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This chapter extends and integrates the analysis of innovation systems presented in Chapter 3 and the account of how different firms develop different kinds of organizational capabilities outlined in Chapter 6 to explain how leading firms in differently organized market economies develop distinctive innovative competences and strategies. It argues that firms have several choices in developing innovative competences and selecting innovation strategies that are guided by dominant institutions. These institutions include those governing the development of skills and labour markets, capital markets, and inter-firm relationships as well as the organization and conduct of research in the public sciences. As a result, societies with distinctive institutional frameworks encourage the development of particular kinds of innovative capabilities, and so manifest contrasting types of technological development and sectoral specialization, as illustrated by the examples of late 20th-century Germany, Japan, and the USA.

This chapter suggests how the major changes that have taken place in the organization and direction of the public science system (PSS) since the end of the Second World War have altered authority relationships governing research priorities and the assessment of results in different kinds of PSS, and how these shifts in authority have had varying effects on intellectual innovation and integration. It first summarizes the key differences between six ideal types of PSS in terms of the relative authority of the state, intellectual elites, and employers in guiding intellectual goals and evaluating approaches. Second, it outlines how the six shifts in governance of public science systems have affected the authority of six different groups and organizations over research activities. Next, it suggests how these changes in the relative authority of different groups and agencies can be expected to influence patterns of intellectual coordination and innovation in the public sciences in general. Finally, the chapter examines how these connections between changes in authority and the generation and selection of intellectual innovations in different societies are likely to be affected by the key features of the six different kinds of PSS. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter examines the changes that have taken place in the political organization of research and its possible consequences for research behaviour and research performance by analysing a specific corporate actor, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as Switzerland's main funding agency, and its funding instruments. First, it briefly presents the position of the SNSF in the Swiss public science system. It discusses the establishment of the SNSF in the early 1950s then analyses the institutionalization of three funding instruments that characterize the key changes in governance rationales during the second part of the 20th century.

This chapter shows that the developmental trajectory of scientific disciplines is highly dependent on the nationally based higher education and science systems in which they are embedded, despite possibly increasing flows of international influence. By comparative examination of the emergence and evolution of business studies in the USA and Europe, it demonstrates that not only the ways in which this particular discipline came to be organized in the first place, but also how its later development into a scientific field, differed in these two settings.

Much recent research has focused on how intensified competition for resources and increasing demands for relevance and accountability have affected patterns of authority relations between academics and various stakeholders (the state, companies, research councils, and so on). Such effects may be visible at the bottom level of individual researchers or research teams, which are the elementary units of scientific production, as well as at a more aggregated level — that which the institutions teams belong to, and whose nomenclature and characteristics vary across countries: university departments, institutes and research centres, and research units or laboratories. These studies of organized research units (ORUs) usually focus on how ORU cope with external pressures and defend their professional autonomy against external claims on the products of their research. In contrast, there are only a few investigations on how external drivers for change affect authority relations within ORU, and more specifically between research teams and the administrative head of the unit. This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration of these intra-organizational authority relations as a result of structural changes affecting the public science system. It argues that the understanding of these intra-organizational dynamics is crucial as the management of research is still a decentralized and distributed process. The chapter focuses on a specific subtype of ORU: the French ‘mixed research units’ (unit és mixtes de recherche).