At arm\u27s length?: Commercial research agendas, academic science, and the construction of organizational boundaries

Concepts of organizational boundary have played a long and integral role configuring the intellectual landscape of organizational theory. By and large, organizational-environmental frontiers are simply assumed to be there. The interpenetrated condition of contemporary organizations and environments, however, bids us to question theorizing which treats organizations and environments as ontologically distinct entities. In particular, a new generation of research alliances between a host of American research universities and multi-national corporations has provoked debate over the boundaries demarking university and industrial interests. Some (Traditionalists) fear that the separation between academic and commercial practices is breaking down, particularly as the commercial potential and shrinking developmental timeframes in some laboratory-driven fields place a premium on market-oriented research, entrepreneurship and exclusive claims to information ownership. Others (Instrumentalists) counter that the academy needs to update its internal system of values and priorities if universities are to effectively meet the needs of a contemporary knowledge-based society. Accordingly, this exploratory study attempts to address the substantivity of organizational boundary by examining how those who presumably construct frontiers--in this case select groups of university faculty--define the normative boundaries of their academic work. Using the oppositional modes characterizing the Traditionalist/Instrumentalist discourse as conceptual brick and mortar, faculty were invited to construct the social relationships of their professional work. Thirty-one (31) faculty members Q sorted 66 issue statements in a study designed to give numerical form to their normative boundaries, in order to test (1) the ontological status of organizational boundaries and (2) the claims of the Traditionalist-Instrumentalist antithesis. The indeterminacy of borders empirically elaborated in this study opens the literature\u27s core territorial assumptions to interpretation. If, in other words, the thingness (Weick, 1977) of borders can no longer be sustained unproblematically, how is the Archimedian point of the management science universe--the single-minded, factual organization --to be located? Without firm boundaries, insides and outsides are no longer knowable. The ambiguity surrounding the university\u27s location prompts a reconsideration of interpretive grammar that promotes organizations as sovereign and unified centre(s) of calculation and classification (Clegg, 1990)