Strategic Management in Higher Educational Institutions: Comparative Analysis of University Core Values

Abstract

Educational institutions have an increasingly vital role in regional and national economies. Higher education (HE) has been facing new challenges and demands due to political, economic, and technological changes in the course of the last few decades. The purpose of this study was to find out what values Czech and British HE institutions declare as their core values, and based on an analysis of these values identifies what are the differences in the content of organizational culture and the degree of stakeholder orientation of HE institution in the surveyed countries. A qualitative-research procedure was applied to meet the research objectives. The collected values were then analyzed and categorized according to their content similarity. Subsequently, the identified categories of university core values in both the countries were compared. The results showed that the Czech Republic and the UK are different substantially in the extent to which they formulated their values, or the extent that they use them as a tool for strategic management or as a marketing tool, respectively.