Overview

As the university transformed itself into a center of innovation, and biotechnology became a billion-dollar industry, commercialization of university inventions became both lucrative and urgent. In the United States, this shift decisively converted the academic scientist into an entrepreneur. From there, legal structures that facilitated university scientists' patenting and commercialization spread across the world, including to Japan, where earlier modes of doing science made such diffusion more difficult—and more interesting. Cosmopolitan Scientists delineates what happens when global policies diffuse to different cultural and institutional contexts. Instead of simply accepting or resisting the change, Japanese university scientists creatively enacted the new rules, making unique local variations of the global policy—and thus making it Japanese. Drawing on vivid accounts from bioscientists who experienced and enacted the shift toward commercialization, the book offers an insider's view into the way scientists navigate the complex and shifting landscape of science, innovation, and economic policy. In so doing it also tells a broader story of how the global rules can be successfully ""naturalized""—modified, settled down, and made local.

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9781503639928

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Reviews

""Cosmopolitan Scientists provides an empirically important picture with an impressive range of interviews with Japanese bioscientists. Kameo brings the inhabited institutions perspective out of a single organization and into the realm of global policy diffusion, helping us understand the changing global norms of science."" —Beth Bechky, University of California, Davis ""Building from recent research that examines institutional persistence, change, and the agency of professional workers improvising adaptive practices in organizational systems, Kameo raises the bar. In a break-through first, she goes to the global level, introducing innovative concepts as she reveals the diffusion of ideas and transformative adaptive practices between and within countries by elite academic bioscientists. A significant, impressive, essential contribution."" —Diane Vaughan, Columbia University

Author Information

Nahoko Kameo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University.

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