Vitaliano Barberio

Factors affecting the content of universities’ mission statements: an analysis of the United Kingdom higher education system

ABSTRACT This article explores the factors affecting the content of universities’ mission statements. We conceptualize missions as identity narratives, a type of symbolic representation of an organization. Based on the literature on organizational identity we argue that universities need to address two major challenges when crafting their mission statements, (i) to pursuit legitimacy in spite of multiple and competing expectations, and (ii) to properly balance similarity and distinctiveness from other universities. We identify factors that affect this strategic effort and develop hypotheses that we test in the empirical context of the United Kingdom’s higher education system. Results show that (i) among competing expectations, universities choose claims that are plausible to external constituents and consistent with the values of internal members, and that (ii) they adopt claims similar to universities belonging to the same organizational form while differentiating from geographically closer universities in order to reduce competitive overlap.

Toward a Structural Model of Organizational-Level Institutional Pluralism and Logic Interconnectedness

In this article, we develop a structural model for studying how constellations of multiple institutional logics are instantiated at the organizational level. Conceptually, we complement an institutional logics perspective with structural interactionism and network theory and model a constellation as a nexus of organizational role identities and counterroles. The structure of such a nexus reveals degrees of differentiation and interconnectedness between logics as well as distinct interfaces. We validate and further develop our model through qualitative content analysis and semantic network analytical methods applied to the website of a large organization. Our study contributes to recent literature on institutional pluralism by further specifying the structural aspects of constellations of logics and different types of institutional pluralism (monolithic, fragmented, and modular). Specifically, we show how systems of role categories enable the identification of logics, and how multivocal roles create interf...

Weighting Structures: Evolutionary Dynamics of Innovation Networks in Virtual Communities

We discuss and illustrate alternative analytical strategies for representing coordination networks in innovative virtual communities bounded by production relationships among participants. We use information on email communication networks reconstructed using data from the Apache Open Source project to give empirical contents to our arguments and to substantiate our claims that: (i) Self-organizing networks provide the basic principles of coordination in such communities; (ii) Once in place, deliberate governance arrangements affect coordination patterns within virtual communities; (iii) Structural properties of communication networks change significantly over time depending on their internal organizational logics, and (iv) Affiliation (a.k.a. two mode) networks provide a useful representation for detecting community structures.

Report of the comparative analysis of the correlation between topics emergent from regional discourses on the one hand, and the awareness and perceptions of the EU (from Eurobarometer) on the other hand

This document describes the database we developed from data collection and organization activities as described in tasks 5.2 and 5.3 of the PERCEIVE project. The former task, which lasted from month 5 to month 10, consisted of an Original data collection for exploratory topic modeling. The latter task, which lasted from month 10 to month 13, was named Topic modeling and qualification. As stated in the Grant Agreement, this description of the database was expected around month 14 (October 2017), while the database itself will be made publically available on-line for further research only after the end of the PERCEIVE project. Indeed, task 5.4, which will last until month 15 is the Actual Construction of a database of discursive Topics. This document will thus focus on data collection and organization as well as provide an example of the topic models that we are developing coding discourses from different kinds of described datasets.

D 3.1 'Qualitative report on the impact and effectiveness of communication strategies from the semi structured interviews with cohesion policy practitioners (including third-party partners in the consortium), written by each partner'

This document is a comparative synthesis of the reports on regional case studies written by PERCEIVEs partners. Each report is based both on an original data collection and on the analysis of the focus groups section that addresses communication issues. Each partner collected national and/or regional communication plans, which were mostly used for the first chapter of this report: Communication strategy at different levels and LMAs organization.

PERCEIVE deliverable 5.3 ‘Production of a report discussing (including visualizingtopographic maps of meanings) the emergent topics in identityrelevant discourse at the different levels’

In this report we describe the results of the analysis that we performed through topic modeling on nthe texts that we collected and described in the previous deliverable 5.2. In particular, our aim was nto analyze the latent meaning structure, and the shared meanings of EU policies and EU identity, on nfour levels of communication: n1) Communications of the EU: here we analyzed the magazine Panorama; n2) Local implementation: here we analyzed financed projects’ abstracts; n3) Local press: at this level we focus on newspapers; n4) Social media: at this level we focus on Facebook. nThe analysis performed with Topic Modeling on the corpus of tweets collected from Twitter did not nprovide good results, due to the short length of each tweet. It is a result that is expected, but ncollected data are not useless. In order to provide a better coherence of this report, which focuses on nthe results of Topic Modeling, we are therefore not providing an analysis of tweets here. On the ncontrary, we will analyze tweet in the next deliverable 3.3, that is aimed at analyzing the use LMAs nmake of social media. nWith regards to the other level, we are presenting 16 models: one model for Panorama, one model nfor financed projects’ abstracts, 7 models for newspapers – one for each country – and 7 models for nFacebook. Regarding Facebook, LMAs in our case study region in UK do not have a Facebook profile. nThe seventh model regards thus European Institutions’ Facebook profiles. Each model is composed nof a list of 20 topics, which we analyze and characterize through descriptive statististics. We focus in nparticular on the emergent topics related to European Identity and Cohesion Policy. Moreover, in nthis report, we make use of formal methods and techniques to visually represent the meaning of ntopics elicited through topic modeling. nThe following paragraph provides a short introduction to the technique of topic modeling. Then four nparagraph accounts for the several topic models elicited at different level of communication. Finally, nconclusions make sense of the whole analysis.