Interorganizational Dynamics in Collaborative
University-Industry Research Projects: Context, Politics and Social
Construction
Email: m_zanko@uow.edu.au
Professor Richard Badham
Email: Richard.Badham@mgsm.edu.au
Dr Karin Garrety
Email: k_garrety@uow.edu.au
Preferred Streams: G,H,Q,K
Interorganizational Dynamics in Collaborative
University-Industry Research Projects: Context, Politics and Social
Construction
University-industry
partnerships (UIPs) are widely viewed as essential in
leveraging research capability and economic performance in organizations and
the nation as a whole. In
Collaboration,
university-industry, politics, context, social construction
The strong research interest
in interorganizational relations (IOR) is testimony
to the appreciation of organization-environment interdependence as a major
factor in determining and explaining organizational behaviour.
Over the last 30 years or so, significant strides have been made in IOR
research in terms of conceptual developments such as the identification of embeddedness and involvement as collaboration dimensions
that produce strategic, learning and political effects (Hardy, Lawrence and
Phillips, 2003), a typology of IOR determinants (Oliver, 1990), various forms
of resource dependence between organizations (Pfeffer
and Salancik, 1978), and interorganizational
cooperation processes (Ring and Van de Ven, 1994).
The range of settings in which IOR studies have been conducted has also grown
apace. There has been a broadening from a predominant focus in the formative
stages on public sector, human services-type and community IOR studies (Rogers
and Whetten, 1982) to embrace the private sector (Fulop, 2004), the not-for-profit sector (Hardy et al, 2003),
and intersectoral domains (Fulop
and Couchman, 2004). This paper is concerned with IOR
in an intersectoral setting: one concerned with
university-industry research collaboration.
University-industry research
partnerships (UIPs) are widely viewed as essential in
leveraging research capability and economic performance in organizations and
the nation as a whole (Barnes, Pashby, and Gibbons,
2002). In
This paper aims to address
the above gaps by examining the interorganizational
dynamics in a management-related UIP research project we were involved in
defining, negotiating and undertaking (similar to Gray’s (1989) collaborative
process of problem setting, direction setting and implementation but less linear)
with industry partner managers and specialists over a four-year period. This project was one of several undertaken by
the Management Research program that formed part of a jointly funded
industry-university research centre over eight years. This particular project presented a number of
sense-making, intellectual, interpersonal, interorganizational
challenges not found in others and highlighted the intertwined, highly
political, multiple actor, multi-level nature of UIP
collaboration.
The paper is structured is
follows. First, we briefly discuss our methodology. Second, we describe and analyse salient features and processes of the collaborative
context: the university, the industry partner, the research centre and its
programs. Next, we examine and discuss key aspects of the collaboration
involved in the conception and emergence of the research project (which we
shall call Leading Stories) and its implementation within the above context:
consultants, researchers, managers, specialists. Finally, we discuss
implications of our analysis for research.
This study is qualitative and reflexive in nature (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000) and, as noted above, focuses on a single case. This is considered appropriate, given our aim of acquiring a deeper, contextualised understanding of interorganizational collaboration in UIPs (Yin, 1989). We were participant observers in this case study and the following analysis is based on data collected from: reflections on our lived experience of actions and circumstances leading to the research project and its subsequent implementation; key interactions with the industry partner, diaries, email correspondence, minutes of meetings, notes of interviews with managers relating to the project, and research institute, Management Research Program and project documents.
As researchers we had more than 20 years’ combined and continuous involvement with the industry organization in projects and research student supervision, predominantly through the university-industry research institute(see below). We had privileged access to research material. The first author was involved in supervision of an industry partner supported ARC PhD Scholarship and as a joint chief investigator in the research project discussed below. The second author was the Director of the Management Research Program in the institute and was an active leader in all the research projects, which were mainly longitudinal and action research-oriented in nature. He was a chief investigator in the Leading Stories research project under discussion in this paper. The third author was initially engaged as a non-participant observer in the Program and on projects, so as to facilitate reflection on the research being done. However, she was a research fellow in the Leading Stories project once it was commissioned.
Reflection on the research process was a requirement for the university Management Research Program members. Regular ‘systems’ meetings held on Monday mornings over a number of years included time specifically for reflection on work being done as well as relations and interactions with the industry partner. Minutes were kept.
The Leading Stories project was one of the last undertaken by the Management Program with the industry partner and ran for approximately four years from genesis to completion. This project was selected for scrutiny because it brought out clearly the emergent nature of the collaborative process (Gray, 1989) between the industry and the university, and the individuals involved. The collaborative project is the primary unit of analysis.
Leading Stories Case Study
The collaborative interorganizational context for the Leading Stories project is made up of the university, the industry partner, the UIP research institute and its constituents.
