EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

From ‘ivory tower traditionalists’ to ‘entrepreneurial scientists’? academic scientists in fuzzy university-industry boundaries

Alice Lam

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Growing intensity of university-industry ties has generated an intense debate about the changing norms and practices of academic scientific work. This study challenges the protagonists’ views on the emergence of a dominant market ethos in academic science and growing influence of the ‘new school’ entrepreneurial scientists. It argues that academic scientists are active agents seeking to shape the relationships between science and business, and shows continued diversity in their work orientations. Drawing on neo-institutional theory and the notion of ‘boundary work’, the study examines how scientists seek to protect and negotiate their positions, and also make sense of their professional role identities. It identifies four different orientations, the ‘traditional’ and ‘entrepreneurial’, with two hybrid types in between. The hybrids are the dominant category and are particularly adept at exploiting the ambiguities of ‘boundary work’ between academia and industry. The study is based on 36 interviews and a survey sample of 734 academic scientists from five UK research universities.

Keywords: academic scientists; actor agency; boundary work; entrepreneurial university; sociological ambivalence; university-industry links (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 L26 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Social Studies of Science 40.2(2010): pp. 307-340

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/30857/1/MPRA_paper_30857.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:30857

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:30857