World-Rank and/or Locally Relevant? Organizational Identity in the Mission Statements of Higher Education Organizations in Israel, 2008-2018

Israeli higher education organizations are currently under pressure to achieve global excellence, satisfy Israeli economic and security needs, and serve Israel's diverse social groups; they are also required to meet standards of proper governance; and, they wrestle with Israeli, Jewish, Zionist and Palestinian legacies. This array of complex and often conflicting constraints drives our research, to investigate how Israeli higher education organizations are embedded in this particularly complex environment. Whereas research on the mission statements of universities focuses primarily on higher education organizations in the core countries, which serve as the ideals and templates for others worldwide, our investigation reorients this burgeoning research towards the study of higher education identification outside the highly-reputable Western academia. We examine the English-language mission statements of all academic organizations in Israel, in the period 2008-2018. Analyses reveal two main findings: (1) that local-global axis of organizational identity is ordered along place/space distinction and (2) that such glocal identity is enacted at the field level, among categories of higher education organizations. We discuss these findings in the context of the "identity paradox" of contemporary organizations, which are compelled to simultaneously declare their uniqueness as well as their relevance to certain social groups and agendas.