Quality control and validation boundaries in a triple helix of university-industry-government: "Mode 2" and the future of university research

How is quality control organized in the new "Mode-2" Production of scientif ic Knowledge? When institutional boundaries are increasingly blurred in a t riple helix of university-industry-government relations, criteria for quali ty control in the production of scientific knowledge can be expected to cha nge at. the interfaces. The categorization in terms of two nodes of knowled ge Production was introduced by Gibbons et al. (1994) to describe changes i n the networks of scientific communications (funding patterns, research con figurations, styles of knowledge management, etc.). These changes were spec ified mainly as institutional parameters in order to deal with the subjects of R&D management and S&T policies, that is, ex ante (Spiegel-Rosing, 1973 ; Van den Daele et at, 1979). We focus on the "validation boundaries" emerg ing from the differences between Mode 1 and Mode 2; that is, on the criteri a for quality control that can analytically and reflexively be brought to t he fare ex Post The shift from an institutional frame of reference to the d ynamics of communications enables us to clarify several Problems in the dis cussion of the future of university research.