Competition and pluralism in the public sciences: The impact of institutional frameworks on the organisation of academic science

The role of the public sciences in supporting the growth of new industries with radically innovative technologies has varied between countries that encourage different levels of reputational competition and intellectual pluralism and flexibility. These two characteristics of public science systems help to explain: (a) significant differences in the degree to which research is coordinated across universities and similar organisations to solve common problems and, (b) the ease with which new intellectual goals and approaches are developed and incorporated into research programmes to deal with new kinds of problems. They thus help to account for continuing differences in the rate at which public science systems produce highly novel intellectual innovations and deal with a variety of problems. These characteristics of public science systems are in turn affected by four major features of the institutional frameworks governing the production of public formal knowledge in different countries. These are: the extent of state delegation of employment and resources control to scientific elites, concentration of intellectual and administrative control within research organisations, the stability and strength of the hierarchy of research organisations, and organisational segmentation of research goals and labour markets. Together these features help to explain major differences in competition and pluralism between public science systems. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V.