Nicole Philippczyck (Department of Marketing) and Dr. Simon Oertel (Department of Management) are currently visiting Prof. Francisco Ramirez (Graduate School of Education) at Standford University to present current results of their research and to discuss further research projects. In this context, they also gave a presentation at the regularly held Comparative Sociology Workshop.
In their research, Nicole Philippczyck and Simon Oertel deal with instruments of professionalized university management. A joint research project with Matthias Söll (University of Kassel) focuses on the design and use of mission statements by universities. The researchers are particularly interested in the question of what goals universities pursue with the creation and dissemination of mission statements and what ideas about their positioning and strategic development universities address in them. In view of increasing competition between educational institutions and numerous political expectations and requirements, the research team expects new and exciting insights for the management of universities. These research results can also provide valuable contributions to interdisciplinary issues, e.g. in the area of tension between demands on educational systems and the development of educational institutions.
At this year's annual meeting of the European Group for Organizations Studies (EGOS) in Edinburgh, the results of this research to date had already met with great interest. This resulted in an invitation to Stanford and the opportunity for an intensive exchange of ideas with, among others, Prof. John W. Meyer, one of the founders of neoinstitutionalist approaches in organizational theory. The core argument of neoinstitutionalism is that organizations design their structures according to the requirements and expectations of their social environment. Thus, instead of the requirements resulting from the organization's activities and internal and external transactional relationships, the formal structure reflects the notion of rational design of organization.
The joint work on research questions and theoretical approaches represents a great enrichment for the work of the two Ilmenau scientists. The numerous suggestions, ideas and impulses are to be immediately incorporated into the research project after the return to Ilmenau - and, among other things, also used for the preparation of a further third-party funding application.