Organizational Identity in Higher Education: Conceptual and Empirical Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter examines evolving perspectives, methodologies, and narratives that inform scholarly understanding of organizational identity in higher education. It coalesces a broad, discursive, and multidisciplinary body of work around established eras and streams of thought in higher education. Conceptual and chronological foci include institutional storytelling and popular media boosterism at the turn of the twentieth century; the phenomenon of institutional saga developed amid emerging organizational science in the postwar years; the emergence and impact of systems thinking, strategic planning, rankings, and mission drift on institutional distinctiveness in the 1980s and 1990s; and the influence of branding and market positioning on institutional distinctiveness in the early twenty-first century. The literature is organized, also, according to its constituent emphasis—whether created for and about internal members of college and university communities on the one hand or developed with regard to higher education’s external audiences and consumers on the other. As a whole, the chapter integrates and analyzes a previously fragmented body of literature and highlights the ways in which conceptions of institutional identity in US higher education have evolved in relationship to a changing national context.