Sang Teck Oh, “Regulating Technology: State Competition and Diffusion of Autonomous Vehicles Laws” Research on competition-driven policy diffusion has primarily focused on domains tied to economic development policies, such as labor, finance, environment, and businesses. As economy increasingly intertwined with technological development, state policymakers in the United States compete to attract firms and human capital by formulating innovative regulations on emerging technologies. This study aims to investigate how state competition shapes the diffusion of emerging technology policies. Using the case of autonomous vehicle (AV) regulations, I examine the effects of competition on policy adoption and policy convergence and divergence dynamics. For the analysis, I conceptualize interstate competition incorporating the context of knowledge economy and I introduce a novel network-based measures of economic competition among the states using Census Job Flow data. The main finding suggests that competitive pressures increase the likelihood of adopting AV-related bills, even when controlling for standard competition measures such as geographic contiguity. Moreover, I found that policies tend to converge among competing states on average; however, the effects on the directions are contingent on regulatory capacity. Specifically, when a state possesses greater academic expertise, it tends to diverge from its competitors. This paper advances the conceptualization and measurement of state competition by introducing network-based measures and enhances our theoretical understanding of competitive diffusion processes.
Autonomous Vehicle Projects
Sang Teck Oh, “Regulating Technology: State Competition and Diffusion of Autonomous Vehicles Laws” Research on competition-driven policy diffusion has primarily focused on domains tied to economic development policies, such as labor, finance, environment, and businesses. As economy increasingly intertwined with technological development, state policymakers in the United States compete to attract firms and human capital by formulating innovative regulations on emerging technologies. This study aims to investigate how state competition shapes the diffusion of emerging technology policies. Using the case of autonomous vehicle (AV) regulations, I examine the effects of competition on policy adoption and policy convergence and divergence dynamics. For the analysis, I conceptualize interstate competition incorporating the context of knowledge economy and I introduce a novel network-based measures of economic competition among the states using Census Job Flow data. The main finding suggests that competitive pressures increase the likelihood of adopting AV-related bills, even when controlling for standard competition measures such as geographic contiguity. Moreover, I found that policies tend to converge among competing states on average; however, the effects on the directions are contingent on regulatory capacity. Specifically, when a state possesses greater academic expertise, it tends to diverge from its competitors. This paper advances the conceptualization and measurement of state competition by introducing network-based measures and enhances our theoretical understanding of competitive diffusion processes.
Sang Teck Oh, “Embedded Engineers: How Regional Professional Systems Shape Innovative Pracitces?” This paper contextualizes technical professionals' innovative practices, focusing particularly on the regional context. It presents a new approach to understanding regional effects on technical decision-making by conceptualizing region as a configuration of professions that constitutes a regional professional environment. I defined regional professional system as a system of engineering groups organized around a technology that varies by region. The key characteristic of a regional professional system is the professional dominance that a certain engineering group has over the approach and problem-solution space of technological development in a region. I hypothesized that regional professional systems guide individual technical professionals to follow the dominant approach in their region, and its effects depend on individual’s and the affiliated organization’s epistemological position in that region. I used autonomous vehicles as the empirical case because it is a novel and ambiguous technology that can be approached from diverse engineering professions, being at a developmental stage, and the dominant approach varies by regions. I used patents for my source of data and interviews with engineers to supplement the quantitative results. I found that regional professional systems have direct effects on individual patenting behavior in mechanical engineering dominant region but not in computer science dominant region. The contingent effects of regional dominance that depends on the position of the expert and their organization within a region were significant for both regions, such that effects on a subordinate group were stronger than on a dominant group. In discussion, I explained the heterogeneity in the two regional contexts in terms of their different industrial and disciplinary characteristics. These findings contribute to our understanding of power relationships among collaborative innovation groups and extends the concept of system of professions by integrating regional variance into it.
Sang Teck Oh, “Laboratorization of Cities: How Cities Became Testbeds for the Autonomous Vehicles?” Cities have become laboratories for the development of autonomous vehicles in the United States since 2013. The laboratorization of cities or the diffusion of living labs is a social phenomenon due to the development of data-intensive technologies. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have examined various cases of living labs, studying their implications and operations. However, less research has focused on investigating the causes of laboratorization and the factors that accelerate and legitimize this process. In this paper, I investigate the cultural, regulatory, and professional contexts that shape this phenomenon. I highlight the emergence of discourses on technological inevitability, economic competition among regulators, and the professional acceptance of safety rules, with a particular emphasis on the role of techno-politics across these domains. In the discussion section, I explore the social consequences of the laboratorization of autonomous vehicles, particularly emphasizing the potential marginalization of citizens. This paper contributes to the fields of STS studies, the sociology of testing, and the politics of artificial intelligence.
