kyoto University 31 29 25 25 25 27 1
Assignment University of Michigan 36 29 38 18 19 28 1 University of Melbourne 19 22 27 38 36 28.4 1 Ecole Polytechnique (Paris Tech) 10 37 28 34 36 29 1 Carnegie Mellon University 44 35 20 21 27 29.4 1 University of Manchester 35 40 30 29 26 32 1 Peking University 15 14 36 50 52 33.4 1 University of Toronto 29 27 45 41 29 34.2 1 University of California, Los Angeles 37 31 41 30 32 34.2 1 University of Sydney 38 35 31 37 36 35.4 2 Northwestern University 46 42 29 33 32 36.4 2 King's College London 73 46 24 22 23 37.6 2 University of British Columbia 38 50 33 34 40 39 2 Monash University 33 38 43 47 45 41.2 2 University of Queensland 47 45 33 43 41 41.8 2 Brown University 71 54 32 27 31 43 2 University of New South Wales 40 41 44 45 47 43.4 2 London School of Economics 11 17 59 66 67 44 2 University of Bristol 49 64 37 32 43 45 2 Chinese University of Hong Kong 51 50 38 42 46 45.4 2 Hong Kong University of Science & Technology 43 58 53 39 35 45.6 2 Tsinghua University 62 28 40 56 49 47 2 New York University 56 43 49 40 52 48 2 University of Texas at Austin 26 32 51 70 76 51 2 Boston University 54 66 47 46 54 53.4 2 University of Auckland 52 46 50 65 61 54.8 2 Heidelberg University 45 58 60 57 57 55.4 2
Assignment Georgia Institute of Technology 147 145 97 83 86 111.6 4 Lund University 180 122 106 88 67 112.6 4 University of Maryland 133 111 79 122 122 113.4 4 University of Virginia 105 130 110 96 128 113.8 4 University of Pittsburgh 193 88 77 97 114 113.8 4 University of Aarhus 138 126 114 81 -- 114.75 4 University of California, Davis -- 170 96 89 108 115.75 4 Nagoya University 129 128 112 120 92 116.2 4 Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon 92 72 157 140 126 117.4 4 University of North Carolina 143 123 151 102 78 119.4 4 Georgetown University 159 102 102 110 129 120.4 4 University of Montreal 132 181 93 91 107 120.8 4 Tohoku University 136 168 102 112 97 123 4 University of California, Santa Barbara 159 141 117 98 106 124.2 4 University of Sussex 100 105 121 130 166 124.4 4 Queen's University -- 176 88 117 118 124.75 4 Humboldt University of Berlin 112 105 126 139 146 125.6 4 University of Liverpool 119 139 101 133 137 125.8 4 Cardiff University 141 99 133 135 127 4 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 143 198 132 95 69 127.4 4 University of Waterloo 159 -- 112 129 113 128.25 4 Wageningen University 108 97 148 142 155 130 4 University of Aberdeen -- 105 137 153 129 131 4 University of Otago 186 79 144 124 125 131.6 4 Maastricht University 157 172 111 111 116 133.4 4 University of Minnesota 150 187 142 87 105 134.2 4
Assignment Ghent University -- 141 124 136 136 134.25 4 Queen Mary, University of London 112 99 149 160 164 136.8 4 Macquarie University 67 82 168 182 189 137.6 4 University of Lausanne 133 89 -- 161 168 137.75 4 Free University of Berlin 172 148 146 137 94 139.4 5 University of Massachusetts 68 124 175 191 139.5 5 National Autonomous University of Mexico 95 74 192 150 190 140.2 5 McMaster University 184 155 108 117 143 141.4 5 Texas A&M University 125 150 122 137 179 142.6 5 Tel Aviv University 188 147 151 114 114 142.8 5 University of Bath 130 153 145 152 144 144.8 5 Technion— Israel Institute of Technology 194 158 -- 109 132 148.25 5 Newcastle University 168 133 129 162 158 150 5 City University of Hong Kong 178 154 149 147 124 150.4 5 Nanjing University 150 180 125 143 168 153.2 5 Free University of Brussels 76 165 154 183 191 153.8 5 Technical University of Denmark 154 194 130 133 159 154 5 Tufts University 164 130 159 157 160 154 5 University of Tübingen -- 170 142 155 149 154 5 University of Oslo 138 177 188 177 101 156.2 5 University of Western Ontario 191 -- 126 159 151 156.75 5 Hokkaido University 157 133 151 174 171 157.2 5 University of California, Irvine -- 198 140 132 161 157.75 5 University of Göttingen 114 156 173 166 186 159 5 University of Colorado 163 -- 107 180 186 159 5 State University of New York, Stony Brook 175 165 -- 127 173 160 5
