A Colloquium You Should Check Out

BERKELEY SOCIOLOGY COLLOQUIUM SERIES

WOODY POWELL

Stanford University

Chance, Nécessité, et Naïveté

Ingredients to create a new organizational form

Monday, 5 April, 2-3:30 p.m.

Blumer Room, 402 Barrows Hall

We examine the genesis of new organizational forms, as well as their potential to catalyze fundamental changes in the institutional milieux that gave them birth. Our setting is the commercialization of bioscience breakthroughs in the 1970s and early 1980s, which spawned a novel collection of organizational practices that coalesced into a new science-based organizational form – the dedicated biotech firm (DBF), which became the hallmark of an upstart industry. Of greater interest, however, are the reverberations of these re-purposed practices back into the conservative institutional domains from which they were borrowed: the academy, the financial community, and the R&D labs of major pharmaceutical companies. Using historical analysis of archival data, and oral histories supplemented by interviews with DBF founders, we construct the “lash up” process that melded elements from three separate domains – academic science, commercial healthcare, and new-venture finance – into an interactively stable pattern. Our findings modify received wisdom on organizational genesis in two important ways. First, although we accept social novelty as the reassembly of pre-existing elements, we argue that it matters greatly whether such reassembly results from recombination (the rearrangement of recognizable elements within an institutional domain) or transposition (the introduction and incorporation of foreign elements from previously separate institutional domains). Second, our analysis points to an unexplored paradox in organization theory: that commercial viability and institutional influence may be inversely correlated. Among the pioneering DBFs were two distinct variants: a handful of businesses founded through recombinatory mechanisms, and a group of firms launched by “trespassers,” amphibious scientists who naively transposed academic practices and values into a commercial setting. Perhaps predictably, the former proved a more robust business model. Yet the latter – an odd, uncomfortable intermingling of science and finance – was disruptive enough to produce fresh action, with far-reaching consequences for both the academy and industry.

Woody Powell is Professor of Education and Sociology at Stanford University.