On Com Modification and the Governance of Academic Research

8/6/2019 On Com Modification and the Governance of Academic Research

1/15

On Commodication and the Governance of AcademicResearch

Merle Jacob

Published online: 12 December 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract The new prominence given to science for economic growth and industrycomes with an increased policy focus on the promotion of commodication andcommercialization of academic science. This paper posits that this increased interestin commodication is a new steering mechanism for governing science. This isachieved by rst outlining what is meant by the commodication of scienticknowledge through reviewing a selection of literatures on the concept of com-modication. The paper concludes with a discussion of how commodicationfunctions as a means for governing science.

Keywords Commodication Science Gift Commodity Governance

Introduction

One of the recurring themes in social science has been that late modernity will tend

to increasing commodication (Everett 2003 ; Harvey 2001 ; Thrift 2006 ; Tinic1997 ). The concept of commodication itself has undergone some change insofar asit has moved from its traditional location in the Marxist analysis of capitalism tosocial theory, and, in so doing, the understanding of what is commodication maybe said to have undergone some revision since Marxs summary treatment. Giventhe foregoing, it should come as no surprise to nd that higher education andresearch is one of the new locations where commodication processes areincreasingly said to apply (Weisbrod et al. 2008 ). Pestre ( 2005 ), for example, has

M. JacobResearch Policy Institute/CIRCLE, Lund University, PO Box 117, 22100 Lund, Sweden

M. Jacob ( & )Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, Oslo University, PO Box 1108,Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norwaye-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

123

Minerva (2009) 47:391405DOI 10.1007/s11024-009-9134-2


2/15

argued that since the 1980s we have moved from a system of science in societydominated by a vision of science as public good to a system dominated by a visionof science as mainly a nancial good . Pestre and others contend that this process isto a large extent rooted in an extension of the system of property rights and in

nding the right balance between what can be commodied and thus transferred tothe sphere of private property and what needs to be public (Biagioli 2006 ; Pestre2005 ; Mirowski and van Horn 2005 ).

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The rst objective is to explore a conceptualproblematization of commodication that goes beyond the extant approach which isto treat commodication as merely the exchange of knowledge for money. Thesecond is to use this to show how commodication has become a steeringmechanism for the governance of public science.

There is an abundance of literature within both higher education studies and

research and innovation policy that thematizes the increasing commodication/ commercialization of university science (Kleinman and Vallas 2001 ; Geuna andMuscio 2009 ; Valentin et al. 2006 ; Siegel et al. 2007 ). While this literature is veryinformative about the concrete instances of commercialization in specic universityand national settings, its primarily empirical thrust leaves little room for reectionon the nature of commercialization and/or commodication. Further, there is verylittle explicit linkage between these empirically driven narratives and the centralproblem of research and innovation policy, i.e. how resource ows and allocationprinciples function as steering mechanisms for university science. One possible

reason for this lacuna may be that the majority of contributions on these issues haveas their primary concern the elucidation of the immediate impacts of commodi-cation and commercialization on issues such as academic freedom and theuniversitys mission. This is a lacuna that is not particular to the problem of commercialization but applies to the majority of the corpus of work that focuses onthe impacts of the changing mission of universities in Europe (Dale 2007 ).

The present contribution takes its point of departure in the problematization of commodication as one aspect of the problematique of governance as it plays out inthe empirical context of the European public university system. The paper ismindful of the fact that there is no European public university system as such butrather a heterogeneous multiverse of institutions which are united by a similarity of functions. That being said, it is possible to discuss systemic changes on an abstractlevel, as this paper proposes to do, since one of the more remarkable aspects of thelast two decades of national policies is the degree of similarity which one observesat the level of general prescriptions and explicated intentions. Commodication ishere dened after Marx as those instances in which knowledge is exchanged formoney where the knowledge is packaged in a form that the buyer can use theknowledge without the intervention of the producer. The paper singles outcommodication as a process which is distinct from commercialization in order tomake transparent how commodication functions as a steering mechanism. Thisapproach has the additional advantage of creating room for separating issues of ethics arising from commercialization processes from issues of governance. Forinstance, there is a body of research which treats the issue of commercialization andits impacts on the academy (Krimsky 2003 ). This research problematizes how

