Higher Education 46: 315–339, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Learning the ‘New, New Thing’: On the role of path dependency in university structures GEORG KRÜCKEN Department of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, P.O. Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany (E-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. In current debates over the future of core institutions in a ‘knowledge society’, universities figure most prominently. It seems clear that they are crucial nodes in the overall knowledge producing system, which, however, need to be repositioned and reformed. Therefore, the learning capacities of universities are of central relevance. But how do universities adapt to new challenges? The central claim of the paper is that the rapid change of pace at the level of higher education discourse is hardly met at the level of universities. Here, one has to take the path-dependent character of their structures, practices and identity concepts into account. Therefore, learning the ‘new, new thing’ is a more cumbersome process than might be expected at first sight. Empirical evidence for this claim is drawn from the institutionalization of technology transfer offices at German universities. Based on these findings, further general policy and research perspectives on the role of path dependency in university structures are discussed at the end of this paper. Keywords: commodification of knowledge, German university system, industry and higher education, institutional change of universities, knowledge society, organizational learning, organizational path dependency, technology transfer, university reform

Introduction The ‘knowledge society’ is back. In contrast to Bell’s seminal book from 1973, more recent discussions have focused on the heterogeneity and plurality of societal expectations that shape the production of knowledge (Bell 1973; Stehr 1994; Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny et al. 2001). Where Bell depicted a linear increase in societal demand for trained technical and scientific personnel, current debates stress the necessity of opening sites of knowledge production to the public and to broader social values – which in turn leads to more complex relationships between science and the larger society. Correspondingly, the sites of knowledge production multiply and become more fuzzy than in Bell’s analysis, which focused exclusively on clear-cut organizational forms like universities, research laboratories in industrial firms, and public research centers. In particular, Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny et al. (2001) broaden this purview and highlight the importance of hybrid forms between academia, industry, and the state, which transcend organiza-

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tional boundaries; as well as the emergence of new actors like think-tanks, non-governmental organizations, and consulting firms, which all are seen as central elements of knowledge producing systems. Both long-term trends – the pluralization of societal demands and the multiplication of organizational forms – have left their marks on the epistemological status of knowledge itself. Knowledge, so it seems, has become more deeply embedded in society, and the institutional division of knowledge producing sites from their societal environments has become obsolete. The current debate on the learning capacities of universities needs to be seen within this context. The repositioning of universities figures prominently in all current debates on the future of knowledge producing systems. As central parts of these systems, universities are a main strategic site for the adaptation to new challenges – i.e., institutional learning. Both researchers and policy makers try to explore and enhance universities’ learning capacities as part of society’s broadened technoscientific agenda and infrastructure. In particular, traditional boundaries – between basic research and applied research, between universities and their socioeconomic environments, and between academic disciplines – of all kinds have become prime targets for reform. This has already led to remarkable developments at the level of science policy and higher education policy discourse. The United States experienced a remarkable discursive shift in the 1980s. The traditional legitimacy of science and higher education has been based on a linear innovation model, in which science and education naturally led to overall societal benefits. This model, which had been the rationale for US science policy after World War II, came to an end, and the social contract of science was rewritten (Guston/Keniston 1994). With the end of the Cold War, the role of military R&D was questioned, and economic competitiveness became the prime goal of many governmental policies. In addition, the underlying model of innovation changed significantly. Instead of assuming that knowledge flows, unidirectionally, from basic research through applied research and technological development to commercial applications, knowledge generation and the active search for economic applicability are now seen as parallel and substantially overlapping processes.1 The way universities present the value of research changed accordingly. Where until the late 1970s the inherent value of basic research and the autonomy of science were celebrated, a new rhetoric emerged in the 1980s, in which ‘entrepreneurial science’ and direct linkages to socioeconomic environments were increasingly seen as desirable (Slaughter 1993). The German higher education system is usually regarded as more traditional and conservative than the US system. Nonetheless, even in the German

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system one can witness quite dramatic changes in the overall tone of science and higher education discourse: stronger links between science and society through open exchange are advocated; participation and hybrid organizational forms are recommended; and evaluation and interdisciplinary research are fostered.2 This discursive shift also reached the two strongholds of pure, disinterested and curiosity-driven research in Germany, the Max-Planck Society (MPS) and the Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft (DFG). The director of the MPS, Hubert Markl, recently took a critical stance on former positions when he argued “Drawing a line between basic research and applied research is a fiction, with which we lived for too long a time.” The DFG, the main and most prestigious funding agency for academic research in Germany, which relies basically on academic disciplines and a rigorous peer-review system, changed in a similar way. According to its director, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, interdisciplinary research is a “top priority”, and cooperation between academic researchers and industry nowadays gets strong ideological and also some financial support from the DFG. The pace of change is remarkable. However – and this is the claim of this paper – the shift at the discursive and policy level is hardly accompanied by an equally dramatic change at the level of the practice of central knowledge producing organizations like universities. In universities, new ideas only slowly diffuse into practice, and the orientation toward historically entrenched concepts plays a much stronger role. As a result, one has to take ‘two speeds’ of change into account. The rather sobering point regarding universities’ adaptations to new challenges will be demonstrated by focusing on the institutionalization of technology transfer offices at German universities. The institutionalization of transfer offices seems to be a rather strong case for making the ‘two speeds’ claim in higher education. Technology transfer is one of the key issues in current higher education discourse. Both policymakers and researchers argue that the continuous flow of knowledge and technology between universities and industry is the key to the 21st century which deserves wide institutional support. On the one hand, this is reflected in a multitude of organizational linkages between industry and academia, as well as in political programs aiming at facilitating technology transfer. On the other hand, social scientists agree on the importance of technology transfer as an organized activity which involves the university as a whole. Henry Etzkowitz, Andrew Webster, and Peter Healey, for example, argue that direct contributions to economic development are no longer limited to the collaborative efforts of individual researchers, but have become an institutional mission of the university (Etzkowitz et al. 1998). Likewise, the authors of ‘The New

