Abstract

The study combined organizational theory with semiotic and discourse analysis to arrive at some compelling themes concerning higher education culture in the United States. One of the theoretical vehicles for intertextuality in organizational fields appears to lie in institutionalism and the mechanisms involved in isomorphism where organizations become to share similar structures, components, images and language. Three concepts of institutional isomorphism are at play — mimetic, coercive, and normative — where institutions become like one another especially in organizational fields (Dimaggio and Powell 1983). These three processes provided the theoretical backbone to explore the how universities represent themselves to the public through mission statements and their corresponding university websites at 28 randomly sampled research intensive universities.