This regional university is situated
75km south of
Industry Partner
The industry partner (which we shall
refer to as Sprogwheels) is a major and leading
established Australian firm that for many years enjoyed government import
protection, captive domestic markets and healthy profits. Badham,
Garrety, Morrigan, Zanko and
The significant number of changes in structures and strategy in Sprogwheels from the inception of the UIP research institute was complemented by a revolving door of departing managers and technical specialists, with some of whom we had close, direct researcher-client involvement. This necessitated the formation and nurturing of new industry partner individual contacts for ongoing project work.
A university-industry research institute was established in the mid 1990s following lengthy discussions between university and Sprogwheels senior management. The espoused shared intent of the institute was to assist Sprogwheels enhance its business and performance through academic staff research involvement and to provide industry staff with the opportunity to contribute to fundamental research. A key driver in the institute’s establishment was a primary focus on applied science and technology research. The institute received significant funding from Sprogwheels to recruit and retain leading academic researchers, and to equip and set up its principal operations at the science and technology end of the main university campus. The institute and its research, particularly the science and technology based work, were clearly of strategic importance to the university. It brought in government grants (plus associated multipliers) and enhanced the university’s reputation academically through publications and the quality of its staff, institutionally in higher education as a key technology partner with industry, and in the community though close economic and socially desirable ties with a major local employer. However, it is not clear how the institute was of strategic significance to the industry partner. Rather, it seemed as an adjunct to its own local and extensive research laboratories, and a socially responsible active engagement with its local community.
The institute was initially structured around two main categories of research: the Technology Research Program and the Management Research Program, and this arrangement existed until end 2001. An institute director was appointed; he has held the position since the establishment of the institute. He is also leader in the Technology Research Program. A technical advisory committee comprising representatives from Sprogwheels (predominantly science and technology-focused) and the university (predominantly science and technology-focused) coordinated the institute and its programs. This committee reported to a board of university and industry executives.
The university and industry partners considered the Technical Research program far more important than the Management Program. It received far more attention from the technical and advisory committee, representing the professional and academic interests of the majority of its constituents and the institute’s primary thrust. The program, in conjunction with the industry partner, was highly successful in winning significant and sizeable competitive ‘partnering’ research grants from the government. The Technical Research program was substantially larger than its Management counterpart in terms of the allocation of academic and support staff, space and equipment.
The Management Research Program was of secondary importance in the institute. This is evidenced in part by the distribution of resources that appeared to favour the Technical program. Management research staff and research students could not be collocated within the institute. Consequently, the director of the Management research program was situated both in the institute offices and at the social science end of the university campus. In a sense, the Management program was at the periphery of the institute’s Technology program core.
The Management program was engaged in a number of research projects, four of which were received competitive government research grants, and some that were not. They all received industry partner support. All of these projects involved qualitative research (some contained quantitative data collection and analysis), with researchers often spending significant amounts of time at Sprogwheel’s dynamic and fast changing sites on tasks such as gathering observational, interview and documentary data, building and maintaining relationships, gaining and regaining local entry to sites, feeding back results, and running workshops. An issue associated with this type of social science research from an industry perspective, is that outcomes are often more difficult to measure as directly as those in the applied science and technology domain, where much research is more amenable to control than a fast and regularly changing management research field site. The technical and advisory committee appeared to be less interested in and knowledgeable about the Management Research program, and therefore was less supportive. This can be ascribed largely to the science and technology research and development backgrounds, orientation and priorities of most of the committee. Eventually, this led to uncertainty about the demonstrable contribution by the Management Research program to the industry partner (often difficult with social science research), which in turn brought about the commissioning of the Leading Stories project, which is discussed in the next section.
To summarise, there was explicit interorganizational collaboration between university and industry partners at the institute, program and research project levels, where such collaboration is defined as ‘a cooperative, interorganizational relationship that is negotiated as an ongoing communicative process, and which relies on neither market nor hierarchical mechanisms of control’ (Hardy et al, 2003, 323). However, the collaborative interorganizational context was characterised by an assymetrical power relationship between the university and Sprogwheels. The university was more dependent on the industry partner in research collaboration in terms of its strategic value, and therefore more likely to be responsive to and guided by industry concerns. There was a further relational asymmetry between the two research programs in the UIP research institute, where the Technical Research program was dominant and drove the research agenda. Thus, the Management program faced a power imbalance within the collaborative institute and with the industry partner. This raised issues of the program’s fit within the institute.