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Production of Knowledge’ see in the transformation of technology transfer toward an organized practice a central indicator for far-reaching institutional change: “There was at the turn of the 1980s a watershed in the history of technology transfer in the universities in the United States and Europe” (Gibbons et al. 1994, p. 87). The question, however, is what does an unquestionable phenomenon like the quantitative growth of transfer offices indicate? Is it really an indicator for institutional change as the above mentioned authors would suggest? In order to answer this question we will use qualitative empirical material on the institutionalization process at German universities. Though the empirical focus is on Germany, the general perspective of this paper allows for a more nuanced view of how relevant sites of knowledge production actually adapt to new challenges. By highlighting the role of historical legacies in current reform processes one might get a less optimistic, but perhaps more realistic picture of learning the ‘new, new thing’ in an university setting. In this paper we will first describe the research methodology and data sample of our study. Having done that, the three main empirical findings will be presented and analyzed. The empirical parts contain direct quotes from our interview partners. These voices from the field are put in quotation marks. The paper concludes with a summary and an outline of some policy and research perspectives on the role of path dependency in university structures.

Research methodology and data sample3 Our research methodology consisted of interviews based on guidelines. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Later, we created analytical categories according to our guidelines and research hypotheses. Through this we were able to decompose, analyze, and interpret our interview material in a systematic and non-random way. In addition, we tried to validate our interview findings through written documents (statistical yearbooks, reports, related studies and the like). The data sample included all universities (with the exception of the public German Sport University in Cologne which due to its very specific profile was left out of the sample), their transfer offices and the related local Chambers of Industry and Commerce in North Rhine-Westphalia. Fifteen of North Rhine-Westphalia’s 16 universities are public, as are the overwhelming majority of German universities. The group of public universities consists of eight traditional and well-established universities, five ex-polytechnics that had achieved full university status in the 1970s, and one open (offcampus) university. Also North Rhine-Westphalia’s single private university

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was included in the data sample. Note that we did not include polytechnics (‘Fachhochschulen’) in our sample. The pursuit of transfer activities has been an integral part of these tertiary educational institutions ever since. German universities, in spite of their heterogeneity, share an institutional identity that has traditionally been very different from polytechnics. North Rhine-Westphalia hosts Germany’s largest and most diversified university infrastructure. North Rhine-Westphalia is Germany’s most populous state (2000: 18.0 million), and it includes the industrial Ruhr as well as the Rhine area (with the state’s capital Düsseldorf, and the former German capital Bonn). The variety of universities ranges from those created around engineering disciplines to those which exhibit a particular strength in the humanities. Several universities founded in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the ‘massification’ of higher education in Germany complement the rather heterogeneous picture. Between November 1998 and April 1999 we interviewed representatives from the universities, the universities’ transfer offices, and the local economy. The first category of interviewees consisted of the heads of the university administration or their deputies. In contrast to universities’ presidents, which are professors elected for a limited period of time, the administrative heads are professionals. As such, they represent the organizational memory of the universities, and are singularly knowledgeable about long-term strategic considerations. With regard to transfer offices the focus was on those in charge of the organized transfer at universities, typically the directors of transfer offices. In addition to this group, we occasionally interviewed staff members in order to get further information. The local economy was represented by the local Chambers of Industry and Commerce in cities which had an university. In most cases, the representatives we interviewed dealt directly with transfer issues, drawing on the experiences and expectations of the industrial firms they represented. The responses to our inquiry were very positive. Representatives from all transfer offices and all Chambers of Industry and Commerce agreed to give us interviews, and also 10 out of 15 representatives from the universities were willing to respond (see appendix, figure 1). Besides these main constituencies, we also conducted interviews within North Rhine-Westphalia’s ministry for science and education, and with two independent transfer-related organizations. Thus our data sample makes possible some interesting insights into actual adaptation processes as regards the institutionalization of technology transfer offices at German universities.

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Technology transfer: From informal linkages to an organized activity German universities have actively taken part in technology transfer since at least the late 19th century (König 1990). Strong ties between academia and industry were especially fruitful in chemistry. Medicine, physics, and engineering also had exposed strong ties between different constituencies, which facilitated a series of remarkable scientific and technological innovations and, ultimately, economic competitiveness. German universities were internationally renowned at that time, also for the results of the strong university-industry linkages. The ascent of the American research university at the turn of the 20th century was in large part an attempt to copy the German model (Geiger 1986). Two major specifications need to be made, however. The Berlin University, founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1809/1810, was the role model for the German university system as such. It was highly influenced by German idealist philosophy of that time (e.g., Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher). The ideal was one of a remote, socially disembedded community of students and professors, happily bound together in a unity of teaching and research. The status of the natural sciences within that institutional setting had been ambiguous: Theoretical advancements had been widely recognized, while empirical research and industrial applications were considerably lower in status. The study of engineering received much less recognition. Engineering had been taught at polytechnics, which had, despite their increase in status in the 1870s, a far lower status than did universities. A second specification has to be made with regard to the character of the ties between academia and industry. They were not institutionalized whatsoever. The transfer process had been limited to the directly involved partners in academia and industry. The very ingredients of technology transfer as an ‘academic mission’ – organizational infrastructure, university’s active involvement, political programs – were absent during this early stage of academic transfer activities in Germany. The situation changed dramatically during the 1970s. Triggered by the widespread perception that German technology lagged behind that of the United States, efforts were made to facilitate cooperation between different partners in technological innovation in order to spur the flow from basic research to industrial applications.4 As a result, technology transfer from universities was no longer seen merely as an informal process between individual researchers and industrialists, but rather as an organized activity needing institutional support. Technology transfer increasingly involved the university as a whole, rather than solely transfer-oriented individuals. This shift manifested itself in a variety of newly created political programs and organizations. One major outcome of these efforts was the creation of technology transfer offices at German universities. We will discuss the origins and

