Degrees of Compromise

Industrial Interests and Academic Values

Edited by Jennifer Croissant & Sal Restivo

Subjects: Science And Society
Series: SUNY series in Science, Technology, and Society
Paperback : 9780791449028, 308 pages, April 2001
Hardcover : 9780791449011, 308 pages, April 2001

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Table of contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Abbreviations

1. Organizational Perspectives on University-Industry Research Relations
Edward J. Hackett

2. New Arenas for University Competition: Accumulative Advantage in Academic Patenting
Jason Owen-Smith

3. Entrepreneurship in Technology Transfer Offices: Making Work Visible
W. Patrick McCray and Jennifer L. Croissant

4. Harnessing a Public Conglomerate: Professional Technology Transfer Managers and the Entrepreneurial University
William N. Kaghan

5. Science as a Vocation in the 1990s: The Changing Organizational Culture of Academic Science
Edward J. Hackett

6. Building Labs and Building Lives
Jennifer L. Croissant and Sal Restivo

7. Industry, Academe, and the Values of Undergraduate Engineers
Edward J. Hacket, Jennifer L. Croissant, and Blair Schneider

8. Conflicts of Interest and Industry-Funded Research: Chasing Norms for Professional Practice in the Academy
Deborah G. Johnson

9. Your Space or Mine? Organizational Interactions and the Development of a Two-Arm Robotic Testbed
Jeffrey L. Newcomer

10. Systemic Influences: Some Effects of the World of Commerce on University Science
Daniel Lee Kleinman

11. The Gloves Come Off: Shattered Alliances in Science and Technology Studies
Langdon Winner

Literature Cited

List of Contributors

Index

Analyzes value changes arising from new university-industry research relationships.

Description

Degrees of Compromise probes the convergence of for-profit business collaborations with higher education. Interdisciplinary in scope, the collection questions the effects of commercialization activities on undergraduate student values and graduate education practice and ethics, research autonomy, institutional prestige, and scientific imperatives such as objectivity.

Included are philosophical analyses of the professional status of faculty in higher education; ethnographic explorations of technology transfer, laboratory design, scientific assumptions, and graduate education; and a quantitative assessment of patenting and its relationship to institutional prestige and resources.

Jennifer Croissant is Assistant Professor in the Program on Culture, Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Arizona. Sal Restivo is Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is coeditor of Math Worlds: Philosophical and Social Studies of Mathematics and Mathematics Education, also published by SUNY Press, and author of Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity.

Reviews

"Addresses a crucial set of questions, and provides careful, convincing evidence that ties to industry affect the values that science students and faculty hold. This is an extraordinarily interesting and important question for scholars as well as an issue of national policy interest. If scientists and students are driven by values of the market, there are potentially damaging implications for the kinds of knowledge that are produced and the social relations between scientists, students, and their clients. " — Kelly Moore, Barnard College