Higher education systems are changing due to trends of funding pressures, increasing social demands and growing numbers of students. Even though teaching and research are still considered as the pivotal functions of universities, other activities such as technology transfer, lifelong learning or social engagement have broadened the scope of their actions. These activities, labelled as third mission, are supposed to strengthen the impact of science in society and epitomize the changing role of universities. In Germany, the federal government and the states announced different programs aiming to foster these activities, e.g. the “Innovative Hochschule” or Real-world Laboratories. In this article, we first want to develop a definition framework of third mission. In two further steps we analyze how politics and policies in Germany have framed the concept in the last few years and how public universities are responding to this in their formal structure. We use approaches of neo-institutional theory according to which organizations such as universities create institutionalized structures and reflect institutional rules in order to maintain legitimacy. As an example of organizational formal structure we analyze mission statements of public universities. Using computer-based qualitative content analysis, we assess to what extent these universities take up the third mission. Our results show that most universities mention the third mission in their mission statements. However, the focus is mainly limited to economic impact and (technical) knowledge transfer. Much less emphasis is put on civic engagement or further education issues.

中文翻译：

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重塑德国高等教育的第三个使命：政治框架和大学的反应

由于资金压力的趋势、不断增加的社会需求和不断增长的学生人数，高等教育系统正在发生变化。尽管教学和研究仍被视为大学的关键职能，但技术转让、终身学习或社会参与等其他活动扩大了其行动范围。这些活动被称为第三项使命，旨在加强科学在社会中的影响并体现大学不断变化的作用。在德国，联邦政府和各州宣布了旨在促进这些活动的不同计划，例如“创新高等学校”或真实世界实验室。在本文中，我们首先要制定第三个任务的定义框架。在进一步的两个步骤中，我们分析了德国的政治和政策在过去几年中如何构建这一概念，以及公立大学如何在其正式结构中对此做出回应。我们使用新制度理论的方法，根据这些方法，大学等组织创建制度化结构并反映制度规则以保持合法性。作为组织形式结构的一个例子，我们分析了公立大学的使命宣言。使用基于计算机的定性内容分析，我们评估这些大学在多大程度上承担了第三个任务。我们的结果表明，大多数大学在其使命陈述中都提到了第三个使命。然而，重点主要限于经济影响和（技术）知识转移。