Market Orientation: An important Consideration for Higher Education of Pakistan

This study highlights a theoretically and empirically neglected area in higher education system of Pakistan which is the market orientation (MO) and university performance (UP) relationship, underpinned by theories like resource based view (RBT/RBV), organizational learning theory (OLT) and multiple constituency theory (MCT). This paper tries to extract a detailed review of the pertinent literature with a more context specific operationalization of MO for higher education settings. The review of obtainable literature with the essential purpose of highlighting ‘the deficit of MO in Pakistani universities’ identifies that a significant relationship is evident between the MO and organizational performance even in higher education sector. However a few studies report inconsistent results about the given relationship which signifies for further investigation of the given relationship in presence of some mediator or moderator. Nevertheless, the research particularly on the relationship of interest is found insufficient in literature. Hence MO appears as a neglected area in the context of Pakistani universities. Consequently, this paper asserts for further empirical investigation of desirable relationship through a more context specific measure for MO in higher education settings, so as to empower universities, researchers, and policy makers for national transformation.