Roads to Institutionalization: The Remaking of Boundaries between Public and Private Science

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Abstract

We analyze the process of institutionalization, arguing that it is the outcome of the self-reinforcing feedback dynamics of heightened legitimacy and deeper taken-for-grantedness, using novel techniques to document and trace this change over a 30-year period. Our focus is the remaking of the boundaries between public and private science, an institutional transformation that joined science and property, two formerly distinct spheres. The setting is Stanford University, an early adopter and pioneer in the formulation of policies of technology transfer. We illustrate how archival materials may be systematically assessed to capture notable changes in organizational practices and categories, reflecting both local and field-level processes. The paper concludes with a set of indicators that gauge low, medium, and high elements of institutional change. We argue that this approach allows for more precision in measurement and enables comparisons across studies, two standard critiques of the institutional approach.

Introduction

Despite broad appeal and wide application in studies of the diffusion of managerial practices, the adoption of organizational structures, and even the global spread of managerialism, institutional theory has lacked agreement about several of its core concepts. This approach to organizational analysis has had a “big tent” attitude, welcoming social scientists with interests as varied as discourse analysis and critical realism to comparative researchers studying the world polity. While having galvanized interest, this broad embrace comes at the expense of precision in measurement (Haveman, 2000). This difficulty in conceptual fidelity is not surprising, given that institutionalization is both a multi-level process as well as an outcome. Nevertheless, several of the core ideas associated with the institutional approach, specifically legitimacy and taken-for-grantedness, have not been characterized in a way that allows for ready comparisons across studies. Thus, our goal in this chapter is to facilitate agreement about these central concepts in institutional analysis.

We argue that institutionalization is driven by the self-reinforcing feedback dynamics of heightened legitimacy and enhanced taken-for-grantedness. Consequently, the expansion and deepening of these constructs are the motors of a wider process of institutionalization, which we break down and analyze. We illustrate how practices can be more or less legitimated and assess how taken-for-grantedness changes through time, as well as show how both can be assessed and measured. To accomplish this, we use archival materials from the technology transfer office at a leading research university, Stanford, and draw on these materials in a way that provides metrics of low, medium, and high legitimacy and taken-for-grantedness. One of the criticisms of institutional research has been a lack of attention to how elements of the social order can be pre-, semi-, or fully institutionalized (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996; Strang & Sine, 2002). We address this shortcoming directly by spelling out the gradations and scale of a process of institutionalization.

Our empirical focus is the remaking of the boundaries between public and private science, and the joining of science and property, two spheres that were formerly distinct. The subject of the commercialization of science is highly apt for our theoretical aims because of the institutional transformation that has transpired over the past four decades. We begin in an era, the 1970s, when academic entrepreneurship was unfamiliar, technology transfer practices were highly idiosyncratic and not formalized, and the commercialization of science was even actively resisted. Over time, entrepreneurial activity became more familiar and commonplace on some university campuses, and was eventually buttressed in the early 1980s by federal law encouraging these efforts. By the late 1990s, technology transfer was celebrated and championed. Consider two indicators of this institutional change. Technology transfer offices on U.S. campuses numbered only in the 20s in 1980, but exceeded 200 by the year 2000 (Mowery, Nelson, Sampat, & Ziedonis, 2004). From 1980 to 2000, the number of patents assigned to research universities rose 850% (Owen-Smith, 2003). The great majority of this increase is driven by patenting in the biomedical field (Ganz-Brown, 1999; National Science Board, 2000); hence our focus is on the life sciences.

Stanford University was an early champion of technology transfer, which was initially pursued by multiple units on the campus, ranging from the sponsored research office, to the technology licensing office, to the laboratories of individual researchers. Through time, the practices were consolidated in a single high-profile office, and greatly elaborated and routinized, making this office a critical site for the locus of institutionalization. We make extensive use of rich archival materials from this office, and illustrate how researchers can draw on documents to provide concrete evidence of the changing nature of organizational practices, and to gauge how familiarity with specific practices evolves and is reproduced through time. We show how the development of categories and classifications at Stanford had ramifications well beyond the boundaries of the university.

