Dead Cat, Live Cat, If Schrodinger’s Cat Catches Mice, It’s a Good Cat: Organizational Chimerism

• In Event: Doing Science in Asia: Linkages and Tensions

Abstract

“Biotechnology with Chinese characteristics” is a sociotechnical imaginary aiming to create not only novel, distinctly “Chinese” technologies, but also new ethical frameworks, modalities of social order, and constellations of state, science, and market collaboration (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). It centers on a principle of “technological domestication” whereby fears of technologically-induced pollution surrounding genetically modified technology are recast into an opposition to foreign aggressors, be they countries, companies, or individual actors. This paper focuses on how this sociotechnical imaginary spurs the formation of new organizational forms within China’s agrobiotechnology sector. I show how solidifying the salience of the Chinese/foreign dichotomy drives not only substantial organizational isomorphism among state-owned and private firms, but also the emergence of an organizational phenomenon I refer to as “organizational chimerism”. “Chimeric” Chinese technology firms concurrently express the characteristics of—and function as—commercial companies and academic laboratories, switching between different identities in a contextually dependent manner like an agentic version of Schrodinger’s cat. Maintaining an undefined status enables “organizational chimera” to take on high risk, long term projects of national significance, and maximizes these firms’ flexibility vis a vis the state and the market. It thus allows Chinese technology enterprises to negotiate with plural tiers of the government whilst not being tainted by the party-state’s legitimacy crises. While much of the scholarship on the biotechnology industry’s emergence articulates how divisions between academic science and the market have blurred and moved, I show how these distinctions can essentially be erased by drawing new moral boundaries across other ontological axes.

Author

• Abigail Coplin, Columbia University, Department of Sociology