Faculty patenting and communities of practice: An exploration of institutional processes at the micro level

The micro level of institutional theory seeks to explain how individuals come to learn certain practices as “social fact” through sharing common experience with others and to describe the conditions under which individuals maintain these practices as external and objective over time and across contexts. The patenting of scientific discoveries by faculty members at universities is used in this study as the focal practice to be examined. Patenting, as an activity associated with commercial science, represents a particular type of practice characterized by a particular set of routines, goals, patterns of evaluation, and methods.; Faculty members learn about the scientific process in graduate school where, as students, they participate in a university's scientific community of practice. Later, as faculty, they may participate in a different community characteristic of their employing university. To assess influence of the level of commercial science practiced at each community on faculty patenting, data were collected on 670 faculty members employed in chemical engineering departments at 71 research universities.; Logistic regression was used to determine the influence of the graduate school, the current university, and the interaction between graduate school community and current university practices on the likelihood of faculty patenting. Of the hypothesized influences on patenting, only the practices of the current university increased the odds of patenting. Neither the graduate school nor an interaction between current university and graduate school increased the odds of patenting.; For institutional theory, these data would seem to suggest that behaviors learned as “social fact” in one context may become extinct in communities where the practice is not institutionalized. Action will not be perceived as external and objective if there is no way to index individual action to shared typifications. At the micro level, practices learned as social facts require continuing social referents to be maintained. For managers seeking to introduce new behaviors to a community of practice via selection, these data would seem to suggest that the new behavior may not become part of practice, but instead may itself become extinct as the newcomer reflexively monitors the shared practices of the community and comes to learn them.