New Legitimation Models and the Transformation of the Public Research Organizational Field

The public research sector is changing all over Europe. New semi-public research centers have emerged and now coexist with the traditional public research centers in the same organizational field. It is argued that these changes are mostly policy-driven and that the main mechanism is the emergence of new legitimation models of what research and research centers should be for, with a strong emphasis on excellence in science, technology transfer and service to society. Governments have changed the way they distribute resources or create research structures according to these changing models. As in many other events of the history of science and technology policy, the boundary struggles and changes are underlying issues in this paper. This transformation in the institutional environments of the research centers has instigated changes in the structure of the organizational field of research, mainly reflecting the emergence of new types of organizations and their search for management flexibility and the diversification of funding sources. 1 _______________________________ In most European countries, in the last 20 years, we have witnessed a significant reduction in government’s involvement in performing R&D and, at the same time, an increase in the third party funding of public research organizations (OECD 1989). However, despite those changes, the public research sector continues to have a relevant role in innovation systems (Larédo and Mustar 2004). These changes are difficult to monitor using the traditional research and development (R&D) statistics based on the OECD Frascati Manual (Bozeman and Crow 1990). These statistics hide some of the most interesting organizational phenomena: the changing nature of public research organizations and the transformation of the boundaries between the public and the private sector. Previous research examining change and transformation in the domain of public research has been conducted mainly at the organizational level (Crow and Bozeman 1998; Sanz-Menéndez and Cruz-Castro 2003). Less attention has been paid to the analysis of the re-composition or re-institutionalization of organizational fields. The 1 Laura Cruz-Castro is a Research Fellow at the CSIC Research Unit on Comparative Policy and Politics (SPRI_Spain), C/ Alfonso XII, n.18, E-28014 Madrid, Spain (tel. 34 915.219.160/028 (ext. 107); fax: 34 915.218.103; e-mail: [email protected]). Luis Sanz-Menéndez is a Research Professor at the CSIC Research Unit on Comparative Policy and Politics (SPRI_Spain), C/ Alfonso XII, n.18, E-28014 Madrid, Spain (tel.: 34 915.219.160/028 (ext. 105); fax: 34 915.218.103; e-mail: [email protected]). The authors acknowledge financial support from the Directorate-General for Research of the Ministry of Education and Science (grant SEJ2004-08052-C02-01/SOCI), participation in the EU Network of Excellence PRIME (CITI-CT-2003-506506), and suggestions from editors and reviewers