Understanding the role of the state in research policy: insights from Malaysia and Indonesia

The paper examines the role of the state in research policy and in managing organizational change in universities in Malaysia and in Indonesia in order to build a strong knowledge base. By ‘knowledge’, I refer to scientific knowledge as a point of an inquiry of knowledge based societies. Scientific knowledge is a typology of knowledge that is oft attributed to university as a knowledge-producing organization. Behind such expectation of university producing scientific knowledge, there exist institutional and social arrangements that underpin policy and knowledge production processes. I attempt to examine these arrangements by asking the following main question: what is the role of the state in terms of research policy and in managing organizational change in universities? I define ‘the state’ as Ministry of Higher Education, whereas ‘research policy’ is defined broadly to include written policy pertaining to research for universities. Studies on research policy in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia, have been lacking in terms of empirical contribution at a macro and micro level in Malaysia and in Indonesia. Indeed there have been contributions with regard to the role of universities in terms of the triple helix innovation in Malaysia (Razak and Saad 2007) and science policy analysis in Malaysia (Gerke and Evers 2015), Whilst in Indonesia, studies in STS (see Amir 2012; Amir and Nugroho 2013) call for one to revisit concept of technological state and observe how institutions, networks and practices of technoscience are socially constructed. The paper will conceptually utilize archival analysis on the one hand and a sociological approach inspired by sociology of organization (see Etzioni 1961; Bermann 2006) on the other hand. By using a qualitative method and case studies of President University in Cikarang, Indonesia in 2010 and University of Science Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia in 2015, the paper offers empirical lens and insights into the role of the state in research policy and in managing change in universities.