Jeannette A. Colyvas

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

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.

Ubiquity and Legitimacy: Disentangling Diffusion and Institutionalization

Diffusion and institutionalization are of prime sociological importance, as both processes unfold at the intersections of relations and structures, as well as persistence and change. Yet they are often confounded, leading to theoretical and methodological biases that hinder the development of generalizable arguments. We look at diffusion and institutionalization distinctively, each as both a process and an outcome in terms of three dimensions: the objects that flow or stick; the subjects who adopt or influence; and the social settings through which an innovation travels. We offer examples to flesh out these dimensions, and formulate testable propositions from our analytic framework that could lead to further theoretical refinement and progress.

From Vulnerable to Venerated: The Institutionalization of Academic Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences

We examine the origins, acceptance, and spread of academic entrepreneurship in the biomedical field at Stanford, a university that championed efforts at translating basic science into commercial application. With multiple data sources from 1970 to 2000, we analyze how entrepreneurship became institutionalized, stressing the distinction between factors that promoted such activity and those that sustained it. We address individual attributes, work contexts, and research networks, discerning the multiple influences that supported the commercialization of basic research and contributed to a new academic identity. We demonstrate how entrepreneurship expands from an uncommon undertaking to a venerated practice.

Problematizing Actors and Institutions in Institutional Work

The growing popularity of institutional work suggests a broad agentic turn in institutional approaches to organizational studies. We briefly describe the contribution of the evolving institutional-work research agenda. Then, we identify two problematic areas in this line of research: the privileged causal status of “actors” and the under-theorized nature of institutions. We suggest that re-engagement with insights of the earlier, foundational work in neo-institutional theory would benefit this emerging research agenda.

Performance Metrics as Formal Structures and through the Lens of Social Mechanisms: When Do They Work and How Do They Influence?.

Our current educational environment is subject to persistent calls for accountability, evidence-based practice, and data use for improvement, which largely take the form of performance metrics (PMs). This rapid proliferation of PMs has profoundly influenced the ways in which scholars and practitioners think about their own practices and the larger missions in which they are embedded. This article draws on research in organizational sociology and higher education to propose a framework and research agenda for analyzing the relationship between PMs and practice. I argue that PMs need to be understood as a distinctive form of data whose consequences in use relate to their role as formalized systems of abstractions and the social mechanisms through which they exert change in practice.

Measures, metrics, and myopia: The challenges and ramifications of sustaining academic entrepreneurship

Contemporary life is replete with all manner of rankings, metrics, and benchmarks (Power, 1997; Espeland & Stevens, 1998). From J.D. Power evaluations of cars to Zagat restaurant reviews to US News and World Report ratings of colleges and universities, modern life seems to be deep in the grip of assessment and evaluation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the introduction of scientific management transformed the workplace, altering relations between labor and capital, and embedding control over the nature and pace of work into the technical organization of production (Edwards, 1979; Shenhav, 1995). In a similar fashion, the current embrace of rankings may reflect a new “Taylorism,” as metrics have the capacity to not only reorder the social institutions they are purported to assess, but also provide a patina of objectivity, especially for the uninitiated.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ACADEMIC HEALTH CENTERS

Academic Health Centers have become an increasingly important locus of inventive activity in biomedicine. The observed increase in patenting and licensing activity taking place at AHCs has called attention to this phenomenon but has also raised questions about the impact on the creation and diffusion of important technologies and research tools. This paper explores the contributions of academic health centers in generating new medical technologies, addressing the ways in which intellectual property rights affect technological innovation and diffusion. The paper underscores the relevance of understanding important features of the innovative process, namely the nature and degree of uncertainty in technological change. The paper draws on patent data and case studies from Columbia and Stanford University to illustrate these issues and raises questions about the costs and benefits of various commercialization strategies and university patenting approaches.

Ideological Call to Arms: Analyzing Institutional Contradictions in Political Party Discourse on Education and Accountability Policy, 1952–2012

Abstract Despite a legacy of research that emphasizes contradictions and their role in explaining change, less is understood about their character or the mechanisms that support them. This gap is especially problematic when making causal claims about the sources of institutional change and our overall conceptions of how institutions matter in social meanings and organizational practices. If we treat contradictions as a persistent societal feature, then a primary analytic task is to distinguish their prevalence from their effects. We address this gap in the context of US electoral discourse and education through an analysis of presidential platforms. We ask how contradictions take hold, persist, and might be observed prior to, or independently of, their strategic use. Through a novel combination of content analysis and computational linguistics, we observe contradictions in qualitative differences in form and quantitative differences in degree. Whereas much work predicts that ideologies produce contradictions between groups, our analysis demonstrates that they actually support convergence in meaning between groups while promoting contradiction within groups.