Although internationalisation underpins many practices in higher education, its adopted approaches can be uneven between institutions and create ambiguous conceptualisations of how it is enacted in practice. Therefore, a whole-sector analysis can provide insight into whether spaces exist for new and innovative approaches to internationalisation, or whether they might be limited by structural inequalities and pressures in the sector. Using the UK as an illustrative case, our research has conducted a qualitative ideal-type analysis of 132 institutional approaches to internationalisation across the sector, as codified in university internationalisation strategy documents and through secondary quantitative data about key internationalisation metrics. Our typology developed three dimensions that shape internationalisation approaches: reputation, mission, and attitude. Our findings outline that universities use their understanding of their reputations and material contexts to determine their missions, and the combination of these shape the dominant emotional tone of strategic approaches to internationalisation. We outline how institutions, on the whole, shape their approaches to internationalisation to fit an existing status quo of global elitism, rather than highlighting new and innovative approaches to internationalisation. The UK case can provide an illustrative example for other diverse sectors in marketised and internationalising contexts.