Assignment Shanghai Jiao Tong University 169 179 163 144 153 161.6 5 Waseda University -- 158 180 180 148 166.5 5 University of Notre Dame 179 152 155 168 199 170.6 5 Chalmers University of Technology 166 147 197 162 198 174 5 University of Bologna 159 173 192 174 174.5 5 University of Twente -- 115 185 200 200 175 5 RWTH Aachen 172 172 182 -- 182 177 5 KTH, Royal Institute of Technology 196 172 192 173 174 181.4 5 University of Barcelona -- 190 194 186 171 185.25 5 Kobe University 172 181 197 199 -- 187.25 5 University of Reading -- 190 180 194 191 188.75 5
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APPENDIX B
COUNTS AND MENTIONS PER 1,000 WORDS
BY QUINTILES AND INSTITUTION
116
Table B.1: Count Totals for Quintile 1 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics Imperial College London 1 162 73 84 59 62 Oxford University 1 167 71 154 90 36 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich 1 81 87 32 4 63 McGill University 1 94 22 6 24 15 National University of Singapore 1 3 9 11 15 1 University of Hong Kong 1 102 87 90 47 48 University of Tokyo 1 63 37 26 41 57 Australian National University 1 26 19 17 14 22 University of California, Los Angeles 1 57 24 41 46 37 Cornell University 1 183 86 192 361 128 Count Total 938 515 653 701 469
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Table B.2: Standardized Counts per 1,000 Words for Quintile 1 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics Imperial College London 1 17.12 7.72 8.88 6.24 6.55 Oxford University 1 14.39 6.12 13.27 7.75 3.10 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich 1 7.80 8.38 3.08 0.39 6.07 McGill University 1 22.42 5.25 1.43 5.73 3.58 National University of Singapore 1 1.92 5.77 7.05 9.62 0.64 University of Hong Kong 1 14.65 12.50 12.93 6.75 6.90 University of Tokyo 1 19.82 11.64 8.18 12.90 17.94 Australian National University 1 17.33 12.67 11.33 9.33 14.67 University of California, Los Angeles 1 13.18 5.55 9.48 10.64 8.56 Cornell University 1 9.89 4.65 10.37 19.50 6.92 Average 13.09 7.19 9.11 9.78 6.54
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Table B.3: Count Totals for Quintile 2 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics University of Washington 2 20 25 20 14 8 University of Auckland 2 118 110 123 78 23 Trinity College Dublin 2 186 99 161 63 76 Osaka University 2 10 7 8 5 13 University of British Columbia 2 31 40 38 20 12 University of Queensland 2 25 24 13 5 6 Chinese University of Hong Kong 2 60 57 139 38 75 University of Wisconsin , Madison 2 9 14 10 24 9 Boston University 2 42 40 64 49 46 London School of Economics 2 62 36 54 24 5 Count Total 563 452 630 320 273
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Table B.4: Standardized Counts per 1,000 Words for Quintile 2 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics University of Washington 2 21.03 26.29 21.03 14.72 8.41 University of Auckland 2 17.36 16.18 18.09 11.47 3.38 Trinity College Dublin 2 15.38 8.18 13.31 5.21 6.28 Osaka University 2 15.34 10.74 12.27 7.67 19.94 University of British Columbia 2 10.92 14.08 13.38 7.04 4.23 University of Queensland 2 25.72 24.69 13.37 5.14 6.17 Chinese University of Hong Kong 2 5.41 5.14 12.52 3.42 6.76 University of Wisconsin , Madison 2 7.63 11.86 8.47 20.34 7.63 Boston University 2 5.45 5.19 8.30 6.35 5.97 London School of Economics 2 16.80 9.75 14.63 6.50 1.35 Average 11.73 9.42 13.13 6.67 5.69
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Table B.5: Standardized Counts per 1,000 Words Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics Vanderbilt University 3 151 73 225 226 164 Utrecht University 3 86 67 91 75 9 University of St. Andrews 3 65 30 91 56 6 University of Western Australia 3 50 31 33 17 28 Glasgow University 3 80 64 66 18 8 Uppsala University 3 58 24 40 11 55 Eindhoven University of Technology 3 103 72 80 31 29 University of Helsinki 3 129 49 36 39 55 Pennsylvania State University 3 116 146 347 234 196 Tokyo Institute of Technology 3 36 32 22 22 33 Count Total 874 588 1031 729 583
