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Close interaction between universities, industries, and governments has given rise to hybrid organizations incorporating economic development alongside scientific research and higher education. We will approach this phenomenon and the related organization-theoretical problems by looking at two cases of discipline making to discuss the potential of the concept of organizational field introduced by the neoinstitutionalist school of organization theory. As this concept presumes the Bourdieusian theory of social fields, we will consider possibilities of reflective contesting of the states of doxa in discipline making in regard to organizational aspects of disciplinary boundaries in the university-centered system of higher education, its demarcation to business and schooling, as well as to the related ideology of professionalism and science policy. We will also comment on the Bourdieusian conceptuality inscribed in the neoinstitutionalist metaphor of organizational field from the perspective of systems theory inspired by Luhmann. This is because we believe that further development of the semantic focus in the problem of disciplinary boundaries would benefit from Luhmannian tools designed to grasp organizations as social systems that facilitate interrelations of differentiated function systems relevant for discipline making in current technoscience.

“Academic values” is one of the most popular terms used in the higher education literature. But how do we study academic values? Besides autonomy, freedom, and collegiality, the “values” in “academic values” often remains implicit, leaving a conceptual gap in the literature. Moreover, autonomy, freedom, and collegiality may reflect the shared normative expectations as part of the value system of a profession, rather than the value orientation at the individual level. To examine the latter, this chapter proposes a conceptual framework adapted from the studies of work values in applied psychology. As a heuristic device, the academic work value framework consists of six ideal-typical value orientations belonging to three dimensions: work autonomy, social orientation, and value of knowledge. The framework's relevance and usefulness are evaluated by revisiting relevant literature on academic orientations. The result shows a spectrum of value positions in academic work, from the “old school” values to the “entrepreneurial” ones to the hybrid orientations. Overall, this framework provides a potential approach to operationalize the concept of academic values for empirical research. At the same time, as a heuristic device, it is open for reflection, critique, and further development.

Although the cottage industry of neoinstitutional research gained its momentum through a conceptual architecture that was centred on a bifurcation of technological/material forces and cultural dynamics, current research in this genre has begun to re-examine the utility of such distinctions. One of the downsides of such a conceptual distinction is that the institutional approach to technology is anachronistic, treating it as an exogenous force. Even though early work by Woodward and others usefully contributed to our understanding of organizations by highlighting how different technologies correlate with various organizational forms, recent scholarship has enhanced our more functional understanding of technology by highlighting processes of coevolution and structuration. In this chapter, we draw on such social constructionist developments in the study of technology to reanimate institutional analysis. More specifically, drawing on the case of the development of nanotube intellectual property, we focus on how technological knowledge production is embedded in community cultures. Our arguments and evidence suggest that there are distinctive community cultures around intensive versus extensive knowledge-generating patents, highlighting how an approach that appreciates the interactive dynamics of technology and culture can yield important insights into the institutional dynamics of technology development.

Israel, characterized by various knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms, provides an interesting case study for examining sector-based differences and “small country” regional patterns. This chapter has a dual goal of exploring sector and regional differences of knowledge-intensive firms in Israel. The first goal is to depict similarities and differences between firms in three knowledge-intensive sectors: Life Sciences, information technology, and Cleantech. The second goal questions whether the geographical distribution of these firms across regions is associated with different levels of knowledge concentration and organizational homogeneity. Regional and sector-based differences were measured by firm-level network structures, funding patterns, and innovation proxies. One way analysis of variance tests were conducted for attaining these research goals. The main findings show that while most regions exhibit similar patterns of firm and network characteristics, many differences exist on the sector level that are associated with sector-specific attributes. These findings support the notion of a “small country inter-regional homogeneity effect.”

Organizational fields are shaped by both the relations that organizations forge and the language they express. The structure and discourse of organizational fields have been studied before, but seldom in combination. We offer a methodological approach that integrates relations and expressions into a comprehensive visualization.

By mapping networks and discourse as co-constitutive, the method illuminates the mechanisms active in organizational fields. We utilize social impact evaluation as an issue field shaped by the presence of an interstitial community, and compare this structure with simulated alternative field configurations.

The simulations reveal that variation in organizations’ openness to adopting concepts from adjacent meaning systems alters field configurations: differentiation manifests under conditions of low overall openness, whereas moderate receptivity produces hybridizations of discourses and sometimes the emergence of an interstitial community that bridges domains. If certain organizations are open while others remain focused on their original discourse, then we observe integration in the discursive domain of the invariant organizations.

The observations from the simulations are represented by visualizing organizational fields as topographies of meaning, onto which interorganizational relations are layered. This representation localizes organizations and their interactions in a cultural space while emphasizing how meanings of relationships and organizational expressions vary with different field configurations. By adding meaning to network data, the resulting maps open new perspectives for institutional research on the adaptation, translation, and diffusion of concepts.

The chapter presents a theoretical framework that deals with the basic question of how networks and industries coevolve. We draw upon the structural and relational perspectives of networks to theorize about changes occurring in interfirm networks over time and the coevolutionary linkage of these changes to the industry life cycle. We further extend the widely accepted industry life cycle model by claiming that industry-specific evolutionary patterns impact the structure of the network’s relations, which in turn lead to diversification in the sources of innovation and to variation in the patterns of industrial evolution.

Networks connecting two important supporting institutions – law firms and venture capital partnerships – explain regions’ disparate abilities to sustain diverse high-technology ventures. In order to explain the diversity of entrepreneurial activity in a region, we distinguish between institutional capacity (the number of law firms and venture capitalists in a locale), strong interinstitutional connections that span legal and financial domains, and cohesive structural communities of directly and indirectly connected supporting organizations. We argue that strong connections and cohesive communities are essential, but little examined contributors to the development of diverse research-based economies. We find support for the argument in an empirical analysis of initial public offerings (IPOs) by U.S. high-technology companies in five industries between 1993 and 2005. Linking regional outcomes to strong ties that span local legal and financial institutions and to cohesive structures that weld them into communities offers new insights for research on the institutional and network underpinnings of entrepreneurship and regional economic development.

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.

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.

Following Philip Selznick’s lead in using pragmatist social science to understand issues of public concern we conducted a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry (CCI). We find that social heuristics – collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision-making frames – significantly shape economic and non-economic decision-making practices. Social heuristics are the outcome of industry-based “institutionalization processes” and are widely held and commonly relied on in CCI to reduce uncertainty endemic to decision-making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational to industry co-participants. In the CCI – a project-centered production network – social heuristics as shared institutions sustain network-based social order but in so doing discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically nor structurally reductionist.