Sociology of Science Projects
Sang Teck Oh & Jason Owen-Smith “Competition, Power, and Reproduction of Science” One of the fundamental tensions in the reproduction of science is that graduate students need to develop their own independent work while advancing their supervisors’ research. Why do some students adhere more closely to their supervisor’s work by replicating it, while others do not? Our study focuses on the effects of competition and group power dynamics to explain the varying degrees of replication. Theories of competition offer two opposing predictions regarding this tension. Some contend that competition drives differentiation, while others predict that it leads to homogenization. We argue that the effects of competition are contingent on the power dynamics within a team, which is defined as the dependency of graduate students on faculty. We use the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) data repository as a central source and employ natural language processing (NLP) techniques to construct variables. To measure the degree of replication, we use doc2vec method to calculate the text similarity between funding abstracts and dissertation abstracts. Topic modeling is employed to measure the crowdedness of research field, which indicates the level of competitive pressure. As a result, we found that competition drives differentiation. However, the effects are contingent on group power dynamics. As graduate students’ dependence on faculty grows, and as faculty exerts more power over graduate students, the competitive differentiation effects diminish. Our study has implications for theories of competition, sociology of science, organizational theories, and science policy.
Sang Teck Oh & Jason Owen-Smith “Mapping the Knowledge Space: Grant Topics, the Productivity, and Impact of University Research” We conceptualize a university as a reservoir of capabilities for the innovation and the production of new knowledge. Discovery and innovation alike are the results of process of recombination, where existing ideas, skills, and capacities are brought together to generate new things. While large body of literature has focused on the institutional and organizational characteristics of university research capabilities, we emphasize an abstract “knowledge space” defined by the topics that are covered by a university’s research grants and the networks among topics those grants create and sustain. While organizational, institutional, and social characteristics of organizations also contribute to their innovative capabilities, knowledge space offers an important addition to our efforts to understand scientific productivity and impact. We use LDA topic modeling techniques and data drawn from the abstracts of funded grants from all science agencies to characterize university knowledge space. This paper emphasizes two dimensions: complexity and distinctiveness. Complexity represents the diversity and uniqueness of the elements of each university’s topic portfolio. Distinctiveness indicates how many unique or atypical combinations of topics a university maintains. We argue that increases in the complexity of research capabilities are associated with increases in research productivity. By contrast, increases in the distinctiveness of research capabilities are negatively associated with research productivity but positively associated with high science impact. Cross-sectional models of grant obligations, publication flows, and high impact articles provide initial empirical support for our hypotheses.
Sang Teck Oh, Jinseok Kim, Jason Owen-Smith, “Demographic Dynamics of Scientific Community and National Research Capacity in Computer Science” Examining the determinants of national research capacity is crucial from both academic and policy perspectives. This study argues that the demographic dynamics of the scientific community significantly influence national research outputs. To articulate these dynamics, we employ Price and Gursey’s (1965) concepts of transients and continuants, which categorize authors by tracking their publication records. Despite this framework’s theoretical importance, a methodological challenge known as “author name disambiguation” has hindered its advancement. To address this, we introduce a novel machine-learning based name disambiguation technique to identify and categorize authors accurately. Using this new methodology, we construct three national-level demographic dynamics indicators: transience, continuance, and renewal rate. We then analyze their effects on research productivity and scientific impact, measured by publication and citation counts, respectively. We collected data in the field of computer science spanning years from 2000 to 2017, and tested our hypotheses using a first-order autoregressive correlation model (AR1). We found positive effects of continuance on both productivity and impact, a positive effect of renewal rate on productivity, and an inverted U-shaped relationship between transience and both outcomes. Our study contributes to the literature on science policy, science of science, and bibliometric analysis.
Policy Related Projects
Sang Teck Oh & Daniel Yang, “When Economic Interests and Moral Values Clash in Policymaking: The Legalization of Sports Betting in the United States” Policymakers often encounter challenges when economic interests clash with moral values in regulatory decisions. Prior studies have reported mixed results as to whether policy adoption is predominantly driven by economic incentives or moral principles. Using the legalization of sports betting in the U.S. as a study case, we investigate how economic and moral factors within states influence policy adoption and the degree of restrictiveness imposed. Sports betting legalization has the potential to generate economic gains, serving as a motivation for state policymakers to adopt the policy and allow more permissive regulatory environments. However, moral concerns linked to religion and educational values hinder such decisions. We conduct an event history analysis using cases of sports betting legalization across U.S. states from 2013 to 2022. The findings show that economic factors predominantly drive policy adoption, whereas moral values shape the level of policy restrictiveness. Specifically, states with more casinos and elevated unemployment rates are likely to legalize sports betting, whereas decisions to restrict college sports betting are more common in states that emphasize educational morality. This finding highlights the significance of considering various policy outputs, as economic and moral factors could serve as distinct underlying influences.