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Table B.6: Standardized Counts per 1,000 Words for Quintile 3 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics Vanderbilt University 3 7.41 3.58 11.05 11.10 8.05 Utrecht University 3 29.21 22.76 30.91 25.48 3.06 University of St. Andrews 3 14.86 6.86 20.80 12.80 1.37 University of Western Australia 3 17.21 10.67 11.36 5.85 9.64 Glasgow University 3 21.72 17.38 17.92 4.89 2.17 Uppsala University 3 32.10 13.28 22.14 6.09 30.44 Eindhoven University of Technology 3 14.77 10.32 11.47 4.45 4.16 University of Helsinki 3 8.74 3.32 2.44 2.64 3.73 Pennsylvania State University 3 5.75 7.23 17.19 11.59 9.71 Tokyo Institute of Technology 3 17.26 15.34 10.55 10.55 15.82 Average 10.91 7.34 12.87 9.10 7.28
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Table B.7: Count Totals for Quintile 4 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics University of Waterloo 4 165 24 14 40 9 University of Southern California 4 55 62 53 36 46 University of Lausanne 4 94 22 19 57 20 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
4 5 3 1 7 2
Georgia Institute of Technology 4 76 98 83 54 36 Cardiff University 4 73 36 45 34 12 Wageningen University 4 86 65 36 10 91 University of Minnesota 4 224 48 285 203 128 Queen Mary, University of London 4 94 24 64 50 32 Nagoya University 4 88 250 59 51 82 Count Total 960 632 659 542 458
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Table B.8: Standardized Counts per 1,000 Words for Quintile 4 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics University of Waterloo 4 40.05 5.83 3.40 9.71 2.18 University of Southern California 4 12.54 14.13 12.08 8.21 10.49 University of Lausanne 4 6.57 1.54 1.33 3.98 1.40 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
4 13.81 8.29 2.76 19.34 5.52
Georgia Institute of Technology 4 12.96 16.71 14.16 9.21 6.14 Cardiff University 4 19.89 9.81 12.26 9.26 3.27 Wageningen University 4 12.69 9.59 5.31 1.48 13.42 University of Minnesota 4 12.40 2.66 15.78 11.24 7.09 Queen Mary, University of London 4 22.56 5.76 15.36 12.00 7.68 Nagoya University 4 21.55 61.23 14.45 12.49 20.08 Average 14.59 9.60 10.01 8.24 6.96
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Table B.9: Count Totals for Quintile 5 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics Free University of Bruxelles 5 6 7 6 2 6 City University of Hong Kong 5 85 106 79 99 67 University of Massachusetts, Amherst 5 50 8 84 71 14 University of Twente 5 84 46 99 47 83 University of Western Ontario 5 45 30 15 9 6 Notre Dame University 5 50 34 141 96 21 University of Oslo 5 66 47 32 16 33 University of Newcastle 5 25 20 19 16 6 KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) 5 96 58 60 44 108 University of Reading 5 3 1 3 4 0 Count Total 510 357 538 404 344
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Table B.10: Standardized Counts per 1,000 Words Quintile 5 Themes
Institution Name Quintile Research International Students Faculty Academics Free University of Bruxelles 5 11.24 13.11 11.24 3.75 11.24 City University of Hong Kong 5 10.76 13.42 10.00 12.53 8.48 University of Massachusetts, Amherst 5 12.67 2.03 21.29 17.99 3.55 University of Twente 5 12.88 7.05 15.18 7.21 12.73 University of Western Ontario 5 33.78 22.52 11.26 6.76 4.50 Notre Dame University 5 5.21 3.54 14.68 9.99 2.19 University of Oslo 5 15.90 11.32 7.71 3.85 7.95 University of Newcastle 5 9.84 7.87 7.48 6.30 2.36 KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) 5 15.43 9.32 9.64 7.07 17.36 University of Reading 5 11.90 3.97 11.90 15.87 0.00 Average 11.86 8.30 12.51 9.39 8.00
