This paper develops a framework for the measurement of the market orientation (MO) of higher education institutions (HEIs) and implements said framework in measuring the nature of MO in HEIs.

Market orientation (MO), a foundational concept in the discipline of marketing, can be understood as the degree to which a firm undertakes behaviours in generating and responding to information about customers and competitors to create value (Bhattarai et al., 2019). Ample evidence supports the benefits of MO on customer, performance and employee-related outcomes (Modi and Sahi, 2018).

The link between a MO and HEI performance has also been empirically established (Abou-Warda 2014). For example, research on the relationship between MO and the performance of academic staff (Kűster and Avilés-Valenzuela, 2010), on student satisfaction (Tran et al., 2015) as well as on a range of subjective assessments of HEI performance (Hammond and Webster, 2014) appears quite strong. This MO HEI performance relationship has been confirmed across a range of European HE contexts, for example Assad et al. (2015) in the United Kingdom, Tanrikulu and Gelibolu (2015) in Turkey, Nagy and Beracs (2012) in Hungary and Flavian and Lozano (2007) in Spain.

However, the transposition of a MO into a HEI context, while argued as warranted, is far from straightforward (Llonch at al., 2016; Rivera-Camino and Molero Ayala 2010; Akonkwa, 2009). The context specific aspects of implementing a MO in a HEI context requiring consideration are significant, namely the treatment of students, types of stakeholders including academic staff, relationship to competitors and the measurement of HEI performance. That is the MO concept needs to be ‘context-specific’ to HEIs (Akonkwa, 2009, p. 312).

A review of literature across European and International contexts serves as a guide for conceptualising MO in a HEI context (Llonch J. et al., 2016; Rivera-Camino and Molero Ayala 2010; Pavicic et al., 2009; Voon, 2008). Thus in a HE context MO is a culture with resulting behaviours, across all departments of the institution, that seeks to understand and respond to; students, collaborating/partner institutions, competitors, parents, employees, employers, funders, other stakeholders as well as wider society and the environment in an innovative and sustainable way. A framework consistent with this conceptualisation is presented as a tool to examine the nature of MO in HEIs. This framework informs the subsequent aim of this research to measure the nature of MO in HEIs. 

A content analysis categorising the manifest content of the strategic plans of six Irish HEIs using a deductive approach took place to measure the nature of MO in HEIs. Content analysis is a systematic and rigorous method for making replicable and valid inferences from texts with the purpose of providing new insights (White and Marsh, 2006; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008; Bengtsson, 2016). Described as the dominant method for the analysis of ‘corporate narrative documents’ (Merkl-Davies et al., 2011) it allows categorising of textual information in an unobtrusive manner (Vaismoradi et al., 2013). These categories describing the phenomenon in turn provide knowledge and understanding of said phenomenon (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008). In line with a positivist research paradigm the study took a deductive approach to the content analysis using a priori content categories derived from framework developed (Merkl-Davies et al., 2011). Irish HEIs have a legislative requirement to produce strategic plans – these plans provide insight into the strategic decision-making processes of the senior management of HEIs and would have the explicit approval and or involvement of the governing bodies of HEIs, their academic councils or legislature, presidents, registrars and development officers as well as being the result of some form of engagement and consultation with HEI staff and stakeholders. These strategic plans would not have been developed for the purpose of setting out the long-term direction of the organisations thus avoiding a respondent bias but providing an insight into the MO of these organisations. The strategic plans from two types of Irish HEIs were analysed - three from universities and three from institutes of technology - reflecting an educational and geographical diversity in a national context in understanding the phenomena in question – the MO of HEIs. NVivo software was utilised in the four stages of the data analysis process: the de-contextualisation, the re-contextualisation, the categorisation, and the compilation with each stage performed several times to enhance quality and trustworthiness (Bengtsson, 2016). The resulting analysis was a textual, numeric, “graphic and tabular presentation” (White and Marsh, 2006, p. 39).

Findings examine the MO of six HEIs across eleven dimensions reflective of the conceptualisation of MO; student orientation, employee orientation, sustainable innovation orientation, employer orientation, parent orientation, resource orientation, stakeholder orientation, societal orientation, competitor orientation, environment orientation, inter-functional coordination. Furthermore, the HEI type, geographical context, HEI size, research focus, degree of internationalisation and management of the HEIs were examined as part of this analysis. The research provides an examination of the MO of HEIs in an Irish context - which to date has not been undertaken. Furthermore, the research provides a framework for educational managers to implement and measure the MO of HEIs that has an applicability for HEIs across European contexts.

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