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consequences of this institutionalization process more thoroughly by focusing on the situation in the state North Rhine-Westphalia. Having studied official documents from North Rhine-Westphalia’s government and its ministry for science and research, we identified a strong political commitment to what Elle et al. (1998: 95) later called “institutionalized transfer”, i.e., technology transfer as an organized and mediated activity. The ministry saw a “transfer gap” (MWF 1984: 25) between the potential supply from universities and the potential demand from industry as the main obstacle to effectively pursue technology transfer. The ‘missing link’ was identified in transfer offices, bridging the transfer gap by “creating personal contacts between entrepreneurs and scientists” (MWF 1984: 53). As a result, political programs and initiatives were set up and universities were given budgetary incentives in order to actively stimulate the creation of technology transfer offices. Beginning with a pilot project in 1976 at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, other universities followed, eventually leading to the institutionalization of transfer offices at all public universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. After a little more than a decade, in 1988, what had begun with an innovative pilot project, had become completely institutionalized (see appendix, figure 2). This rapid institutionalization was seen as a major political success and might be considered as a prime example of how different sites of a knowledge producing system learn to adapt to new challenges. With the help of our interviews we can give a more fine-grained account of that process. Since the political initiatives helping to create transfer offices were not always met with an equally strong commitment from the universities and industry, what at first sight seemed to be as an unequivocal success story needs to be seen in a different light. When asked about the process of institutionalization, interviewees at ten of the fourteen public universities claimed that either the state’s government or its ministry for science and research was the driving-force. By creating transfer offices “the general political will” was implemented as one interviewee put it. As one provost added, “politicians began to regard our university as well as others as ‘engines of socioeconomic change’ (. . .) while industry was more cautious on this.” In only three instances was the motivation located within the universities: twice from the administration and once from transfer-oriented professors. Local and regional industry played hardly any role at all. In only one case was industry’s demand visible, but that demand was not considered to be a primary source of motivation. Though the state’s government and its ministry for science and research did not directly impose the creation of transfer offices on the universities, strong political pressures to comply were perceived by many interviewees. This

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is summarized in statements like “All transfer offices were created because of political pressures.” and “Undoubtedly, technology transfer is becoming more important. (. . .) But political actors do not give the universities the time it takes. Of course, we will adapt to the short-term oriented wishes from politicians and industrialists, though I don’t fully agree with them.” The perceived pressure on the side of the universities was met with a widespread lack of interest on the part of the possible transfer partners. While many universities in the 1970s and 1980s met the external governmental expectation with the creation of transfer offices, transfer-oriented professors and industry mostly did not perceive the necessity for a new organizational unit. Their impact during the institutionalization process was regarded as “doubtful”. Some even feared that “transfer offices might work as an intermediary bureaucratic layer establishing new rules to follow”, hence stifling well-established informal transfer activities. Because transfer offices are administrative units, this fear was particularly strong among transferoriented professors, i.e. those who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries in academia. In the beginning some of them saw transfer offices as “administrative control units” or as “part of this very administration with its rules and procedures”. Those who work in transfer offices are well aware of this structural problem: “The acceptance among scientists is low, because administrations are a kind of natural enemy of scientists who are just ‘chaotic’ to them.” And one representative from industry saw in an administrative unit for technology transfer just “the extended arm of the provost”. In this view, technology transfer offices are an expression of bureaucratic power rather than functional units for fostering university-industry ties. The institutionalization of transfer offices, to put it differently, in large part neither emerged from within the universities, nor was it a response to industry’s demand. Transfer offices were mainly a political role model. As a result, the rapid institutionalization process was much more problematic than at first sight. Though the process hardly met open resistance, it lacked the required support from all relevant actors outside the political realm. From the point of view of neo-institutional organizational analysis the problematic aspects of the process of rapid institutionalization are not at all surprising. They may be thought of as a typical example of what John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977) call the loose coupling between the formal structure and the activity structure of an organization. According to Meyer/Rowan (1977), organizations need to be understood as embedded within broader social contexts. They are bound to these contexts through material resources and legitimacy. Both are granted by conforming to the expectations of the organizational contexts. The conformity is reflected in the formal structure of an organization, which serves as a kind

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of display window for external parties. The formal structure is only loosely coupled to the activity structure of an organization. This serves to buffer the organization from external pressures. Applied to our case it is obvious that universities’ behavior could only be understood by their dependency on the state’s government, which actively promoted technology transfer and the institutionalization of intermediary organizations. Universities learned to conform to these expectations by creating a new and externally visible subunit, the transfer office, which is part of the formal structure. In this, one can see a process of organizational adaptation, which, however, took a very different path from what policy-makers expected. Transfer offices mainly served as a display window toward the universities’ political environment. They effectively guaranteed external legitimacy and resources without heavily altering the organizations’ activity structure. With formal structures established, ‘business as usual’ can proceed. ‘Business as usual’ implies two things in this instance: The preservation of an institutional identity which cannot fully incorporate technology transfer as an academic mission on the part of the university as an organization; and the reliance on informal, noninstitutionalized transfer mechanisms by those who are actively involved in technology transfer. In the following two sections we will elaborate on both aspects.

