Content analysis of mission, vision and strategic goals of Turkish universities as stated in strategic plans

Beginning in 2004, along with other public organizations Turkish universitiesare required to prepare strategic plans to manage and use financial resources allocatedby the government. This study aims at examining mission, vision and strategic goalstatements of Turkish universities. The main purpose of the study is to determine ifTurkish universities differ in terms of emphasis or priority in mission, vision andstrategic goals as stated in strategic plans.Data for this study was obtained from http://www.sp.gov.tr web site wherestrategic plans of all Turkish public universities were kept. For the foundationuniversities, it was necessary to go to the web site of each university and examine thestrategic plan of the university.Mission, vision and strategic goals proclaimed by Turkish universities wereexamined by content analysis method. Content analysis as a method of study has notbeen frequently applied in the area of business and management in Turkey; even thoughother disciplines in social sciences more frequently employ this technique as a dataanalysis method. When the written information or document is preferred as a mainsource of data, content analysis seems to possess advantages over survey data.Findings show that mission, vision and strategic goals of universities differ interms of length of the statement and content. For instance some universities formulatedstatements of mission, vision and goals in a single sentence while others preferredlonger descriptions of mission, vision and goal statements. Majority of Turkishuniversities emphasized societal dimensions in their mission statements. In visionstatements Turkish universities emphasized the concept of global and globalizationvimore frequently then other concepts. Finally it was determined that Turkish universitiesprefer to allocate their financial resources mainly toward scientific projects andactivities.