| Stewardship is a process that colleges and universities use to acknowledge, express gratitude, give recognition, provide status reports, encourage involvement, and re-cultivate their major donors for future gifts as part of their fundraising efforts. This study uses a comparative case study approach to explore how conditions in the institutional and task environments and internal organizational characteristics influence the nature of the stewardship process in five professional schools at the University of Michigan.; Sites for the case studies were selected to provide maximum variation in the institutional and task environments and the internal organizational characteristics that the professional schools encounter in their efforts to provide stewardship for their major donors. Data was collected and findings reported using a conceptual framework informed by institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and organizational context perspectives.; Stewardship, defined in terms of shared beliefs, social structure and organizational routines, was explored using data collected through interviews, documents and archival records. Case study informants in each case study unit included the dean of the school, as well as senior development administrators, major gift officers, and development staff.; As theorized, the analysis revealed that resource dependence, uncertainty regarding donor behavior and interconnectedness are the major influences on stewardship from the task environment. Pressures for legitimacy, efficiency, external legal coercion and the voluntary diffusion of norms were influential on stewardship from the institutional environment. Organizational factors including centralization, configuration, design and management of tasks, interactions, political process, reputation and competition were also influential on stewardship.; Unanticipated factors that emerged from the data suggesting their influence on stewardship included internal pressures from the institutional environment, diversification and stockpiling from the task environment, and institutional commitment to fundraising through staff and monetary resources from the organizational context. Stewardship proved to be an evolving organizational response to these pressures. The study also discusses how the task environment, the institutional environment and organizational factors influence one another to in-turn influence the stewardship process. Implications for theory, research and practice are considered. |
