This article describes the emerging bipartisan political coalition supporting commercial competitiveness as a rationale for research and development, points to selected changes in legal and funding structures in the 1980s that stem from the success of the new political coalition and suggests some of the connections between these changes and academic science and technology, and examines the consequences of these changes for universities. The study uses longitudinal secondary data on changes in business strategies and corporate structures that made business elites (...) in the defense and health industries consider supporting competitiveness R&D policies. The article identifies and assesses an array of national R&D legislation concerned with competitiveness that was passed in the 1980s and 1990s and that has implications for academic R&D. The effects of competitiveness R&D policies on universities and academic science and technology are appraised by analyzing changes in time-series data on science and technology indicators compiled by the National Science Foundation. (shrink)

Particle physicists constitute a community of sophisticated mythmakers—explicators of the nature of matter who forever alter our views of space and time. But who are these people? What is their world really like? Traweek, a bold observer of culture, opens the door to this unusual domain and offers us a glimpse into the inner sanctum.