Come engage with me: The role of behavioural and attitudinal cohort effects on academic's levels of engagement with industry

Abstract

Although academics have considerable autonomy, they work in a highly institutionalized environment and are subject to social expectations and pressures from a range of domains, including their colleagues, their department leadership, their university and members of their discipline. Recent efforts to understand how the behavior of an academic’s peers shapes the nature of academic’s engagement with industry have suggested that there are strong cohort effects, in that the entrepreneurial behavior of one’s colleagues in the same department will encourage academics to become entrepreneurs themselves. This study builds on and extends this work by exploring how both the behaviors and attitudes of colleagues shape an academic’s engagement with industry. In doing so, it separates out the effects of what local peers do from what they think about industry engagement in order to gain better understanding the nature of the social processes that shape an academic’s decision to engage with industry. The analysis builds on a set of rich datasets that cover the industrial engagements of large sample of UK academics from physical and engineering sciences. The paper argues - and empirically demonstrates - that both behavioral and attitudinal cohort effects shape individual engagement behavior and attitudes, yet behavioral effects have a stronger impact than attitudinal effects. It explores the implications of these findings our understanding of cohort effects in professional organizations and for policies designed to encourage academics to engage with industry.