TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 147 institutions: the growth of the universities after the Higher Education Law of 1878, the expansion of industry after 1890, the increasing number and scale of hospitals, the curious lack of patent law between 1869 and 1912 (a characteristic the Netherlands shared with Switzer land), and so on. It is also unfortunate that, except for Van Lieburg, none of the authors has attempted to compare developments in the Netherlands with those in other countries and to explore foreign influences in the Netherlands (e.g., the great number of German professors and scientists working there and the sponsoring of at least two university laboratories by the Rockefeller Foundation). As Hakfoort explains in the introduction, external factors were deliberately excluded from the volume and are to be dealt with in another book. In my opinion, this separation of internal and external factors (which is, of course, quite usual) is a mistake. The questions that really matter can be studied only when the interplay of techno logical, scientific, political, economical, and cultural forces is explored. Thus the book is very useful as a first inventory of some facts about the expansion of laboratories in the Netherlands. But it fails in asking questions about why this happened, that is, how these developments were tied up with the cultural, economical, and power structures in which they appeared. Dick van Lente Dr. van Lente is on the Faculty of Societal History and Study of the Arts, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He has published articles and a book about reactions to technological innovations in the Netherlands between 1850 and 1920 and is working on a project about the social effect of communications technologies in the Netherlands during the 19th century. Entrepreneurial Science: New Links between Corporations, Universities, and Government. By Robert F. Johnston and Christopher G. Edwards. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books (Greenwood Press), 1987. Pp. 157; notes, bibliography, index. $37.95. Academic science these days is anything but academic, according to venture capitalists and high-tech publicists Robert Johnston and Christopher Edwards. Rather, it is changing the way America does business. They contend that, to keep pace with aggressive foreign competitors in computers, robotics, biotechnology, optics, and other high-technology industries, America will increasingly have to rely on its universities for ideas and on small, university-bred, and entrepreneurially oriented Arms to turn those ideas into marketable products. They expect, in fact, that by the end of the century the primary role for big business may well be providing financial, marketing, and manufacturing know-how for the innovations generated by these high-tech companies. “We are witnessing a reorganization of the 148 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CUL TURE process of conducting and commercializing research,” they say. “Com panies that heed this trend are more likely to profit from it” (p. 132). Those that do not had better start looking for something else to do. While written primarily as a guide to the new rules of the high-tech game for executives and investors, and consequently heavy with how-to advice on such matters as “research and development limited partnerships,” this book nonetheless offers (as the subtitle promises) a surprisingly complete survey of the “new links between corporations, universities, and government.” Johnston and Edwards highlight half-a-dozen state initiatives, from older ventures like North Caroli na’s Research Triangle Park to such recent efforts as New York’s Centers for Advanced Technology program, a multimillion-dollar state project to promote regional economic growth through targeted grants to university programs in health care, telecommunications, and computer software research. They also include a rundown of the latest industry-university collaborations, including RPI’s Center for Manufacturing Productivity and Technology Transfer, sponsored by an industrial consortium led by General Motors, General Electric, and Boeing and aimed at improving the professional image as well as the on-the-line performance of manufacturing technology. “The pro gram is unique,” the authors claim, “in having paid project managers instead of faculty members to oversee the work of the graduate and undergraduate students” (p. 36). They detail other cases where, instead of collaborating with established industries, universities have gone into business for themselves. Baylor Medical Center, for one, recently...
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