As indicated in the
preceding section, the technical and advisory committee was concerned to ensure
that the Management Research program made a more demonstrable and focused
contribution to Sprogwheels. The committee suggested
that an evaluation of a leadership program that had been rolled out over the
previous 6 years to more than 1,000 managers across the organization at a cost
of over A$10 million would be a valuable and
worthwhile exercise. A number of Sprogwheels’ representatives on the technical and advisory
committee had participated in the leadership program with strong, wide-ranging
and challenging experiences and, through their personal involvement, identified
with and were interested in its objective assessment according to ‘hard’ scientistic effectiveness and efficiency criteria. The
courses had been supported by a long-term group of 3 to 4 main external
consultants and approximately 10 human resources specialists working fulltime
on the program. A senior HRM representative on the committee was charged with
bringing Management Research program (academics) together with the Sprogwheels custodians of the leadership program to
formulate and design a research proposal for government funding. The Management
Research program director responded to this initiative and met with the HRD
manager who was conscripted into the project in order to shape and secure a
commitment to the evaluation. A series of meetings took place in the following
weeks between Sprogwheels leadership program
custodians, including an external consultant who was an architect of the
program, and Management Research program members. This consultant, a strong and
forceful personality, acting with tacit approval of Sprogwheels
program custodians, confronted the meeting by affirming that the leadership
program senior management sought was in fact a disguised, major attempt at
planned, sustainable cultural change. With this in mind, he wanted the research
project to shift from objective evaluation to one that reinforced and embedded
the change program through a team of independent outside researchers (the
Management Research team) gathering representative stories of employees’
experiences following the leadership course, for insertion into ‘cultural
distribution systems’ inside Sprogwheels.
The Management Research team
accommodated the custodians’ needs. It crafted a research proposal that went
through numerous drafts and sensitive meetings and finally secured agreement from
Sprogwheels hr management and specialists and the
technical advisory committee. However, the original idea of an objective
evaluation was transfigured into one that focused on an ‘evaluation for
learning’. This new approach was based on Guba and
The compromise was not long
lived. In the early stages of project implementation, which included
recruitment of research fellows, it became clear there would be no evaluation
for learning of the leadership program. One of the fellows left after several
months through frustration at not being able to make headway with the project.
The leadership program custodians wanted the Management Research team assigned
to the Leading Stories project only to gather employee leadership program
stories, designated as the first stage of the project. This in itself proved
problematic. It took the Management Research team a number of often difficult
to arrange meetings spread out over several months to secure access to
informants. In some instances, requests for access were acknowledged but not
followed. The evaluation for learning exercise did not even get onto the agenda
for discussion. Furthermore, there were palpable interpersonal tensions between
some of the industry leadership custodians and some of the Management Research team
possibly due to a perceived threat by the former that the university team was
coming in to measure, evaluate and report on their key work activity. Over
time, meetings became even more difficult to convene. Ties between the two
groups, never close, became weaker. There was no overt or confrontational
conflict. It was more limited cooperation. The Management Research team, as the
weaker partner (for reasons giving in discussion of the collaborative context),
was not able to fully implement the project in line with original aims. In
addition, another confounding factor was that part way through the project, Sprogwheels was in the throes of massive restructuring,
such that the manufacturing division (in which the Leading Stories project was
being conducted) was to be calved from the parent and to operate on its own as
an independently listed company. Inevitably, preparation for a new identity and
public listing diverted the hrd group’s gaze away
from the now and past practices to radically different futures. This was
reflected in Sprogwheels focus on rolling out a
completely new cultural change program for the new organization in place of the
leadership program. The Leading Stories project had become less germane to Sprogwheels. For that matter, members of the Management
Research team were engaged in other research projects both with and without Sprogwheels.
However, as before, the team
accommodated the reconstructed version of the project. In fact, the weak ties
between the leadership custodians and the Management Research team gave the
team the space and time to use the data acquired for critically reflective
research and publications (eg Badham
et al, 2003; Garrety et al, 2003).
To summarise,
the interorganizational collaboration in the project
was an uneven, assymetrical one. The political
dominance of Sprogwheels and the strategic dependence
of the university on the industry partner found in the collaborative context
were also played out in the project. There was no power sharing in project
design or implementation (Gray, 1989). In an attempt to meet the needs of the
dominant industry partner, the Management Research program responded by seeking
to reconcile conflicting demands internal to the industry partner for the
scrutiny of the leadership program: evaluation (hard, science) versus stories
(soft, culture). In doing this, the project collaboration involved a series of
social constructions and reconstructions of what was considered to be
worthwhile at the definitional, problem setting and implementation stages. Even
then, changing organizational circumstances influenced industry attention
directed to the project.
This case shows interorganizational collaboration in a university-industry
partnership to be a highly politicized, contextually dependent and socially
constructed process. It also highlights the nonlinear and multiple level nature
of such collaboration, and the dependency of the university on the industry
partner. However, this UIP management research project is a single case, which
clearly makes generalization problematic. A multi-case comparative study of UIP
interorganizational collaboration dynamics would
strengthen the robustness of the findings. The question of whether UIP social
science projects, such as management research, are more likely than science and
technology projects to be contested and display the above characteristics, and
if so how they vary, warrants examination. This may lead to useful
prescriptions for structuring and carrying out such research.
From a methodological viewpoint, this
paper demonstrates the value of digging deeper into organizational phenomena
such as interorganizational collaboration, so that
ostensibly simple characterizations can be shown for what they are. In
addition, there is a valuable opportunity when undertaking longer term projects
with industry to reflect on, and research the nature of that relationship.
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