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Introduction
The last decades have seen a proliferation of theoretical and empirical studies aiming to operationalise the market orientation concept into its main dimensions such as customer orientation, competitor orientation, inter-functional coordination and responsiveness. Very soon, following recommendations from marketing scholars, studies on the market orientation strategy have been extended to non-profit organisations, including higher educational institutions (for the case of higher education, see [10], [11] Caruana et al. , 1998a, b; [47] Keneley and Hellier, 2002; [89] Webster et al. , 2006). Concretely, models developed in seminal works such as [48] Kohli and Jaworski (1990); [42] Jaworski and Kohli (1993), as well as [61] Narver and Slater (1990), [78] Slater and Narver (1994), have been transposed to higher education.
According to this growing body of research, market orientation is likely to help higher educational institutions in their endeavour to overcome the challenges and pressures of their changing environment. Although researches using such transpositions have reached understandable results, they have belittled the peculiarities of higher education, which cannot easily be put up with commercial models. Thus, I suspect the results obtained by these researches to be distorted and to draw misleading conclusions.
This paper contends that market orientation is actually a relevant strategy, which can help higher educational institutions to face and overcome changes that are happening in their environment. However, the way the model is being straightforwardly transposed in empirical studies seems irrelevant, and likely to reduce the potential of the strategy to help effectively higher education institutions. Higher education institutions, indeed, are definitely different from commercial organisations which have been the underlying context for the conceptualisation of market orientation. Therefore, only if preliminary studies are undertaken, on both the market orientation concept and the surrounding issues its application suggests, can the aforementioned strategy be useful for higher education.
There are of course, enough reasons for the market orientation strategy to be effectively applied to higher education. Indeed, researchers such as [80] Slaughter and Leslie (1999) in their masterpiece on academic capitalism applied to Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA, [83] Thys-Clement (2001) in Belgium, [93] Kaiser et al. (1999) and [71] Salerno (2004) for The Netherlands; [90] William (2004) and [82] Theisens (2003) in the UK, [44] Kaiser (2003) and [13]...