Institutional identity As we have tried to work out in the previous section, the role of universities in the process of institutionalizing transfer offices was mostly ambiguous. Though they all complied with the underlying political will, this process was not always accompanied by a strong commitment or even enthusiasm. As a result, many transfer offices experienced a lack of institutional support. During the time we conducted our interviews one was even at the verge of being shut down because “it is ultimately a ‘one man show’, and the critical mass has not been reached”. Though others perceived an increasing interest from other parts of their universities over time, the request for more personnel was a common complaint in nearly all interviews conducted at transfer offices. However, requests for more resources are typical in organizational settings and therefore only a weak indicator for the status of an organizational subdivision. The task structure of a transfer office seems to be a stronger indicator. Here, our analysis shows rather diverse results. The activities of transfer offices range from assisting start-up companies to university’s public relations, and from advice on public funding to extended vocational training. Advice on patenting and licensing plays a role, too. Due to the legal obstacles in Germany, however, this last aspect is not as central as in

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other university systems.5 The concrete task structure depends heavily on local circumstances, and does not follow textbook recipes on what transfer offices should be all about. Some of them, for example, take part in activities which, like university’s public relations, only remotely resemble tasks of an organizational subunit specializing in technology transfer. An optimistic reading could interpret the heterogeneous task structure as an indicator for a context-sensitive approach, which is generally seen as superior because of its flexibility and adaptability. Following our analysis, however, this structure rather indicates that transfer offices are hardly more than a residual unit. With ill-defined core functions, all kinds of activities, especially those which are peripheral to the organization, can be labeled ‘technology transfer’ and assigned to transfer offices. Because of this precarious status, transfer offices experience a relatively low status within universities, and they are far from being central players within a university setting. The lack of institutional support for transfer offices is somewhat surprising, given the fact that all our interviewees representing the universities stressed the growing importance of technology transfer. Why is it that this perceived importance was infrequently transformed into policies supportive of transfer offices? Part of the answer lies in personal animosities between the provost and the head of the transfer office (one case), and in the early fear on the part of the administration of losing centralized control to a new organizational subunit (two cases). However, these cases are far from representative. They cannot account for the more widespread experience of ambivalence. When studying the transcripts of the interviews with the heads of the university administration we became aware of a factor which was also relevant to universities’ level of support for their transfer offices. Among them, we detected a strong and commonly shared institutional identity. That identity is not easily compatible with the idea that economic development through technology transfer should be at the very core of what a university is about. It is difficult to give a quantitative assessment of the identity concept shared by our interviewees at the top levels of the administration. Remarks concerning the institutional identity were made at various points during the interviews. However, these responses make up a clear and consistent picture, one which may help to explain the puzzle of why universities seem to take technology transfer seriously, yet do not assign centrality to it. Over the course of our interviews it became apparent to us that the ideals of Wilhelm von Humboldt remain deeply entrenched in contemporary German universities.6 The very essence of von Humboldt’s university concept – the unity of teaching and research; social disembeddedness and autonomy; a non-utilitarian approach to higher education as opposed to purely vocational training – are still part of the commonly shared understanding of what it

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means to be a university. It should be emphasized that this does not imply that an unrealistic and romanticized image is held by our interview partners: the von Humboldt conception is not untouched. Rather, there is an active adaptation of von Humboldt’s ideals to the new challenges of present-day universities. This ongoing political construction process becomes apparent in the following characteristics. First, von Humboldt’s concept is by no means to be taken as an accurate description of what universities actually are in an era of mass education. Our interviewees were extremely clear and forthright on this point: “The social disembeddedness of the university and the professor is, obviously, no more given in times of mass education.” But referring to von Humboldt’s ideals serves as a strong benchmark that helps to evaluate both the current state of the art and future trends in German academia. In most cases, our interview partners affirmed the ongoing relevance of von Humboldt’s ideals. One provost suggested that “in the best of European traditions, all university reforms of the last two-hundred years are inspired by von Humboldt”. The provost of the youngest and only private university in our sample even claimed that his university “has, from its very beginning, felt a particular strong bond to von Humboldt’s ideals”. The ongoing relevance of these ideals for the heads of the university administration, however, became most visible when the interviewees were confronted with the “Humboldt is dead” statement made by Germany’s former minister for education, science, research and technology. In virtually all cases, the minister’s “provocation” was vigorously rejected. One provost called it “utter nonsense”. Another argued: “The ideas of von Humboldt are not dead. There are obviously some, who would like to kill them, because they do not understand them. These people cannot handle universities”. Interestingly, nowadays not only politicians refer to the United States when talking about the future of the German university system. US universities seem to be the standard for many university administrators as well. In particular, Stanford University serves as a mythical role model – for very different parties.7 While German politicians seek to legitimize reforms in order to overcome historical legacies by invoking the Stanford myth, several of our interviewees in the university administration referred to US ‘ivy league’ universities in general (“those particularly remarkable universities”) and to Stanford University in particular as being more effective in implementing von Humboldt’s university concept. One provost even quoted the well-known statement by Stanford’s then university president Gerhard Casper, who was born and educated in Germany: “Stanford’s reputation is based on the fact that von Humboldt has not been forgotten here”. As this example shows, reaffirming traditional ideals of German universities is nowadays less a matter of referring to a national era gone by. It is, rather, an

