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RESEARCH MANAGEMENT AND COMMERCIAL MARKETS: CULTURAL CHANGE IN AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS
Abstract
Research institutions and universities have undergone significant organisational change during the past decade. While these organisations have been pressed to attract an increasingly larger proportion of their research budget from industry, they have introduced business principles and practices in order to manage their scientific research and to focus it more on producing commercial outcomes. As individual scientists and institutions have responded to these changing research environments, the research cultures of these organisations have undergone a transformation. This paper seeks to unpack the notion and process of ‘cultural change’ and to emphasise the social dynamics that underpin such change.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES
An important review of the CSIRO in 1976 reported that the organisation was operating in a substantially changed environment, but Johnston and Buckley, writing in retrospect, have noted that the authors of the report may not have appreciated the full extent of the changes nor the growing public dissatisfaction with the organisation's view of the place of science. See R. Johnston and K. Buckley, ‘The shaping of contemporary scientific institutions’ in R.W. Home (ed.), Australian Science in the Making, Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1988.
Maassen and van Buchem make this same point in their discussion of the situation in the Netherlands. They point out that international trends have meant that higher education institutions in many countries have been pressured toward institutional autonomy but at the same time accept a greater degree of institutional vulnerability. P.A.M. Maassen and M.T.E. van Buchem, ‘Turning problems into opportunities: The University of Twente’ in F.A. Schmidtlein and T.H. Milton (eds), Adapting Strategic Planning to Campus Realities, Jossey-Bass Inc, San Francisco, 1990.
Sociologists such as Simmell and Homans have emphasised the cost/benefit relationship in human interaction, that is, that in human exchange, various choices are more or less rewarding or costly, between at least two persons. From this perspective, analyses focus on the boundaries of exchange, but tend to avoid the question of the extent to which there is a cultural bias to the selection of choices and the extent to which such bias has a root in social structure. However, decisions to choose from a range of alternative courses of action are made because some meaning or value is attributed by the chooser to potential outcomes and these meanings are a driving force in such choices. See M. Douglas, How Institutions Think, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987.
See, for example, E. J. Tuininga, ‘Research management in professional organisations: searching for new impulses’, R&D Management, 20, 2, 1990, pp. 139-153; A. Rip, T. Misa and J. Schot (eds), Managing Technology in Society: The Approach of Constructive Technology Assessment, Cambridge University Press, 1994 (forthcoming); and J. Ziman, ‘Academic science as a system of markets’, Higher Education Quarterly, 45, 1, 1991, pp. 41-61.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Research and Experimental Development, All-sector Summary, Australia, Catalogue 8112.0, Table 1, 1993.
The rationalisation of the Australian higher education system from 1987 has involved the amalgamation of 24 universities and 47 Colleges of Advanced Education and Institutes of Technology to form 38 universities in a Unified National System. This substantially increased the number of academic researchers and institutions eligible for Commonwealth government research funds.
Some of this growth in the business sector may be due to more accurate procedures of accounting for research expenditure introduced by businesses to gain maximum advantage from the government's 150 per cent tax concession scheme introduced in 1984.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, op. cit.; Department of Employment, Education and Training, Selected Higher Education Statistics 1991, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1991.
National Board of Employment, Education and Training, Crossing Innovation Boundaries: The formation and maintenance of research links between industry and universities in Australia, Commissioned Report No 26, A Report of the Board prepared by the Centre for Research Policy and Sultech, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1993.
ibid.
See Department of Defence, Corporate Plan, 1993/97, Department of Defence, Canberra, 1993.
D.T.G. Gillespie, ‘Research management in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia’, Public Administration, Spring, 1964, p. 23. (Most of the literature of this period refers to the researcher exclusively in the masculine form.)
ibid., p. 22.
ibid., p. 23.
CSIRO, Report of the Institute Model Study, Canberra, August, 1987, p. 3.
J. Stocker, ‘Australia's economy - A stool missing a leg?’, Speech to the National Press Club, Canberra, March 11, 1992.
See National Board of Employment, Education and Training, op. cit.
