Rethinking the Third Mission: Organizing dissonance in transformative universities

Gesa Pflitsch & Max-Peter Menzel (2026) Research Policy, 55, online first Abstract. Universities increasingly engage in sustainability transitions through Third Mission (TM) activities that confront “wicked” problems and conflicting value systems. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework that explains how TM contributes to transformative change by placing value collisions at its analytical core. Drawing on Convention Theory, we distinguish two knowledge processes: equivalence-oriente...