Standard Research Grant: Trading Codes between Industry and Academia

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This project explores how university administrators have used commercial language and how industry managers have drawn upon academic codes in their efforts to describe, justify, and explain the activities in their respective domains, examining change over time in this trading of codes. Intellectual merit The premise of this research is that the nature of university-industry interaction is considerably more complicated than the debates about academic-business relations suggest. Through an analysis of periodicals read and written by academic administrators and science-based industry leaders, the PI intends to explore the subtle and varied changes that the cultures of US academia and science-based industry have experienced as a product of their interaction over the period between 1960 and 2000. Broader impact With the advent of the biotechnology revolution in the 1970s, concern grew that university research agendas would be increasingly be set by industry and that the free flow of information characteristic of academic science would be stifled. Indeed, since the 1970s calls for policies that protect the relative autonomy of university science have been repeatedly called for by academic scientists and administrators and state and federal policymakers. The PI will disseminate results to academic and non-academic audiences. Findings will inform debates about the virtues and the drawbacks for academia and industry of the blurring of university and commercial cultures.