Dreams, dollars, and donors: organizational actorhood and the rising development orientation of global higher education

Abstract American universities operate as organizational actors with goals and elaborate structures to achieve them, often in interaction with multiple “stakeholders.” Fundraising has increasingly become central in these universities. University development offices with fundraising objectives emerged, expanded, and professionalized, becoming core features of American universities. Yet, it is not clear to what extent fundraising has diffused through higher education outside of the United States. Utilizing an original cross-national sample of 437 non-US universities, this paper seeks to ascertain whether university development orientations are more likely to be found in universities that look more like organizational actors and in more marketized societies. We find strong support for the neo-institutional hypothesis that universities with greater organizational elaboration and links to transnational professional associations are more likely to adopt a development or fundraising orientation. We find that universities in the Anglosphere are also more likely to adopt this orientation. However, other indicators of more marketized societies are not associated with university development structures. These findings contribute to scholarship on organizational actorhood and the globalization of higher education by highlighting the importance of university organization in accounting for their embrace of an American-influenced development-oriented university model.