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In the era of the knowledge economy, universities are expected to contribute to the economic development of their countries. Therefore, their research agendas must be relevant to the local context and geared, though not uncritically, to the national educational agenda. To do this diligently requires research autonomy. However, due to the low government investment in research on the African continent, universities have had to rely on other sources of funding, which usually come with strings attached. Our study investigates the case of Ghana, in particular, the University of Ghana, the leading research university in the country. We drew on resource dependence theory, which suggests that, despite external pressures on universities, they can enhance their autonomy through the implementation of strategic measures. Primarily, we analyzed documents such as research reports, journal articles and speeches in the light of Clark’s (1998) model of the “entrepreneurial university,” which, if adapted with care and in a localized form in Ghana, may contribute to the research autonomy of its universities. We found that, although research autonomy in Ghanaian universities is limited due to their over-reliance on external donor funding, it is likely to be strengthened if the government of Ghana follows through on plans to increase research funding and universities continue with measures to diversify their funding sources.

This chapter traces the history of digital libraries (DLs) in the United States through the funding sources that have supported DL research and development over the past decade and a half. A set of related questions are addressed: How have the mission and goals of funding agencies affected the types of projects that have been funded? What have been the deliverables from funded projects and how have the goals of the funding agencies shaped those deliverables? Funding agencies have exerted strong influence over research and development in DLs, and different funding agencies have funded different types of projects, with varying sets of concerns for driving the various fields that feed into DLs. This chapter will address the impact that DL funding has had on the development of research in the field of Library and Information Science, as well as on the practice of librarianship.

Traditional studies in the sociology of science have highlighted the self-organized character of the academic community. This article focuses on recent interrelated changes that alter that distinctive governance structure and its related patterns of competition and cooperation. The changes that we identify here are contractualization and large-scale cooperative research. We use different data sources to exemplify these new patterns and discuss the illustrative role of research clusters in German academia. Research clusters as funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are both a highly prestigious scarce good in the competition for reputation and resources and a means of fostering cooperation. Our analysis of this German example reveals that this new institutional configuration of universities as organizations, academic researchers, and the state has a profound effect on organizational practices. We discuss the implications of our empirical findings with regard to collegiality in academia. Ultimately, we anticipate a further weakening of collegial bonds, not only because universities and the state have become more active in shaping the nature of academic competition and cooperation but also because of the increasing strategic and individualistic orientation of academic researchers. In the final section, we summarize our findings and address the need for further research and an international comparative perspective.

In this article, we analyse how variations in organisational conditions for research affect researchers’ opportunities for changing individual-level or group-level research programmes. We contrast three innovations that were developed in universities and public research institutes in Germany and the Netherlands, which enables comparisons both between organisational settings and between properties of innovations. Comparing the development of three innovations in the two types of organisations enables the identification of links between patterns of authority sharing at these organisations and the opportunities to develop innovations. On this basis, the distribution of opportunities to change research practices among researchers in the two countries can be established.

The US Federal government is a potential source of support for advancing Library and Information Science (LIS) through funding experimentation, innovation, and demonstration. Most agencies are not as much interested in advancing the research front in LIS as they are in LIS contributions that advance other fields. The full potential of federal funding to impact LIS is far from realized. LIS researchers should be aware of each agency's mission as well as the types of research that each one supports. Many people contribute to research agendas but the most influential are researchers themselves. Becoming more successful in winning grants will require researchers to become better grant writers and to collaborate with people outside LIS.

Purpose – University–industry relationships raise concerns about the influence of commercial interests on academic science. In this paper, we investigate how academic scientists who collaborate with industry understand their professional identity in relation to their research money and the notion of scientific “independence.”

Design/Methodology/Approach – We conducted in-depth interviews with 84 scientists and 65 administrators from 9 U.S. universities. The scientists do research in the field of agricultural biotechnology and collaborate with industry. The administrators have oversight responsibility for academic research, university–industry collaborations, and technology transfer.

Findings – We find that our respondents are wary of industry funding but believe that it has an appropriate place in academic research. Typically, industry money is treated either as seed money for preliminary research or as flexible funding that supplements the core, essential competitive grants academic scientists obtain from public agencies. We find that academic scientists talk about the mix of public and private funds in their research funding portfolios in ways that aim to construct an “independent” investigator professional identity.

Originality/Value – Our study is a case of how money is inscribed with meanings in institutional settings. It contributes to scholarship in economic sociology of work by revealing how money is used by academic scientists to signal their alignment with institutionally sanctioned professional norms and by administrators to evaluate scientists' work.

We are in the midst of a broad societal change in which women’s sexual problems are becoming increasingly medicalized, characterized as treatable medical conditions and defined and understood as a largely physiologically based disease, called “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD). When a condition is medicalized, a medical framework is used to understand it, and medical interventions are used to treat it. As part of this process, then, over the last several years, researchers and pharmaceutical companies have turned attention to developing medical treatments for FSD. As this medicalization continues to unfold with potentially important impacts, it is crucial that we understand the forces working to shape it.

This paper analyses French and US universities’ organizational responses to the more or less explicit pressures they face to go interdisciplinary. Defining universities as pluralistic organizations, I show that the implementation of interdisciplinary research does not result in well-integrated institutional strategies, but rather combines initiatives from the scientific community and from university leaders. Based on case studies conducted on the development of interdisciplinary nanomedicine in five leading French and US research universities, I identify three settings where the implementation of interdisciplinarity involves shifts in organizational structure – in principal investigator-based research teams and scientific networks, in departmental boundaries, and in institutional structures, and question issues of governance, leadership and resource allocation arising from those shifts. We see similarities between the two countries in terms of how initiatives by “entrepreneurial academics” – searching for funds for interdisciplinary research – and by the university leadership – also searching for funds, and redefining institutional projects around interdisciplinarity – complement each other. We also identify one major difference – with French pro-interdisciplinary university policies being strongly influenced by a political impetus from the French ministry of higher education and research.