| Status Seeking and Boundary Breaking: Why Middle-Status Universities Commercialize Less in China? |
Received:October 16, 2017 Revised:October 16, 2017 |
Key Words: Status and Reputation; Innovation and Technology |
| Author Name | Affiliation | | Xirong Shen* | Cornell University | | Zhi Huang | Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky |
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Abstract: |
| One of the classical insights sociology provides for organizational studies is that opportunities and incentives for boundary-crossing and institutional change are embedded in social structures, such as status hierarchies.Building on thisinsight, this paper examines how status seeking in a hierarchy, rather than status itself, affect a typical example of boundary-crossing behavior—universities’ commercialization of research output. Prevailing accounts claim that statuses affect actors’ tendencies for crossing boundaries by providing cumulative advantages or exerting normative constraints.Going beyond the effect of status itself, this paper argues: 1) status-seeking incentives are differentially distributed in a status hierarchy; 2) status-seeking efforts affect boundary-crossing behavior differently for organization actors of different statuses. Empirically, We draw on both quantitative and qualitative data to investigate the effect of Chinese universities’ status-seeking efforts in the state-run “academic tournament”, measured by the number of prestigious national titles and awards each university obtains annually. For both high-status (985 universities) and low-status (non-211 universities) universities, status-seeking have a positive effect on their commercialization behavior. However, for middle-status (non-985 but 211 universities) universities, their status-seeking efforts have a significant and negative impact. Further analysis shows that this negative effect is explained by the fact that middle-status actors tend to respond more negatively to local market incentives and utilize less of their high-quality research publications when they invest a lot in status seeking. |
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