Bureaucratic Rationale and Use of an Academic Concept in Policy-Making: The Rise and Fall of the Regional Innovation System in South Korea

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of the interface between academic research and regional policy. According to the literature on policy rationale, policy makers select elements from existing academic research that fit their policy rationale. We further expand on this idea and argue that bureaucrats not only passively choose academic concepts, but also actively reconstruct them. To show this, we theoretically distinguish between three different levels of policy rationale-meta, intermediate, and specific-and analyze the way the Regional Innovation System was used in regional policies under South Korea's Roh Administration (2003-2008).

Is national border weakening in technology space? Analysis of inter-urban hierarchy with Chinese patent licensing data

“…However, they do not explain exactly how RIS improves NIS. Sonn and Kang (2016) study the national dimension of RIS, but their focus is mainly on national politics and policies, with little attention given to the relationship between NIS and RIS. From our point of view, neither GCM nor DHM has been explicitly discussed in RIS literature.…”

The regionalization of the counter hegemon: a response to Hassink, Gong and Marques

“…However, this simple model of knowledge utilisation does not hold in most cases. A policy is not a direct application of academic theory, but a combination of various elements, among which academic theory is only one (Sonn and Kang, 2016;Feser and Luger, 2003;Flanagan, Uyarra and Laranja, 2011;Benneworth, 2002;De Bruijn and Lagendijk, 2005). These complications mean that a single policy can be justified using different concepts.…”