Khaled A. Al Falah
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to present the underlying structure of the mission statements of universities. The sample contains 360 mission statements from 52 different countries extracted from the official websites of the universities. This study used content analysis, which is an often used and accepted analytical tool for mission statements. A set of keywords was prepared to measure the characteristics and components separately. The findings of this research support earlier studies on many counts. All mission statements appeared as ‘broad’ in scope. 'Environmental responsibility' and 'Technology' has emerged as the least frequently used characteristic and components respectively. Eighty percent of universities have mission statements with a range of 0-70 words for each mission statement with 54.3 as an average number of words. Word clouds of mission statements reflect three key pillars of the university's mission statements for example 'University', 'Research', and 'Society'. Managerial implications and directions of future research have also been appended at the end.