The earlier history of reviews of the organisation and structural changes from the late 1970s through the 1980s are described by J. Landsberg, ‘The management of scientific research’, Prometheus, 7, 1, June, 1989.
CSIRO, Report of the Institute Model Study, op. cit., p. 2.
CSIRO, Human Resources Plan, Canberra, 1991.
A. Blewitt, ‘Corporatisation and change - the reality of commercialisation for HR management in CSIRO’, Paper prepared for the IIR Conference, Human Resource Management, Reposition and Realign your HR function for Greater Organisational Effectiveness, April, 1992. p. 8.
ibid.
ibid., p. 7.
J. Flood, ‘The advent of strategic management in CSIRO: A history of change’, Prometheus, 2, 1, 1984.
Centre for Research Policy, Research Cultures and Organisational Change: Case Studies within the CSIRO, Draft Report, Centre for Research Policy, University of Wollongong, April, 1994.
S. Hill and T. Turpin, ‘The clashing of academic symbols’, Science As Culture, 20 (forthcoming); S. Hill and T. Turpin, ‘The formation of research centres in the Australian university system’, Science and Technology Policy, 6, 5, 1993, pp. 7-13.
In a recent survey of universities, the Centre for Research Policy found that most universities had recently established rules for establishing, managing, and, if necessary, disbanding research centres. One of the key features of the rules was the managing of multidisciplinary research and the relationship between centres and departmental structures.
S. Hill and T Turpin, Science and Technology Policy, op. cit.
See S. Aungles, Paper presented to the Fifth APROS Colloquium, East West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, December 12-15, 1993.
S. Liyanage and H. Mitchell, ‘Organizational management in Australian Cooperative Research Centres’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 5, 1, 1993, pp. 3-14.
For this perspective of the situation, see B. Neville, ‘The charm of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard, and the postmodern condition’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 37, 1992, pp. 337-353. These tensions also raise the question about the extent to which the marketed knowledge is also shaped by market demands.
See National Board of Employment, Education and Training, op cit.
See D.T.G. Gillespie, op. cit.; and J. Flood, op. cit.
Wasser, in an analysis of the European situation, has described this shift in activity as creating an identity crisis among universities throughout the world where ‘… the qualitative change is so radical that the very identity of the university and the justification for even using the term itself may be called into question’. See H. Wasser, ‘Changes in the European university: From traditional to entrepreneurial’, Higher Education Quarterly, 44, 1990, pp. 111-122. Keat, writing on the British academic reaction to the ‘enterprise culture’, has noted that academics now complain that their research ‘is now being judged by intellectually facile considerations of “marketability”’. See R. Keat, ‘Consumer sovereignty and the integrity of practices’, in R. Keat and N. Abercrombie (eds), Enterprise Culture, Routledge, London, 1991.
P. Wing, This Gown for Hire: A History of the Australian Tertiary Institutions Commercial Companies Association, Anutech, Canberra, 1993.
In an interesting way, Barley has studied the culture of the funeral industry and analysed different domains of action. The definition of domain is a symbolic category where members share at least one feature of meaning. His argument is that, in different domains, quite mundane and every day paraphernalia are open for interpretation as ‘lit candles hovering above both the icing and cake of culture’. Our point is that domains of action are as important as the cultures themselves, for it is within these domains that the meanings themselves are formed and communicated. See S. R. Barley, ‘Semiotics and the study of occupational and organisational culture’, in P.J. Frost, L.F. Moore, M. Reis Louis, C.C. Lundberg, and J. Martin (eds), Reframing Organizational Culture, Sage Publications, London, 1991.
This approach focuses analytical attention on the boundaries of cultural groups and investigates organisational culture, not so much as sub-cultures or monolithic cultures, but as layers of organisational culture that are formed by, and, in turn, inform actors as they variously engage in activities across the cultural layers. See S. Sackmann, Cultural Knowledge in Organisations, Sage, London, 1991, p. 165.
A. Rip, T Misa and J. Schot (eds.), op cit., p. 12.