Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine
When science adopts the logic of the market

American universities today serve as economic engines, performing the scientific research that will create new industries, drive economic growth, and keep the United States globally competitive. But only a few decades ago, these same universities self-consciously held themselves apart from the world of commerce. Creating the Market University is the first book to systematically examine why academic science made such a dramatic move toward the market. Drawing on extensive historical research, Elizabeth Popp Berman shows how the government—influenced by the argument that innovation drives the economy—brought about this transformation.

Americans have a long tradition of making heroes out of their inventors. But before the 1960s and '70s neither policymakers nor economists paid much attention to the critical economic role played by innovation. However, during the late 1970s, a confluence of events—industry concern with the perceived deterioration of innovation in the United States, a growing body of economic research on innovation's importance, and the stagnation of the larger economy—led to a broad political interest in fostering invention. The policy decisions shaped by this change were diverse, influencing arenas from patents and taxes to pensions and science policy, and encouraged practices that would focus specifically on the economic value of academic science. By the early 1980s, universities were nurturing the rapid growth of areas such as biotech entrepreneurship, patenting, and university-industry research centers.

Contributing to debates about the relationship between universities, government, and industry, Creating the Market University sheds light on how knowledge and politics intersect to structure the economy.

1100870468
Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine
When science adopts the logic of the market

American universities today serve as economic engines, performing the scientific research that will create new industries, drive economic growth, and keep the United States globally competitive. But only a few decades ago, these same universities self-consciously held themselves apart from the world of commerce. Creating the Market University is the first book to systematically examine why academic science made such a dramatic move toward the market. Drawing on extensive historical research, Elizabeth Popp Berman shows how the government—influenced by the argument that innovation drives the economy—brought about this transformation.

Americans have a long tradition of making heroes out of their inventors. But before the 1960s and '70s neither policymakers nor economists paid much attention to the critical economic role played by innovation. However, during the late 1970s, a confluence of events—industry concern with the perceived deterioration of innovation in the United States, a growing body of economic research on innovation's importance, and the stagnation of the larger economy—led to a broad political interest in fostering invention. The policy decisions shaped by this change were diverse, influencing arenas from patents and taxes to pensions and science policy, and encouraged practices that would focus specifically on the economic value of academic science. By the early 1980s, universities were nurturing the rapid growth of areas such as biotech entrepreneurship, patenting, and university-industry research centers.

Contributing to debates about the relationship between universities, government, and industry, Creating the Market University sheds light on how knowledge and politics intersect to structure the economy.

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Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine

Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine

by Elizabeth Popp Berman
Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine

Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine

by Elizabeth Popp Berman

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Overview

When science adopts the logic of the market

American universities today serve as economic engines, performing the scientific research that will create new industries, drive economic growth, and keep the United States globally competitive. But only a few decades ago, these same universities self-consciously held themselves apart from the world of commerce. Creating the Market University is the first book to systematically examine why academic science made such a dramatic move toward the market. Drawing on extensive historical research, Elizabeth Popp Berman shows how the government—influenced by the argument that innovation drives the economy—brought about this transformation.

Americans have a long tradition of making heroes out of their inventors. But before the 1960s and '70s neither policymakers nor economists paid much attention to the critical economic role played by innovation. However, during the late 1970s, a confluence of events—industry concern with the perceived deterioration of innovation in the United States, a growing body of economic research on innovation's importance, and the stagnation of the larger economy—led to a broad political interest in fostering invention. The policy decisions shaped by this change were diverse, influencing arenas from patents and taxes to pensions and science policy, and encouraged practices that would focus specifically on the economic value of academic science. By the early 1980s, universities were nurturing the rapid growth of areas such as biotech entrepreneurship, patenting, and university-industry research centers.

Contributing to debates about the relationship between universities, government, and industry, Creating the Market University sheds light on how knowledge and politics intersect to structure the economy.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691166568
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 06/23/2015
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 280
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Popp Berman is assistant professor of sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix





Chapter 1: Academic Science as an Economic Engine 1

The Changing Nature of Academic Science 4

Studying the Changes in Academic Science 8

Explaining the Rise of Market Logic in Academic Science 12

Overview of the Book 17





Chapter 2: Market Logic in the Era of Pure Science 19

Federal Funding and the Support of Science Logic 21

Using Market Logic in the 1950s and 1960s 23

Limits to the Spread of Market Logic 29

The Pillars of the Postwar System Begin to Crumble 35

The Effects of the Dissolving Federal Consensus 37





Chapter 3: Innovation Drives the Economy-an Old Idea with New Implications 40

Market-Logic Practices of the 1970s and Their Limits 42

The Political Power of an Economic Idea 44

The Innovation Frame and the University 55





Chapter 4: Faculty Entrepreneurship in the Biosciences 58

Before Biotech 60

Early Entrepreneurship 63

1978: A Turning Point 69

Academic Entrepreneurship: Money Changes Everything 76

Why Did Bioscience Entrepreneurship Take Off? 87





Chapter 5: Patenting University Inventions 94

University Patenting during the Science-Logic Era 96

Barriers to the Expansion of University Patenting 104

Innovation, the Economy, and Government Patent Policy 106

University Patenting after 1980 111

Why Did University Patenting Take Off? 114





Chapter 6: Creating University-Industry Research Centers 119

UIRCs versus Biotech Entrepreneurship and University Patenting 119

The Trajectory of University-Industry Research Centers 122

The Emergence of Federal and State Support for UIRCs 131

The Expansion of State and Federal Support for UIRCs in the 1980s 139

Why Did University-Industry Research Centers Spread? 141





Chapter 7: The Spread of Market Logic 146

The Expansion of Biotech Entrepreneurship, Patenting, and UIRCs 147

Market Logic Elsewhere in Academic Science 149

University Administrators and the Rhetoric of Innovation 154

Science Logic and Market Logic: An Uneasy Coexistence 156





Chapter 8: Conclusion 158

How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine:Considering the Evidence 159

Reconsidering Alternative Arguments 162

Speaking to Larger Conversations 167





Notes 179

Bibliography 221

Index 261


What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Many scholars have opined about the new entrepreneurial university, but few have carefully and analytically explored its historical origins. Elizabeth Popp Berman masterfully charts the roads traveled from the ivory tower to the market, and brilliantly illuminates how political choices and financial forces shaped the process that now celebrates universities as engines of economic development."—Walter W. Powell, Stanford University

"Much of the scholarship on university-industry relations, or more broadly the commercialization of the university, is ahistorical. Creating the Market University not only shows variations across time in the array of university-industry relations experimented with, but it makes a nuanced historical argument to explain their success in the 1980s. Sound and exciting, this book is a pleasure to read."—Daniel Kleinman, University of Wisconsin—Madison

"Extending arguments and evidence in economics, sociology, education, management, and technology policy, Creating the Market University provides a sophisticated and compelling account of how academic scientists, and the universities within which they are embedded, increasingly embraced a market logic that valorizes patenting and technology commercialization. Elizabeth Popp Berman demonstrates the importance of understanding how scientific and technological innovation at universities serves as an engine of economic growth."—Michael Lounsbury, University of Alberta

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