Guston D H
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Soc Stud Sci. 1999 Feb;29(1):87-111. doi: 10.1177/030631299029001004.
The sociological study of boundary-work and the political-ecomomic approach of principal-agent theory can be complementary ways of examining the relationship between society and science: boundary-work provides the empirical nuance to the principal-agent scheme, and principal-agent theory provides structure to the thick boundary description. This paper motivates this complementarity to examine domestic technology transfer in the USA from the intramural laboratories of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). It casts US policy for technology transfer in the principal-agent framework, in which politicians attempt to manage the moral hazard of the productivity of research by providing specific incentives to the agents for engaging in measurable research-based innovation. Such incentives alter the previously negotiated boundary between politics and science. The paper identifies the crucial role of the NIH Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) as a boundary organization, which medicates the new boundary negotiations in its routine work, and stabilizes the boundary by performing successfully as an agent for both politicians and scientists. The paper hypothesizes that boundary organizations like OTT are general phenomena at the boundary between politics and science.
边界工作为委托代理模式提供了经验细节，而委托代理理论为详尽的边界描述提供了结构。本文旨在激发这种互补性，以审视美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）内部实验室在美国的国内技术转移情况。它将美国的技术转移政策置于委托代理框架之中，在该框架中，政治家试图通过为代理人提供参与可衡量的基于研究的创新的特定激励措施，来管理研究生产力方面的道德风险。此类激励措施改变了此前在政治与科学之间协商确定的边界。本文指出美国国立卫生研究院技术转移办公室（OTT）作为一个边界组织的关键作用，它在日常工作中协调新的边界谈判，并通过成功充当政治家和科学家双方的代理人来稳定边界。本文假设像OTT这样的边界组织是政治与科学边界上的普遍现象。
