Autumn Quarter 2009

We examine the emergence of proprietary science in the academy, specifically as a set of rules that came to define how university research findings should be commercialized. Drawing on detailed archives of life scientists’ early invention disclosures we demonstrate how patenting practices originated in labs, rather than legal definitions or policy incentives, and developed in a manner that cannot be separated from the actual production of science. Our investigation also suggests several mechanisms that contribute to the emergence of proprietary science: 1.) a population-level mode of learning through natural selection and lab replication, reflecting how scientific labs produce both knowledge and scientists; 2.) a lab-level, experiential form of adaptation through participation in a chain of knowledge production; and 3.) a lab-level preemptive form of adaptation through anticipation of others' actions. We operationalize these insights into a computational, agent-based model that demonstrates how an institutional regime conducive to patenting can develop and persist without top-down coordination or centralized control. Moreover, experimentation with the model suggests that emergence of such a regime is more likely to occur when lab replication is coupled with a preemptive, forward-looking lab adaptation mechanism, than when it coincides with a participatory, backward-looking form of lab adaptation.  

How should we explain the origin and enduring popularity of intercollegiate football? While previous accounts emphasize the manifest functions of the game (development of character and spirit, financial benefits, and increased visibility), we theorize that a latent function of intercollegiate football provides a more convincing explanation: intercollegiate football is a status system, institutionalized through conference associations and processes of social closure. We develop this idea by tracing the historical development of college football. Drawing on a data set constructed from conference affiliations over time, university characteristics, and reputational measures, we provide evidence of processes we would expect to see if our theory were true: status clustering and status hoarding through conference affiliation. Overall our work suggests that organizational status can be defined by several sets of evaluative criteria simultaneously. 

College plays a critical role in establishing and maintaining both the worldviews and public performances of political actors. But while scholars know a good deal about progressive politics on campus, they know considerably less about college student conservatism. This paper compares the political styles of conservative students in two university systems—Eastern Elite University and Western Public University—and finds them to be markedly different.We locate the experiences of politically active college students in a number of nested organizational structures, each of which provides additional layers of meaning to students’ unfolding political ideologies. We find that students are active agents in their cultivation of political styles, but that they are also enabled and constrained in their individual proclivities by the organizational resources and schemas differentially available to them on their campuses. We argue that styles of campus conservatism are much less the result of “natural inclinations” that students simply bring with them to campus—a simple mirror of students’ social class origins or early political beliefs. Rather, we argue that these dispositions are developed on campus—they are organizational products, built up through multiple networks of shared culture. Marshaling rich data from these campuses, we extend theory on institutional scripts, cultural capital, the reproduction of elite status in higher education, group styles, and the origins of political discourse. 

In this paper, we investigate how organizations’ scope affects their competitive viability. While existing research finds inconsistent results for the diversification and performance link, we base our conceptualization on the premise that organizational environments, selection mechanisms, and organizational fit are important determinants in the way scope affects competitive outcomes. Importantly, organizations and environments have multiple core dimensions, such as product markets and technology, along which an organization may adopt different scope strategies simultaneously. We argue that in certain settings, competitive viability may actually be optimal for those organizations that are relatively diverse in one dimension but approach specialism in another. Taking an evolutionary approach, we formulate hypotheses on the effects of market and technology scope on organizational survival in emerging, technology-based industries. Our analysis of the modern biotechnology industry in Finland in 1978-2006 supports the hypotheses and thus backs up our conceptualization of the scope-survival link – possibly generalizable to other contexts and organizational dimensions.