Accountability for Research Commercialization: Contradictions and Consequences
Dr. Anil K. Naryan and Irshad Ali
Critical Perspectives on Accounting Conference 2014
Discussion Notes
Kenneth A. Fox
Summary of Paper
Motivation and Research Question
The goal of NPM Public Sector initiatives to increase accountability has met with mixed
results. Concerns about these mixed results require attention to examples of
accountability in specific contexts in order to rethink “new approaches to public sector
accountability. To this end, Narayan and Ali examine a case where accountability was
operationalized in the context of “university research commercialization”.
The authors define research Commercialization as
“.the process of transforming research outcomes including intellectual property,
ideas, and knowledge into marketable products, process, or services thereby
contributing to improved economic and social outcomes.” (p. 3)
Little is known about how public sector bureaucrats understand and view existing
accountability arrangements and how these shape university research commercialization.
Their contribution: The answer to the question “How do public sector
accountability assessment mechanisms influence accountability purpose within the
context of university research commercialization?
Methodology
A case study of a NZ University engaged in the commercialization of research.
Case study covers a time span of 8 years: 2002-2010
Two sources of data were collected to cover this time period:
Archival data:
 University Strategic Documents
 Annual Reports
 Newsletters
 Website information
Interviews:
 11 interviews
 Semi-structured
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Theoretical Basis
Accountability Adequacy Assessment
Accountability serves three purposes (Aucoin and Heintzman (2000)):
Control
Assurance
Promotion of Learning in Continuous improvement
Further developed into three perspectives by Bovens et al. (2008):
Democratic Perspective
Constitutional Perspective
Learning Perspective
Narayan and Ali focus on the Learning Perspective where accountability is “a tool to
make public authorities effective in delivering on their promises and goals” (p. 6)
New-Institutional Theory
Narayan and Ali are concerned with isomorphic processes: coercive, mimetic, and
normative. They are further concerned with “decoupling”, where ideas and practices are
symbolically adopted in order to gain legitimacy, but actual practices are divorced from
the idea or formal practice.
Findings
Narayan and Ali condense their findings under three subheadings for discussion:





NPM accountability assessment has a narrow focus causing legitimating
behaviour
Accountability has become a “representational faithfulness” to the rhetoric in the
strategic documents
PBRF assessment culture potentially undermines the research commercialization
agenda
Being accountable is not simply accounting for the use of allocated funds
Premier is making no real attempt to measure research commercialization
performance
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Assessment:
This is an interesting story with a rich case context from which to draw. The authors do a
good job of writing the story, and benefit from long-term engagement with the case
context. The authors have an effective writing style, and the paper represents a potential
contribution to the NPM and performance measurement literature.
There are some areas where the paper could be improved. The motivation for the paper
could benefit from a more definitive place within the accounting literature that deals with
organizational effectiveness, budgeting, and performance measurement. The literature
that focuses on accounting academics may also help motivate the paper.
Theoretically, perhaps embracing the developments in institutional theory that have gone
past the diffusion model of isomorphism would offer a richer examination of the logics at
play within the institutional field.
Methodologically, the challenge of taking an institutional field-level theoretical basis, and
bringing it to bear on one organization creates challenges for the level of analysis, and
what can be said about the organizational actors. Perhaps more alignment between
concepts, theory, the operationalization of these constructs, and the empirics would offer
more support for the findings.
The paper represents a good opportunity for development, and pursuing publication is
encouraged.
Motivation:
The motivation for the paper seems to stem from an unproblematic acceptance of
“research commercialization” as something that is reflective of social norms and “good”
for universities/nations/societies.
The authors address the NPM agenda, in an examination of how national strategies are
effected through public institutions. But it is not entirely clear how this is a New Public
Management story, or what is meant by New Public Management.
It seems as though the rise of research commercialization is a result of NPM initiatives,
but the authors also suggest that the government accountability assessment is based on
other measures: publication productivity and “output” in terms of degree granting.
It might be useful to clarify the position of the government, and whether the measures
imposed on Premier are conflicting with the national agenda. This requires a different
unit of analysis, and brings the focus to the institutional field. This also requires some
clarification of the authors’ notion of NPM, and how Premier is working with and within
it, in this institutional field.
Some suggestions for work that has addressed NPM is Power (1999), and that work is
revisited in Power (2000). This might help define elaborate NPM. The level of analysis,
however, is somewhat problematic, as there is much going on at the organizational level.
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Perhaps more could be done with connecting to the literature on academics that has
investigated the effect of performance pressures on academics. For some additional
insight into the academic milieu, perhaps Gendron (2008) in EAR, might help?
