Abstract
In the contemporary knowledge economy, higher education has become an integral part of national innovation systems and is supposed to help attract globally mobile capital. From this perspective, the key organizational actors of the knowledge economy are universities and transnational corporations (TNCs). Our chapter draws on previous research on interlocks between universities and corporations, as well as on broader studies on the internationalization of higher education and global capitalism. We seek to identify the connections of TNCs with the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU) member institutions through the individuals who simultaneously serve on the university boards and hold executive positions at TNCs. Furthermore, we explore whether connections with TNCs influence the university prestige as measured by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Overall, this chapter provides new insights on the role of TNC interlocks in the corporate hegemony in elite U.S. higher education and also demonstrates that this network between AAU institutions and TNCs extends beyond the borders of the U.S., especially in the case of private AAU institutions.
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Notes
- 1.
For our purposes, we use the term “interlock” to refer to university trustees who sit on corporate boards and university boards simultaneously.
- 2.
- 3.
There are also two Canadian universities included in the AAU, but because of the scope of project focuses specifically on U.S. universities, they were excluded from our dataset.
- 4.
The University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University are neither public nor private, but “state-related,” and have large boards, unlike most other public universities, that nearly approximate the size of private universities. The larger number of board members may account their centrality and number of connections.
- 5.
A list of universities and their corresponding ID numbers for the organization networks can be found in Appendix A1 of Chap. 9.
- 6.
There are differences between diversified and non-diversified firms. Manufacturing is overwhelmingly dominant in diversified firms, followed by Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services, and Wholesale Trade. However, the Finance and Insurance sector takes a rather small part in diversified firms compared to non-diversified firms. See Chap. 9 for further information.
- 7.
Manufacturing includes food, apparel, wood product, chemical, metal, machinery computer electronic semiconductor, motor vehicle manufacturing, etc.
- 8.
Please refer to the census website for further details of NAICS. https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/sssd/naics/naicsrch?chart_code=31&search=2002%20NAICS%20Search
- 9.
For more information on the missing information for the industry classification, see Chap. 9.
- 10.
TNCs (as well as other corporations) are likely to screen especially those rankings that would use dimensions such as regional impact or knowledge transfer in assessing performance.
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Kauppinen, I., Coco, L., Choi, H., Brajkovic, L. (2016). Blurring Boundaries and Borders: Interlocks Between AAU Institutions and Transnational Corporations. In: Slaughter, S., Taylor, B. (eds) Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21512-9_3
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