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Related Content: Balfour and Newbold (PAR September/October 2016)

Abstract
This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as "robotic bureaucracy." The rise of regulations and their contribution to administrative burden on university research have led university administrators to increasingly rely on robotic bureaucracy to handle compliance. This article draws on the administrative burden, behavioral public administration, and electronic communications and management literatures, which are increasingly focused on the psychological and cognitive bases of behavior. These literatures suggest that the assumptions behind robotic bureaucracy ignore the extent to which these systems shift the burden of compliance from administrators to researchers.

AbstractThis study contributes to the literature on accelerators which focuses on private sector accelerators by providing an analysis of an accelerator in the public sphere that works with early-stage, science-driven applications, the National Science Foundation's Innovation-Corps (I-Corps) program. The methodology is based on a comparison of the ability of the services delivered through the I-Corps program to teams at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) to speed their venture project discontinuation decisions over and above those of researchers receiving baseline commercialization services only. We find modest evidence that the I-Corps program helped Georgia Tech I-Corps teams make faster decisions to discontinue venture projects. The total savings of quicker I-Corps project discontinuation are estimated at more than $3.6 million over the 8-year observation period.

The article examines administrative workarounds in the context of university research administration. The empirical results from 116 semi-structured interviews with academic researchers with active National Science Foundation awards are framed by a "Rules Response" model positing relationships among rules compliance requests, administrative burden, red tape, and response choices, including compliance, appeal, rule bending, rule breaking, and workaround behaviors. Propositions are presented and reviewed in light of empirical results. The article concludes with implications of empirical results for improving the Rules Response model and a more general discussion of research needed to improve the understanding of both rules compliance and workarounds.