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active construction process, in which those defending von Humboldt’s ideals seek legitimacy by referring to contemporary foreign universities, which are highly regarded in the German university discourse. Second, invoking von Humboldt’s ideals also serves as a strong demarcation line, separating universities from the more practice-oriented polytechnics in an unambiguous fashion. Current political initiatives aimed at reducing the time it takes to get a university degree, hence making them more closely resemble polytechnics, were criticized because “one cannot realize a broad and well-founded university training within a short time span”. In addition, one interview partner explicitly reaffirmed the more general demarcation line: “It would be nonsense to expect a university professor to teach practical knowledge. Where should this knowledge come from? It would be even more nonsensical to turn polytechnics into universities. This would imply that polytechnics should give up their practical grounds.” We suppose that attempts at redirecting universities toward a stronger emphasis on vocational training and practical knowledge would alter their traditionally superior status in higher education. This underlying fear of degradation is not only a matter of the content, i.e., what universities are actually doing, but also a matter of who defines their task structure. After having stated that technology transfer is not contrary to a modern von Humboldt type of university, one interviewee got to the point by adding that: “One thing is incompatible with von Humboldt: telling universities what they have to do.” This argument for university autonomy goes both against the current political will to redirect universities and industrial partners’ attempts to influence academic research agendas. Not surprisingly, debates in higher education policy focusing on the expansion of universities’ missions are seen as exogenous and are therefore ignored among many decision-makers within universities. We did not get answers which implied the necessity to expand these missions – toward economic development through technology transfer for example. Instead, when expounding the problems of the current limitations of German universities our interviewees mostly mentioned the disjunction of von Humboldt’s ideal of the unity of teaching and research in an era of mass education, and we found numerous remarks on the centrality of research and teaching as the core missions of universities. The inseparability of these missions is confirmed by one administrator’s assertion that “it would be wrong from the very beginning to give up the unity of teaching and research”. Another argues that “the unity of teaching and research, or, to put it differently, the community of researchers, teachers and students has to be strongly maintained for the students’ sake”. Interview partners often invoked von Humboldt’s ideals as guidelines for appropriate behavior. One provost affirmed that “we still live the unity of teaching and research, or least we try not to separate them”.

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Similarly, another provost argued that living according to von Humboldt’s ideals was the essence of what a university should be: “My picture of a university: A university with the research-doing academic teacher”. These findings parallel those of Schimank/Winnes (2000) on the two missions of research and teaching in European university systems, ideally embodied in one person as the last quote shows. According to the authors, in Germany, in particular, there is strong resistance among the professoriate to altering this scheme because any multiplication or differentiation of academic tasks could make universities more closely resemble polytechnics, so affecting the hitherto distinct status of universities in the German higher education system. To sum up, it was surprising for us to see how strongly ‘von Humboldt’ is still invoked in order to define the institutional identity of German universities. We neither noticed the emergence of a fragmented and patchwork-like ‘postmodern’ identity, nor could we detect a far developed ‘entrepreneurial’ definition of what it means to be a university. We interpret the identity concept associated with von Humboldt as an organizational myth.8 A myth, on the one hand, implies that the organizational reality is far away from being the embodiment of the underlying ideals. On the other hand, a myth lies at the very heart of the social fabric of an organization. It provides its members with meaning through reference to a commonly shared identity and helps to create boundaries against external influences. The ‘von Humboldt’ myth, in the case of German universities, is obviously both: far away from their organizational realities while at the same time constituting their chosen frame of reference. Organizational psychologists would call this a ‘cognitive scheme’ (Sims/Gioia 1986). Cognitive schemes do not reflect organizational activities, but they serve as a selective filter of expectations in the organization’s environment. In this, ‘von Humboldt’ can be seen as a major institutional device to buffer external, mainly political pressures to reposition German universities. The ‘third academic mission’ (Etzkowitz et al. 1998), ‘the entrepreneurial university’ (Clark 1998), ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter/Leslie 1997) and other buzzwords of current higher education and science policy discourse are myths or cognitive schemes as well. But at least until now they have been less influential than the ‘von Humboldt’ myth in defining the institutional identity of German universities. And as long as the ‘von Humboldt’ myth is at the center of universities’ very identity, learning the ‘new, new thing’, i.e., technology transfer as an institutional mission, on a par with the traditional missions of research and teaching, will have to pass through this institutional bottleneck.

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Personalized transfer Complementary to universities’ reluctance to fully incorporate technology transfer in their organizational structures, individuals actively pursuing technology transfer continue to rely heavily on a personalized, informal pattern of transfer. This holds true for both industry and for academic researchers. The creation of transfer offices has hardly altered this robust pattern. By far the biggest share of the total sum of transfer projects is achieved through informal links. Compared to this, the share of those being mediated through transfer offices is much smaller. Due to the very characteristics of technology transfer at German universities outlined above, precise data on the relation between direct, informally achieved transfer projects and mediated, institutionalized transfer projects are not available. But representatives from transfer offices were very open on the limited role they play: “Transfer most often is not mediated through us.”, “Most transfer projects are achieved through direct channels. This is the situation at all universities”, and, even more modestly: “No one is really dependent on a transfer office. We don’t have a bottleneck situation in Germany, where the broad stream of technology transfer at universities has to be channeled through the tiny neck of a transfer office.” Our interviewees were not even critical of their rather marginal status. They stressed that they see their work as complementary, and not in competition with more informal structures. Given the well-known dynamics of organizations, this deliberate ‘hands off’ approach might be seen as surprising. But by displaying a low and modest profile transfer offices have sought to decrease the skepticism among transfer-oriented scientists who feared that by creating an office a new bureaucratic layer would emerge and stifle existing transfer patterns. Though far from being validated, our interviewees roughly estimated a ratio of nine informal projects to every formal one. This general finding parallels previous research on the structure of academic technology transfer in Germany (Reinhard/Schmalholz 1996; Elle et al. 1998). In addition to this research, which is based on standardized questionnaires, our interviews with representatives from universities, transfer offices, and industry are revealing with regard to the underlying reasons of the heavy reliance on personalized transfer patterns. According to our analysis, technology transfer first and foremost requires a high degree of trust between those involved. Trust can only evolve over time, and trust-building involves iterative interactions between concrete partners. This is particularly clear in the case of the industry side of transfer partnerships. Industry grants trust to individuals or to research units, sometimes even to organizational departments, but not to an intermediary organization: “Firms want to know with who they are dealing. They don’t want to deal with mediators”, and “Industry wants to deal with transfer-oriented