The chapter is not intended as an empirical analysis of the commercialization of university science; we take up that task in related work. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate how archival materials from the university office that helped pioneer the field of technology transfer can be utilized to study paths to institutionalization. We offer our argument both as a theoretical contribution, where we analyze taken-for-grantedness and legitimacy as constituent components of a sequence that can lead to institutionalization, and a methodological exemplar, which shows how primary documents can be used and indicators derived from careful readings.

Through analysis of the practices of technology transfer, we enrich the conception of legitimacy by showing how procedures and definitions that initially require a great deal of effort, explanation, and translation become more codified over time, as the range of possible options becomes narrower. In a cognitive sense, a great deal of compression occurs, which allows participants to understand both meaning and nuance in a rapid fashion. We show how taken-for-grantedness is the outcome of purposive action, the refining of skills, and the development of reflexivity on the part of participants. Our view of taken-for-grantedness is very much embedded in practices and categories that are associated with different degrees of understanding that change through time.

We turn next to a discussion of our key concepts – legitimacy and taken-for-grantedness, highlighting their central features. The research site, the Office of Technology licensing at Stanford University, which served as a bridge between the worlds of the academy and commerce, is then described. We review the archival materials next, then turn to a detailed analytical narrative of source materials. We conclude the narrative discussion with more general observations on the institutionalization of academic entrepreneurship. We then discuss implications of our approach, suggesting possible applications of our tools to other empirical settings. To encourage such efforts, we abstract from the context of science and commerce and suggest a number of more general organizational indicators of the process of institutionalization. We offer at the end a framework based on our findings that provides a foundation for comparative and complimentary research.

Section snippets

Core concepts

Legitimacy is perhaps the most central concept in institutional research (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zucker, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott & Meyer, 1983) and has been crucial to various lines of work in organizational theory more generally (Hannan & Freeman, 1989; Hannan & Carroll, 1992; Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002). As defined by Suchman (1995, p. 574), legitimacy is “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or

The research setting: University–industry interfaces and technology transfer

Technology transfer at Stanford is an apt setting for analyzing levels of legitimacy and taken-for-grantedness. First, the development of technology licensing at U.S. universities is a reflection of a broader process of institutional change whereby the realms of public and private science have become integrated into a common domain (Owen-Smith, 2003; Sampat & Nelson, 2002). Technology transfer offices are boundary spanning units that join together the academic and commercial worlds, providing a

Methods and materials

We follow the suggestions of Ventresca and Mohr (2002) and Schneiberg and Clemens (2006) who call for a more considered approach to archival analysis and historical inquiry. Schneiberg and Clemens (2006) argue that accounts of institutions are “discursive constructions that incorporate cultural models in their telling.” Consequently, researchers must infer meanings as authors frequently reveal habits of mind and assumptions only indirectly, through their use of emphasis, quotations, and

Narrative analysis

We begin with a discussion of legitimacy, using the correspondence to illustrate how the commercialization of university science at Stanford became more accepted, comprehensible, and diffused across the university over time. We then discuss how discrete elements of this process became taken-for-granted. We begin with specific pieces of correspondence, and build our analysis directly from them, then conclude with a more general abstract assessment. Our goal is to detail an analytic narrative

Discussion and implications

Much of the literature in institutional analysis has emphasized external influences and exogenous shocks as the key motor of institutional change. Whether the trigger is legislative mandate, as in affirmative action law or the creation of the European Union, political ideology, such as neo-liberalism or the oppositional role of social movements, or disputes over professional jurisdiction, as in studies of contests between physicians and managers or accountants and lawyers, much of the

Acknowledgments

We thank the States and Markets program at the Santa Fe Institute, supported by the Hewlett Foundation, the Columbia-Stanford Consortium on Biomedical Innovation, funded by the Merck Foundation, and the Association for Institutional Research for research support. We are especially grateful to the Office of Technology Licensing at Stanford University, which has afforded us unrestricted access to their archives. We are also grateful to Helena Buhr, Gili Drori, Hokyu Hwang, John Meyer, Andrew

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