From an organizational perspective, perhaps more could be done in motivating the paper
to demonstrate different tensions that exist in terms of budgeting and strategy (Oakes et
al, 1998; Preston et al., 1992), which also seems to require some elaboration.
Methodology:
The methodology approach is logically consistent with the research question. A
qualitative methodology seems appropriate for examining “how public sector
accountability mechanisms influence accountability purpose within the context of
university research commercialization”. There does, however, seem to be a bit of a
disconnection between the research question, the theoretical operationalization, and the
findings. Perhaps a bit more elaboration of how the constructs are operationalized would
serve to support the findings.
The connection between NPM and commercialization could be made clearer. It is not
entirely evident how NPM is at work, and how commercialization is part of it, or opposed
to it. It seems as though the NPM connection to Premier is solely focused on research
output in terms of journal publications, and commercialization is an organizational level
strategy that is somewhat removed from the national agenda. Can the authors begin from
an NPM standpoint without first making the connection between government and the
University programs?
With respect to the isomorphic pressures at play, it seems that there are differences in
culture and competing logics at play, but I don’t understand how coercive isomorphism
can be assumed when it is also suggested that Premier is not accountable under NPM; it
seems like they are focused on research publication and “students” (degrees awarded).
Perhaps more could be offered in terms of the interview questions that initiated the semistructured interview process, and of the coding schemed applied to the interviews and the
documents. It seems as though the research evolved past the initial research question,
and seems not so much to be concerned with mechanisms influencing accountability
purpose, but to be more concerned with how culture and incentives drive practices.
It may be that there is an operationalization problem between the micro of the empirics,
and the macro of the greater NPM field, because it is not entirely clear how coercive and
mimetic forces are at work. The unit of analysis, the University, stops short of an
examination of an institutional field in which these forces would be at play.
Within the organization, however, there seem to be other pressures (Gendron, 2008, in
EAR) on the academics. The connection to learning according to the first theoretical
perspective that that the authors are engaging is not quite clear, but it seems like the
academics at Premier are accountable for their research output, which is largely
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influenced by journal rankings. The focus on funding from government sources would
seem to confirm this. If there is a bi-directional “coercion”, as identified on p. 18, perhaps
this is not an institutional story? The Mike Power work (Power 1999), based on
Foucault, would help recognize the circulation of power, and maybe the use of Flybjerg’s
(2001) work on case methodology that accentuates this, would provide further guidance
to develop the paper.
But it does seem that the institutional field needs to be examined and addressed. It would
be the relationship of Premier to government assessment, and external funders from
industry that would support the case for both isomorphic pressures and the importance of
commercialization.
Further, the reference to legitimacy could be elaborated to identify with whom and for
what? It would also be useful to define how it is being used; it seems that the authors
mean symbolic/ritual acceptance of a logic that is not borne out in practice. The
difference between substantive and symbolic consistency with practice could be made
clearer.
Theory
From the analysis of how organizations become the same (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983),
neo-institutional theorists have turned to the study of field-level heterogeneity
(Lounsbury, 2008). Concerned with how organizations differ and how practices vary
from organization to organization within a field, the examination of the different
institutional logics that drive this variation has come to the forefront of institutional
analysis.
Building on the direction first suggested by Friedland and Alford (1991), Thornton and
Ocasio (2008) seek to clarify and define institutional logics, providing a basis for future
research from this perspective. According to Thornton and Ocasio, institutional logics
are:
“the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices,
assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and
reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide
meaning to their social reality.” (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008: 804)
This implies that the context provides the structure for individual and organizational
practices, but, while this structure guides behaviour it also “provides opportunity for
agency and change” (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008). The coercion identified by the authors
seems to go both ways. Perhaps the lake of agency in the New Institutional perspective is
insufficient to explain the dynamics at work at Premier.
The relationship between the institutional context and the logic that acts upon the practice
is important; in their critique of much of the organizational research informed by the
institutional logic concept, Thornton and Ocasio (2008) suggest that not all instances of
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rationalized action constitute an institutional logic: the defining factor is the legitimacy
afforded certain logics by the institutional setting, which provides a “sense of order and
ontological security” (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008).
This leaves some questions unanswered, however, in how different logics exist and
compete within an institutional field at the same time: how do logics coexist; how do
practices vary with different logics; and how do institutional logics change, where new
logics replace old ones and become ‘institutionalized’? Narayan and Ali seem to be in a
position to examine this in the context of competing logics over organizational strategy:
pure research/scholarly publication versus applied research/commercialization.
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