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professors. Alas, you won’t find them in a transfer office.” Not even science or universities as institutions seem to be trustworthy per se. On the contrary, science and universities are widely perceived as “too aloof”, “too far away from real life”, and “too little economic” to deal with bottom-line economic issues. Also academic researchers typically trust their concrete industrial partners without stretching that trust too far. Instead of a mere ‘information gap’, most of our interviewees perceived an underlying ‘cultural gap’ between universities and industry. This led to a high degree of uncertainty and even distrust which was only ever overcome by trust in individual persons. The cultural gap was widely expressed in terms of institutional differences. Stereotypes between “those in the ivory tower” (on the one hand) and “those only interested in short-term results” (on the other hand) were frequently expressed. Language barriers were mentioned as well. Both in terms of spoken language (“Entrepreneurs often expressed themselves too directly and down to earth”, “University professors are often too abstract in the way they talk. In particular, when talking to the boss of a small firm who doesn’t have a university degree.”) as well as metaphorically (“Professors often don’t speak the economic language, they don’t know how to set up a financial plan”, “Academics and representatives from industry often speak in different languages. They can agree on defining the problem. But the problem-solving strategies are often incompatible.”). These differences and barriers seem to undermine the credibility of those concepts in higher education and science policy that neglect the reality of institutional boundaries. Though this might be true in some cases, one should not over-generalize these concepts. For the case we analyzed, institutional boundaries between universities and industry, as well as their related cultural properties, were still heavily entrenched in the perceptions of all relevant actors. Thus those who nevertheless engage in technology transfer cannot do so on the basis of institutional trust. In such a situation of generalized uncertainty and even distrust trust in individual persons reduces the underlying uncertainties when dealing with a different institutional context. Our transcripts were full of quasi-psychological statements and metaphors. The “chemistry between two persons”, “the personal sympathy”, “good feelings”, “similar wave-lengths”, and “understanding each other as human beings” were seen as essential. As one of our interviewees summed up: “Ultimately, here is the least common denominator: individual persons who either get along or not.” This strong role for the ‘human touch’ as expressed by interviewees from all sides is remarkable because of the issue involved: Our (mostly male) interviewees were after all talking about the transfer of technology, not child adoption or marriage.

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As was noted in the beginning of the section, informal transfer patterns are not replaced by transfer offices. How, then, did informal patterns evolve and what are their characteristics? The answers are surprisingly simple – and neither very innovative nor driven by recent policy initiatives. By fulfilling one of the uncontested core missions of a university, i.e. teaching, a lot of relevant contacts between universities and industry are established. Recent university graduates who end up as researchers or engineers in the private sector often keep their ties to their former university. In this way, they act as crucial nodes in linking two institutional sectors. However, transfer through persons is not a one-way process. The typical career of a professor in engineering is described by one of our interviewees as follows: “After having got a Ph.D. the person begins working for a large company. Though he ‘switched sides’, he is still doing research and publishes his results from time to time. Through his research he is still in touch with his former university. Eventually he might get the offer to come back as a professor. If he accepts, he obviously still keeps the contacts to the firm he worked for.” Organizationally, then, the implication is that neither universities as a whole nor transfer offices are involved. It is rather through academic research institutes and university laboratories that professors find the opportunities to “act entrepreneurial”. Here, also ‘bottom up’ organizational innovations can be observed, which do not follow the ‘top down’ pattern implied by the creation of transfer offices. By creating institutes at the university, which nevertheless are legally independent entities (‘An-Institute’), the rather restrictive regulatory framework at German universities which by many of our interviewees was seen as a “corset” to rigid to foster technology transfer, is circumvented. On the industry side, in particular large firms are involved in long-standing relations with universities. Small and medium-sized enterprises only play a minor role. Interestingly, the fields, which according to our interviewees are currently most central for effectively exploiting university-industry relations, are those which have been at the forefront of university-industry relations in the late 19th century: engineering and chemistry. Broad historical transformations and university reforms could hardly alter this persistent pattern. To sum up, since interactions between academic researchers and industrialists are fraught with uncertainty on both sides, personalized modes of interaction, typically embedded in long-standing transfer relations between a university institute and an industrial firm, are a prerequisite for effective transfer. It is quite clear that organizational units like transfer offices can only play a very limited role in reducing these uncertainties. Transfer offices were designed under the assumption that information is the key problem in technology transfer, and they do a great deal in reducing the ‘information gap’ by actively giving advice to those from universities and industry, who turn to

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them in the hopes of finding a transfer partner, by organizing conferences and meetings, and by means of technical communication. But they apparently fail to compensate for the lack of trust and the perceived ‘cultural gap’ between different institutional contexts. Our findings with regard to the necessity of personalized relations of trust are corroborated by organizational network analysis. Mark Granovetter (1985) has long stressed the relevance of personal ties in economic life; Walter Powell has focused on the centrality of informal network structures in organizational networks, which require mutual trust (1990). Due to widely perceived institutional differences between universities and industry, it is clear that technology transfer is an even more uncertain endeavor for all actors involved than interactions between different industrial firms as discussed by the authors, which can at least tacitly agree on mutual expectations and behavioral patterns. Personalized trust in the case of technology transfer between universities and industry is all the more necessary.9

Conclusion and discussion Our analysis has shown that organizational units facilitating the transfer of technology to industry diffused rapidly at German universities. What had begun with a pilot project in the mid 1970s eventually led to the institutionalization of transfer offices at all universities in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988. However, transfer offices did not emerge in a bottom-up way within universities. They rather diffused in a top-down way as a political role model, one lacking the required support of all relevant actors outside the political realm. Because of their exogenous character, they could hardly play an active role. Though universities created transfer offices as new organizational structures, they remained highly de-coupled from local reality. This is due to two factors. On the one hand, German universities still strongly invoke von Humboldt’s ideals, which do not easily mesh with the demand for a more active role in technology transfer. Due to this institutional identity, the pursuit of technology transfer cannot be perceived as an integral part of the universities’ core functions. On the other hand, we found that personalized modes of interaction are a prerequisite for the effective pursuit of transfer between universities and industry. In this regard, organizational units like transfer offices can only play a very limited role, and they cannot substitute for direct contacts between transfer partners. Both aspects – an identity concept shaped by von Humboldt’s ideals at the organizational level, a broad variety of informal links to industry at the individual level – are historically deeply entrenched and both are kept separated from each other. Trying to actively engage in technology transfer at the organizational level, therefore,

