"Unstructured Problems and Non-Routine Production: Business Schools and the Transformation of High Technology, 1967-1983"

From the 1950s to the 1980s the process of securing federal research funding, conducting highly specialized research, and bringing high tech products to market at universities became more competitive, complex, and entrepreneurial. Research universities were forced to develop more integrated systems, engage new sources of revenue and institutional support, and create new types of managers in order to compete. As the Reagan era dawned and federal research subsidies for defense and technology grew rapidly, universities that successfully managed these new complexities were in a strong position to prosper.
Concentrating on the University of Texas, this paper analyzes the emergence of business schools as key components of new technological regimes at research universities in the 1970s, as a response to the economic uncertainty of the era. In the postwar years, scientists and engineers established and directed specialized research labs, worked with bureaucrats to attract funding, and managed other scientists using an engineering style of management, which emphasized the autonomy, creativity, and flexibility of scientific talent. By the 1970s business professors and deans, driven by the economic crises of that decade and a new belief that universities could engender a new economy, developed new institutional structures, devised programs that integrated tech-oriented science and business, and developed a new entrepreneurial style of management, which emphasized dealing with unstructured problems and integration with local business and political elites. In Austin their efforts produced a “technopolis,” an innovative high tech region anchored by a research university hosting an array of centers dedicated to high technology development. These efforts to adapt, however, belied a principle that business schools also promoted during this era: that the free market provided the cure to the economic crisis. Instead, Austin’s story illuminates the way that business schools employed public resources in an effort to spur regional development via high tech.