How Universities Justify their Worth: Layered Cultural Expression in Strategic Plans

Organisations increasingly operate under conditions of evaluative pluralism, in which they must justify their worth to multiple audiences according to potentially competing criteria. Research universities provide a revealing empirical case, as they face conflicting expectations around advancing knowledge, serving democracy, driving innovation, and contributing to economic growth. This article analyses strategic plans as cultural artefacts through which institutions present themselves as legitimate to diverse audiences. Drawing on 130 strategic plans from research-intensive universities in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the study distinguishes three layers of public presentation: vocabulary, narrative claims and extended justificatory accounts. These layers are operationalised using computational text measures, sentence-level large language model classification, and paragraph-level AI-assisted coding. The article develops two arguments. The first is that universities across the three countries draw on shared global repertoires of worth, expressed through nationally distinct configurations across discursive layers. Civic and project-oriented worth dominates extended justificatory accounts in all three countries, while vocabularies and claims diverge, with US vocabularies more industrial and UK and Australian plans more strongly signalling project and green orientations. The second argument relates to the imperative to justify. National contexts differ in how far the forms of value they invoke must be developed into public justification. Domestic and green forms of worth show this pattern most clearly, with cultural differences at every layer of analysis. Organisational legitimacy is thus sought through layered configurations of worth, filtered through nationally specific expectations about which forms demand sustained justification.