Abstract
This article draws on ethnographic data from a field leading university licensing office to document and explain a key step in the process of institutionalization, the abstraction of standardized rules and procedures from idiosyncratic efforts to collectively resolve pressing problems. I present and analyze cases where solutions to complicated quandaries become abstract bits of professional knowledge and demonstrate that in some circumstances institutionalized practices can contribute to the flexibility of expert reasoning and decision-making. In this setting, expertise is rationalized in response to institutional tensions between academic and business approaches to deal making and professional tensions between relational and legal approaches to negotiation. Abstraction and formalization contribute both to the convergence and stability of routines and to their improvisational use in professional work. Close attention to these processes in a strategic research setting sheds new light on an interesting tension in sociological theories of the professions while contributing to the development of a micro-level, social constructivist institutional theory.
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Notes
For the purposes of this discussion, I treat as professions any occupation in which experts draw on abstract bodies of knowledge to solve problems they might never have encountered before (Brint 1994; Van Maanen and Barley 1984). Focusing on expertise and the application of knowledge in practice rather than on credentials, formal training, and the normative work of professional societies (Wilensky 1964) broadens our view beyond doctors and lawyers (the traditional “professions”) to include other expert occupations such as professors (Lamont 2009), engineers (Kunda 1991), consultants (Mckenna 2006), teachers (Hallett 2010), meteorologists (Fine 2007), managers (Khurana 2007), cops (Bittner 1967), bureaucrats (Lipsky 1983) and technology licensing officers.
It is this sense of professionals as the rote appliers of rules that led Perrow (1986) to equate them with machines. That connection is reiterated, although with a different focus in Pinch’s (2008) more recent call for institutionalists to attend to materiality by treating technology as an embodiments of such institutional rules.
MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, a central location for the development of radar systems during World War II.
This solution to problems of differing languages and coordination challenges bears many resemblances to the interdisciplinary review panels observed by Lamont (2009).
In the interests of subject confidentiality, I refer to individuals by a title and differentiate among holders of the same title with numbers. I distinguish among three levels of office hierarchy, identifying the Director, Licensing Associates (the senior members of the office) and Licensing Assistants (entry level members of the staff). Within each title numbers are assigned in the order the individual appears in this article.
The Director of a high profile office at another university.
Patents are the most common form of IP sought by the office. Associates also handle copyrights, tangible materials such as cell lines, and, sometimes, trademarks.
For a more detailed discussion of the contradictions inherent in academic technology transfer and some suggested resolutions, see Nelson (2004).
The tension between more open and more proprietary approaches to technology development efforts is not unique to universities. Biotechnology firms, which often manage the tensions inherent in publication and patenting as a means to recruit top scientists (Stern 2004), face this very challenge. The tension between more publicly oriented and more managerial approaches to non-profit organizations is another manifestation of this common dynamic (Hwang and Powell 2009).
Large licensees with whom Associate 2 has maintained sometimes decade-long relationships centered on multiple, non-exclusive licenses.
Some problems were raised several times over the course of my field work. I coded each discussion as an individual instance for the purposes of determining its status.
These vocabularies bear some resemblance to the six “orders of worth” identified by Boltanski and Thevenot (2006). Like those terminologies, the components of licensing talk can be used to account for action, justify claims and beliefs, and to ascribe value to artifacts or positions.
I code the discussion of whether infringement can be detected as an instance of “technical” language because identifying another’s use of one’s proprietary technology is a separate matter from the strength or breadth of legal rights to an invention. In this case, the docket’s potential value is increased because Inventor K has devised a particular scientific assay that can determine when the patented process was used in the creation of a final product. Here the combination of legal rights and technical capacities together raise the value of a docket.
An MTA is a “Materials Transfer Agreement.” MTAs are common legal mechanisms to enable the transfer of proprietary research materials, in this case a particular chemical compound, between organizations.
While there is a huge technical literature on options and option pricing in this case it is sufficient to know that an option represents a guaranteed right of first refusal to a technology for some limited time period.
Even though Skin-Co will formally have an ownership stake in the patent, EPU could license rights to use the technology to a competitor. One way for Skin-Co to prevent that would be to take an exclusive license from EPU.
A provisional patent application is means to establish a priority date with the U.S. Patent Office without paying the cost of a full patent prosecution. Provisional applications must be converted to regular patent applications within 1 year.
Recall The Director’s invocation of another such rule in the discussion of Inventor K’s new invention.
In some instances multiple codes applied to the same discussions (as when an external regulatory change sparked local comparisons in an effort to determine an appropriate response). As a result the numbers I present in this section sum to more than 36.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the director and staff of the TLO for their time, patience, and willingness to educate a sociological observer. The Director was also kind enough to provide comments and corrections on a draft of this article. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant # 0097970, Grant # 0545634) the Merck Foundation (EPRIS Project), the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Working Group on Scientific Collaboration, and an Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellowship. My thinking has benefited from conversations with Renee Anspach, Bill Bridges, Michael Cohen, Jeannette Colyvas, Gary Fine, Tom Gieryn, Michael Kennedy, Howard Kimeldorf, Matt Kraatz, Mark Mizruchi, Cal Morrill, Pam Popielarz , Woody Powell, Susan Silbey, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Diane Vaughan, Marc Ventresca, John Walsh, and Mayer Zald (channeling Morris Janowitz), the Editors and reviewers at Theory & Society as well as from responses to presentations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the James Martin Institute at Oxford University, the University of California at Irvine, and the 2007 Institutional Entrepreneurship conference held at Cornell. Any remaining errors are wholly my own.
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Owen-Smith, J. The institutionalization of expertise in university licensing. Theor Soc 40, 63–94 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9136-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-010-9136-y