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was hardly compatible with this distinct and historically rather stable pattern, consisting of ‘two cultures’ in academia. Technology transfer as an academic mission did neither mesh culturally with the university as a whole nor with the informal transfer practices employed by those pursuing transfer projects. Following our analysis, universities are best understood as entities which are embedded in larger institutional environments and which due to historically developed practices and identity concepts mostly symbolically adapt to new challenges, which are exogenous to them. They customarily cope with heterogeneous, rapidly changing, and sometimes even contradictory expectations in their environment, without transforming these expectations directly into institutional change. In terms of learning, one can observe that universities adapt new challenges rather to existing practices and identity concepts than adapting these practices and concepts directly to their environments. To name only the three most prominent movements confronted by German universities during the last two decades: the demand for a greater inclusion of women in faculty positions; the demand for more consideration for the adverse environmental effects of science and technology; and the demand for a more active role in technology transfer. None of these expectations led to dramatic changes, and all of them were transformed into typical organizational responses: the creation of representatives and offices. These responses are not intended at fostering institutional change. On the contrary, they allow universities to adapt to broader societal expectations without risking too much institutional change. Depicting transfer offices as a reflection of institutional inertia rather than of institutional change, however, is only one side of the story. Though not designed as such, they can also be seen as agents of change. Transfer offices are of paramount importance for the diffusion of the idea that technology transfer is an important and desirable academic activity. While informal, non-institutionalized transfer practices are not visible at the organizational level, institutionalized transfer being mediated through an office provides high visibility for the idea. Transfer offices symbolize the idea’s relevance and actively promote its diffusion. In this, they extend the traditional academic focus beyond research and teaching. And in this, they take part in the creation of a common organizational culture, in which transfer activities, much like research and teaching, are an integral part of what faculty is expected to do. Transfer offices also broaden the academic basis for transfer activities. While traditionally transfer-oriented fields, particularly in engineering, rely on informal ties to industrial partners, a wide share of all the others turn to transfer offices in order to get advice and support, and in the hopes of finding an industrial partner. As one of our interviewees stated: “Professors who have contacts with industry do not make use of us. And those who do not have

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these contacts turn to us.” In addition, transfer offices play an important role in fostering entrepreneurship. They are often contacted by graduate students and graduates endeavoring to create a start-up company, and who therefore need legal, financial and organizational advice. As a result, institutionalized and non-institutionalized transfer activities must be seen as complementary. They cannot be juxtaposed as serious alternatives for researchers and policymakers. Quantitative evaluation studies assessing and comparing the number of transfer projects being achieved (see Elle et al. 1998) do not grasp the complementary character of these activities and fall short of appreciating the different roles institutionalized and non-institutionalized transfer play within the organizational context of a university. The relevance of playing different roles became particularly clear in the myriad activities transfer offices are involved in to provide opportunities for networking between academic researchers and industrial firms. Two activities are most important in this regard. Universities’ presentations at industrial fairs are most often run by transfer offices as well as organized events within universities in which researchers present their findings to an industrial audience and later meet informally “with beer and sandwiches” as one interview partner called it. The increase in transfer activities during the last years is in part due to the creation of structures like these, which provide opportunities (by transfer offices) for direct and informal interaction (for individual researchers).10 In the end we would like to conclude with three more general research and policy perspectives on the role of path-dependency in higher education. First, the big expectations to be found in the discourse on university reform were not met at the level of organizational practices. In universities, the pace of change is considerably slower than at the level of current higher education and science policy talk. Though one can witness far-reaching changes on the discursive level, institutional structures and practices display a much lower volatility. Therefore, one is well advised to take the different speeds of learning the ‘new, new thing’ into account. This lesson, however, is not limited to policy-makers. Also researchers far too easily fuel the current rhetoric of change by focusing on individual cases which are far from being representative. Good examples for this tendency are Clark (1998) and Sporn (1999). Though the cases they pursue are very interesting in themselves, they hardly allow for generalizations, because both studies show a strong sample bias. The case studies in Clark’s celebrated book on entrepreneurial universities are hardly representative. Three of the five cases he discusses are universities founded in the 1960s with the explicit goal of bridging the gap between higher education institutions and industry more effectively, while the other two were founded as technical institutes which were granted university status roughly a hundred years after their foundation. But entrepreneurial

