Third mission and espoused values of Italian universities: an investigation on official documents

This study examines the espoused values of Italian universities that emerge from statutes with the aim of eliciting patterns of representation of the third mission, which embraces all the activities by which universities contribute to the economic and social development of society. Since all statutes were updated between 2011 and 2012 because of a law enacted on 30 December 2010, n. 240, it is timely to use Italian universities to highlight current patterns of representation. Using a qualitative content analysis performed with Atlas.Ti (Muhr, 1994), seventy-five statutes were analyzed by focusing on core missions, functions attributed to the third-mission activities, and primary tasks of the organization vis-à-vis its environment. By relying on the systematic association between codes created to extrapolate the embodied meaning of the text and units of analysis, results have shown four organizational archetypes in the third mission: 1) Need for coherence, with an emphasis on the need to respect the functions of public institutions regarding the third-mission activities; 2) Exploitation, which focuses on patent disclosure; 3) Openness to participating in external change and satisfying external needs; and 4) Old School, with a focus on entrepreneurial activities as a source of funding. Our analysis leads to proposals for future research.