| During the 1980s, in an effort to revitalize their troubled high technology industries, the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States extended their role in coordinating pre-competitive research and development (R&D) activities among industries and universities by pointing to the perceived successes of Japanese technology development programs as justification for so doing. They instituted explicit attempts to introduce a new set of institutions aiming to improve the innovative performance of national firms. These pre-competitive R&D consortia are the Alvey program (1983--1987) in the UK and SEMATECH (1987-- ) and MCC (1983-- ) in the US, whose establishment have often been considered as fundamental shift of R&D policy in those countries.;This dissertation makes two claims. Firstly, unlike the standard stories often portrayed by the literature of policy convergence or the epistemic community, foreign observers often misinterpret and produce hazy images of the complex reality in the course of drawing lessons from other countries. Two, as foreign models are adopted by the policy community, these models are placed in the context of their own complicated systems of national innovation. Much of the theoretical contributions this dissertation hopes to make are framed under the rubric of policy convergence or policy transfer.;To make more sense of the political process of policy emulation, one must take analysis beyond previous studies of convergence which are based on overly deterministic logic and a static conceptualization of the process. The argument presented in the dissertation also contrasts with the main thrust of the so-called "convergence" literature. In general, this literature contends that structures of production and state/society (economy) relations tend to converge among all advanced industrial countries through processes of competition, imitation, and globalization, as well as through the diffusion of what are generally regarded as "best practices" in relation to given situations. However, these studies tend to underestimate the resilience of specifically national, and therefore distinctive innovative systems. Furthermore, if one recognizes that national innovation systems are a collection of "tightly bundled packages of specific national resources, institutions, and legacies," piecemeal adoption of a single "best practice" is extremely difficult without changing other related institutions in each system simultaneously. Thus, the way this dissertation deals with this problem is to bring in the study of the policy community to incorporate sector specific analysis reflecting more realistic accounts of both political and economic uncertainty than are usually given. |
