Despite the importance of trustees as leaders in US higher education institutions, our knowledge and understanding of their behavior is limited. This is increasingly problematic as trustees engage more directly with institutions as institutional boundaries have become more porous. We utilize social network analysis and document analysis of exchanges to explore trustees’ involvement in a qualitative comparative case study of four elite US research universities. We draw on the microfoundations tradition of neo-institutional theory to frame and evaluate how the actions of these individuals reproduce, expand and reorganize these institutions and their boundaries. Results show that these leaders are heavily involved with the universities they govern, but in widely varied ways and to different degrees. We inductively derive two forms of trusteeship — traditional trusteeship (e.g., governance) and expanded trusteeship (e.g., capacity building and collaborative partnerships) — that occur unevenly across our four institutions. These findings demonstrate that the nature of trusteeship at US research universities varies across institutions in profound ways that have substantial consequences for their boundaries, behaviors, and governance as well as the organizational stratification in the field of US higher education.

尽管受托人作为美国高等教育机构的领导者很重要，但我们对其行为的了解和理解是有限的。随着机构边界变得更加多孔，受托人更直接地与机构接触，这越来越成问题。我们利用社交网络分析和交流文件分析来探索受托人参与对四所美国精英研究型大学的定性比较案例研究。我们利用新制度理论的微观基础传统来构建和评估这些个人的行为如何复制、扩展和重组这些制度及其边界。结果表明，这些领导者与他们管理的大学密切相关，但方式和程度各不相同。我们归纳得出两种托管形式——传统托管（例如，治理）和扩展托管（例如，能力建设和合作伙伴关系）——在我们的四个机构中发生的情况不均衡。这些研究结果表明，美国研究型大学的托管性质因机构而异，这对其边界、行为和治理以及美国高等教育领域的组织分层产生重大影响。