Social Science Research Council

The massive fortification of intellectual property is one of the stunning success stories of the neoliberal project. It has been the primary method deployed to transmute the marketplace of ideas from a dream scenario into quotidian reality. The dogma that no one would think, or at least convey their thoughts to others, unless they somehow received market recompense for their labors, is a tremendous slander on the history of science and culture, but nevertheless has carried the day to become folk wisdom in the neoteric order. Students have to be taught not to ‘steal’ digital music files, even though within their lifetimes making copies of music had been treated as fair use under copyright law. Likewise, students have to be taught not to ‘steal’ research that they may have carried out themselves, unless they have secured permissions from everyone from their thesis advisor to their university technology transfer office. Since the marketplace is the greatest information processor known to humankind, there is no way that a few extra property rights imposed here and there might actually throttle the further production of knowledge and culture.

There have been some interesting analyses of what has been happening to higher education emanating from the beleaguered departments of education, themselves caught in the cross-hairs of the business consultants hired to slim down and streamline the modern university. By sharp contrast with the economists, these analysts approach what has been happening to science and higher education as a subset of larger political movement, one which seeks to re-engineer democracy by privatizing one of the largest sectors of state expenditure, namely, the provision of education. In short, universities are being exhorted to become more like corporations – to regard their products as “information” and “human capital”, to treat their students more like consumers – as a prelude for the state to withdraw from responsibility for the provision of education.

Of all the trends that impinge upon Viridiana’s day-to-day activities, this is the one that is treated as obvious by all her peers. The percentage of national R&D expenditure provided by the Federal government in the US has been falling since roughly 1967, while that emanating from private industry has been rising. Federal dollar expenditures for R&D have been more or less flat over the last 15 years. Science policy experts know this wasn’t only a matter of tight budgets, but that it involves a dramatic reversal of principles which had become ingrained in the political psyche in the years just after WWII.

The globalization of corporate R&D is one of the characteristic hallmarks of the new regime of knowledge production. Of course, multinational companies headquartered in smaller countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland have long internationalized their R&D activities essentially from their inception; but the more striking trend is the sharp rise in international outsourcing of research across the board since the 1980s.

The drive to capture all manner of intellectual artifacts, subjecting them to finely-specified formal contractual relations and market discipline is the culmination of all the previous trends covered so far: the creeping objectification of information, fallout from the mechanization of thought by the computer and low-cost instantaneous forms of communication such as the Internet, the collapse of socialism and hence an ideologically bipolar world where politically sensitive areas were kept fenced off, the de-industrialization of the West, and the conviction that economic growth derives from scientific research and development.

There are many fine histories of the postwar development of the computer and the construction of the Internet, such that it might appear almost superfluous to mention them as a prime determinant in the transformation of our understanding of the production and distribution of information. Their joint impact upon global communications and the control and storage of information conventionally makes reference to two principles said to be inscribed in the very technological trajectory of their development: Moore’s Law, which guaranteed that the per-unit cost of a calculation and/or memory unit was destined to fall exponentially over the horizon of its relevance; and the so-called “end-to-end” principle in the packet-switching architecture of the Internet, where ‘all’ the coordination and control functions were supposedly relegated to the edges of the network, and the internal nodes of the Internet were deemed neutral with regard to simple routing functions.

The United States has been losing net manufacturing employment to production facilities overseas since 1989. Not only were entire geographical locales devastated. Some pundits proceeded to try and paste a positive ☺face on the phenomenon, by suggesting that advanced economies were becoming increasingly ‘weightless’, or else would graduate to a third stage of capitalism consisting almost exclusively of the service sector, or indeed disengage from gross physical production processes altogether. Of course, most people recognized that much talk bordered on delusional, but nevertheless managed to attain a patina of sensibility by engaging in locutions such as “The Information Society” or “The New Knowledge Economy”.

Is Viridiana Jones to blame for her befuddlement concerning what has happened to her profession and her university over the course of her lifetime? By and large, I would be inclined to say no. Existing analyses of the commercialization of science and the transformation of the university on the part of economists, philosophers, sociologists and science studies scholars have left much to be desired, to put it politely. One of the stranger recent developments has been the performance of a small number of econometric exercises by economists to supposedly quantify the extent of harm done to science by certain aspects of the modern commercial regime.

Excerpts from the first chapter of Philip Mirowski’s forthcoming book, ScienceMart™: A primer on the new economics of science, to be published by Harvard University Press, will regularly appear on Knowledge Rules as The Viridiana Jones Chronicles.–N.G.
It’s not easy making a living in the knowledge biz these days. Of late our heroine, the intrepid academic researcher Viridiana Jones, often feels trapped between the Scylla of Disneyfication of higher education and the Charybdis of Free EnronPrise in securing a patron to support her inquiries, and finds herself sometimes wistfully wondering what life might have been like if she had gone and gotten that law degree instead….