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universities seem to face considerable obstacles in the European context. Clarke (1998: xiv) notes that at the time he was searching for appropriate cases, i.e., from the early-to-mid 1980s to the mid-1990s, he didn’t find any in large university systems like Germany and France. The difficulties in finding European cases can also be seen in Sporn’s (1999) analysis of universities, which underwent rapid institutional change. While the US sample consists of major and renowned universities, the European sample is limited to smaller universities specialized in applied economics and business administration. Likewise, broader and more abstract concepts in higher education and science policy research too rapidly side with the political reform agenda. ‘The new production of knowledge’ (Gibbons et al. 1994), ‘the triple helix of knowledge production’ (Etzkowitz/Leydesdorff 1997), ‘contextualized knowledge’ (Nowotny et al. 2001), and other concepts diffused rapidly into the political realm without properly asking for the empirical basis of these claims. Second, one needs to elaborate more of a theory of path-dependency in higher education institutions. With this, one might reach a new understanding about the extent to which learning the ‘new, new thing’ necessarily borrows from the past. This would engender an appreciation of the continuity of adaptation processes, to complement the one-sided emphasis on discontinuity and change that now prevails in the literature. Two strands of research can be seen as resources in this process. On the one hand, cross-national research on universities has shown that they are embedded in distinct national university systems, which evolved historically over long periods of time and which display remarkable stability (Clark 1995; Rothblatt/Wittrock 1993). Since these larger systems shape the behavior of individual universities, the adaptation of universities toward new challenges is characterized by contextual factors which cannot be altered easily. On the other hand, not only by focusing on national contexts, in which university organizations are embedded, a more skeptical view on the apparently unlimited malleability of university structures seems to be warranted. History matters, also for organizations. This has been pointed out in research on organizational learning (March 1999), in organizational psychology (Weick 1979, 1995), and in organizational sociology (Hannan/Freeman 1989). Alas, these insights are hardly reflected in the current management mode of organizational research, in which the pathdependent character of organizational structures is downplayed, while new concepts and models, which seem to flow across organizational boundaries, are celebrated. It will be interesting to see how globalization forces will affect historically entrenched concepts, both in national university systems and in individual university organizations. Given our analysis and in accordance with the research cited above, one has to assume that the organizational

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and national contextualization of globally diffusing expectations, values and structures will lead to very heterogeneous outcomes. Third, our analysis has shown the pitfalls of looking for role models. We suppose that this point is not only limited to individual organizations. Therefore, we would like to conclude with a quasi-evolutionary argument on role models in overall university systems. It seems as if the viability of university systems depends on the plurality of different university types. This holds true for the global level which is characterized by the existence of different national systems. This variety allows for exchange, competition and succession among different national university systems. Limiting variation to different national systems, however, is problematic because fixed and nation-bound role models are assumed. This gives too static a picture of the ever-changing university landscape and falls short of acknowledging variation in universities across types which cross-cut national systems. Unfortunately, there is little research that explores the entire pool of university types within national and transnational settings. We suppose that strategies for exploiting and enhancing learning capacities might benefit from that kind of research too. Reducing variation by focusing on one role model – the entrepreneurial university, for example – and fostering universities which behave accordingly might be a successful ‘picking the winners’ strategy in the short run, but less convincing in the long run. This is especially true in the context of our contemporary ‘knowledge society’ – i.e., a society in which environmental conditions change and related strategies become outdated at an ever increasing pace. And in this context it increasingly becomes part of our responsibility as researchers to work less on the creation of new role models and less on supporting policy-makers in their selection of appropriate models, and more on exploring ways of enhancing the adaptability and learning capacity of the overall system.

Acknowledgments The paper was written during a research stay at the Department of Sociology, Stanford University, which was supported by the German Research Council (DFG Grant # Kr2011/1–1). I am grateful to a number of people who contributed comments and suggestions. In particular, Jim March, Nathan Rosenberg, Woody Powell and Francisco O. Ramirez made helpful suggestions during colloquium audiences. I am especially indebted to Elaine Coburn and John Meyer, who provided lucid and detailed comments on every single page of the manuscript. In addition, the paper benefited from the thoughtful suggestions made by an anonymous reviewer of Higher Education.

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APPENDIX

Figure 1. Interview sample

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Figure 2. Institutionalization of transfer offices at public universities in North RhineWestphalia.

Notes 1. Both institutional and discursive changes in US science policy have been analyzed in Slaughter/Rhoades (1996). 2. A thorough discourse analysis of the German case is missing so far. For some empirical evidence, including references of the quotes below, see Krücken (2001). 3. For a complete project report (in German) see http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/ kruecken/lfg. 4. This perception was mainly fueled by the OECD report “Gaps in technology” (1968). This report showed a widening technological gap between the United States and Europe. At that time the United States – in a remarkable shift from the situation at the beginning of the 20th century – were seen as the most successful country in fostering technological innovation. This national innovation model was, however, succeeded by the Japanese one in the 1980s, which then again lost ground to the American model in the 1990s. 5. The main legal obstacle seems to be that the title to all potentially patentable innovations belongs to the inventor if he or she is a civil servant. See Schmoch et al. 2000 (pp. 96–102). This creates a double-edged problem because universities have no financial incentive to actively support licensing and patenting activities and professors most often lack the time and knowledge to deal with these issues individually. Though political reforms of the legal framework have been initiated recently, given our analysis, it is far from certain that these reforms will show unambiguous results when being implemented. 6. The very essence of von Humboldt’s ideals and their relevance in the famous founding of the Berlin University is still debated among scholars. His overarching role in the history of the German university system, however, is not in doubt. For a discussion of von Humboldt’s conceptual ideas and their application in the German higher education system see the historical reconstructions by McClelland (1980) and Turner (1980).

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7. In addition to the research being presented here, the author of this paper was able to witness this tendency at first hand during an eighteen-month research stay at Stanford University from October 1999 until March 2001. 8. On organizational myths in general see Meyer/Rowan (1977). For different aspects of the ‘von Humboldt’ myth in German academia see Ash (1997). 9. Our findings on the nature and relevance of trust in transfer relations are also instructive for addressing the role of the Internet in technology transfer. Though we certainly believe that the Internet is a very useful tool, we remain skeptical about the Internet’s overall problem-solving capacity. Internet communication falls short of remedying the social uncertainties and perceived institutional differences between academic and industrial partners. Trust-building through personalized interaction is a process which can be a solution for these problems. This process can hardly be replaced by the Internet, which can provide information but not trust. 10. Conceptually, this implies a broader perspective than the one taken by Meyer/Rowan (1977). Though their neo-institutional perspective on organizations was instructive for our analysis of the institutionalization process of transfer offices, one can see that in the longer run formal structures can also trigger organizational change by promoting new ideas and by providing new opportunities for action. For a more general discussion on the insights and limits of the neo-institutional approach in organizational analysis see Hasse/Krücken (1999).

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