Research | Gili S. Drori

MY RESEARCH

"Globalization, often referred to as primarily a flow of commodities and political influences, is currently recognized as also a major flow of

symbols, knowledge, standards and models of behavior. This mixture of the commodified and the cultural is crystallized in the work of international
organizations, of various types and scopes. And, the ever denser web of such international organizations, which provides the backbone of world society, also institutionalizes, formalizes and perpetuates world culture." (2005: 193)

“Governance is a product of a world steeped in rationalization and the primacy of individual actorhood. This cultural atmosphere of rationalization and actorhood leads to the translation of ‘management’ into ‘governance'.” (2006: 92)

“The most dominant among these global scripts and standards is developmentalism, and governance, commonly viewed as a means for achieving development, is also a scripted model. Governance infuses even state-led developmentalism with the logics of market and business rationality and thus with rationalized managerialism” (Drori, Jang and Meyer, 2006: 222)

My research interests include the comparative study of science and innovation, globalization, and rationalization. I also study branding, world culture, technology entrepreneurship, higher education, and global health – analyzing all from an institutionalist and comparative perspective.

My current research agenda concerns the branding of universities (how marketing strategies shape higher education and its organization), business and technological entrepreneurship (how economic arrangements and business practices reflect global ideas, often in disconnect from local context), and the rationalization of governance and management (how professionalization joins other institutional forces in shaping governance models and propelling their global diffusion).

University Branding

Universities worldwide are in the midst of a dramatic transformation of their administrative and scholarly goals. Such reforms are driven by a sense of global competition among higher education institutions, now requiring universities to set strategic plans for growth and excellence. Complementing strategies for financial solvency, global ranking, and curricula, universities also approach their identity in a strategic manner and increasingly concentrate efforts on branding. What is the impact of the coming of marketing and branding to universities? How has the introduction of these managerialist concepts impacted academia and its missions of research, teaching and relevance?

Together with my dear colleagues, Giuseppe Delmestri and Achim Oberg, we created a data-set of visual artifacts of universities in 25 countries. We collected the university's official emblem (seal or crest), main web-site image, and favicon. We then analyzed the content of such visual artifacts, for references to various social categories and for their aesthetic features.

We are currently embarking on a series of analyses of these visual data, working to identify cross-national variations in university branding, to capture the institutional models, or logics, that govern the visualized identity of universities, and to trace the relational context of universities and its impact on tendency towards branding.

University branding is a timely matter, with campaigns launched in universities worldwide. Several tales of current university branding campaigns pointedly exemplify the pattern we describe. See, for example:

- University of California's campaign, December 2012

- Drake University's 2010 D+

Global Diffusion of STI

My interest in the global diffusion of technology leads me onto several research paths. First, I focus on the relationship between technology diffusion and social inequality. While the revolution of information and communications technologies, such as the Internet, has meant that within its short duration more people around the world have access to more information and at a lower cost, plenty of people worldwide are still left behind. The criteria defining those who are left behind remains these that have marked social marginality for a long while: they are further away from the global core, namely across the divides of development, gender, ethnicity, race and the urban/rural divide. I trace the contours of global technological divides; I also consider the policies that are formulated to remedy such global inequalities and analyze the myths that underly them.

Second, I investigate the global cutlure of technological innovation and entreprenurship. By compiling a unique data base of business incubators and technoparks worldwide, I study what conditions encourage their establishment in various countries and their unique impact on economic development. Specifically, I assess the relative impact of national or local conditions (such as strength of local support, legacy of local business and industry, and existence of a local consultancy sector) and of international or global conditions (such as the ties with the global business community or immersion in entrepreneurial networks) on the founding rates and on the performance of such site of technological innovation and entreprenurship.