2025/02/26 by Leland Glenna · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Asian Industrial and Economic Development
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf027
openalex publication_date 2025/02/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
United States (US) universities conducted publicly and privately funded research during the early decades of the twentieth century, but universities considered their primary mission at the time to be education. It was not until Vannevar Bush’s leadership during the war years and the establishment of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health after the war that US universities added research to their mission. Kameo argues that research universities were then assigned a third mission, commercialization, in 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act enabled universities to own the patents on their professors’ inventions. Combined with the rise of biotechnologies and a growing sense among political and economic leaders that scientific and technological innovation could stimulate the national economy, the Bayh-Dole Act “legitimized and institutionalized the commercialization of university research.” (p. 25). Other nations soon followed the US’s lead in seeking to commercialize the products of research universities. Kameo explains that, by 2020, at least 20 other nations had adopted a policy resembling the Bayh-Dole Act. One of those nations is Japan, and Kameo uses the case of Japan’s adoption and uneven implementation of its version of the Bayh-Dole Act to explore the utility and limitations of new institutionalism, a theory that sociologists developed to explain why many organizations often strive to adopt policies and practices of the innovative organizations that first developed and implemented those policies and practices. She highlights Meyer and Rowan’s foundational new institutionalism study, which argued that many organizations adopt new policies and practices more for the legitimacy that is attached to those new policies and practices than for their efficiencies. She acknowledges that new institutionalists recognize that there tends to be some element of modification of policies and practices to accommodate local variations, but she argues that new institutionalism tends to treat this process of accommodation as passive, as opposed to a process through which local actors actively resist, manage, and revise policies and practices.