The future is everywhere: Actorhood and the modern hyper-university

Actorhood always relates to future action. If an organization assumes agency it declares that it is able to elicit action in domains where it used not to act (in the past), where it has not acted yet (in the present), but where it will act (in the future). This notion of future-oriented action lies for example at the heart of strategy papers drafted by universities. In such papers, universities articulate their aspirations to become excellent, international, digital etc. On order to do so they assume new tasks for the organization that had previously been taken care of by other internal and external units, or had not been formally rationalized at all. As the university assumes agency for more and more domains, it is confronted with the contradictions that she herself has brought about through expanding its responsibilities and borders (Bromley and Meyer 2015). However, to refrain from actorhood is not an option in modern Western societies (Meyer and Jepperson 2000). The paper carves out these contradictions by empirically analyzing strategy papers of German universities for different domains such as internationalization, digitalization, or human resource development, and by pointing to practical occasions where these contradictions not only surface but also have to be accommodated, for example in admission procedures of excellent graduate schools, in the digitalization of teaching, or in the working conditions of academic staff. In some cases, embracing the future triggers organizational change, while in others, it surrenders to routine or tradition.