392 M. Jacob

123


3/15

conicts of interest arising from commercialization of research (biomedical researchin particular) create incentives for withholding behavior and other types of departures from the professional norm in scientic conduct. This type of researchshall for the purposes of this paper be classied as thematizing issues of ethics and

public trust in science rather than governance. By focusing on the connectionbetween commodication and governance, the paper can provide a route to linkingtwo bodies of research on the commercialization of science which are currentlythematized within different frames. Here, I refer to narratives such as McSherry(2001 ) and Rhoten and Powell ( 2007 ) on the one hand, and the growing body of work on biopolitics and commodication (Prasad 2009 ), or creativity, invention andcapitalism (Thrift 2006 ) on the other. These narratives all thematize the implicationsof the increasing entaglement of science and capitalism. Last but not least, byexploring the implications of commodication for the governance of science, one is

able to situate the ongoing debate about the changing context of universities inEurope in the global problematique of modernity which has been a central concernof modern social science.

Commodication of Everything

Commodication is a primary concept in modern social theory, and its applicationto the governance of academic knowledge must be understood in the context of the

state of the art with respect to understanding processes of commodication in latemodernity. Any discussion of the concept of commodication must be prefaced witha reference to Marxs succinct denition of a commodity as an external object, athing which through its qualities satises human needs of whatever kind (Marx1990 :125). This status is according to Marx independent of the type of need thething satises. Thus, a thing may be a commodity which is directly consumed or itmay be a commodity by dint of being part of the means of production. Marx refersto this condition as use value but use value is only a necessary condition forrendering the status of commodity to a thing. Commodity status requires a furthercondition to be fullled, and that is exchange value, i.e. use value must not only befullled for the producer of the commodity, but it must be shown that the thing hasuse value for others and that this use value (a) can be realized without theintervention of the producer and (b) can be priced. Marx further argued for adistinction between use and exchange value by stating that use value was a propertyof the commodity in question and refers to the needs it fullls. Exchange value of one commodity versus another is, however, determined with reference to a thirduniversal equivalent. Reasoning from Marx, Lyotard applied the above concep-tualization to academic knowledge and observed that:

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledgethey supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume theform already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumersto the commodities they produce and consume that is, the form of value.(Lyotard 1991 : p. 4)

On Commodication and the Governance of Academic Research 393

123


4/15

This denition, however, still leaves room for a conation of commercializationand commodication since Lyotard focuses only on the notion of attributing valueto knowledge and the existence of a buyerseller relationship. Thus, commissionedresearch would ll Lytotards criteria for knowledge as commodity. The process of

commodication entails more than the attribution of a monetary value to an object,although money equivalence is a necessary condition for commodication.Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that the state of commodication isneither absolute nor permanent (Kopytoff 1986 ), i.e. objects may exist ascommodities at one moment and as gifts at another. We owe this unveiling of thedynamic aspect of commodication to anthropological research on gifts andcommodities (Godelier 1999 ; Morris 1986 ) and more specically to Kopytoff (1986 ) who argued that commodication should be conceptualized as a process,where commodied things may have biographies in which they exist in the non-

commodied sphere for signicant parts of their lives. Kopytoffs contribution isimportant for two reasons, one is that it allows us to deal with the rather elusivecharacter of academic knowledge as product.

The second and interrelated issue is that it provides a way out of the impasseraised by Mauss and Marx, in that it allows us to explain how a thing can be bothgift and commoditya common sense relation which we know to exist but hashitherto resisted theoretical explanations. For instance, a carpenter who sells hercarpentry skills for wages may be said to have commodied her labor in thosemoments for which she receives wages for her carpentry. The same individual may

donate her labor to a neighbor or a friend during the weekends and in thosemoments she would have transformed her labor into a gift. This uidity betweencommodity and gift status is quite common but has been overlooked in all butanthropological accounts.

Marx set the tone for the contemporary view of commodication with hisanalysis of the transformation of human labor into a commodity. He did this byshowing how industrial capitalism effectively objectied human labor by treating itas separate from its human owner and as embodying two forms of utility: use andexchange value. The use value of a commodity consists in its utility within a speciccontext of use whereas its exchange value represents the monetary value which it isassigned in the process of exchange. Contemporary notions of commodicationbuild on and extend this association to incorporate aspects of commodicationoverlooked by but consistent with Marx. One such extension may be found in theaddition of a third category of value, i.e. aesthetic value ( Haug 1986 ; Bohme 2003 ;Thrift 2006 ). Aesthetic value is the value created in the process of staging andrepresenting the commodity in the market. The commodication of knowledge mayarguably be seen as part of the development of capitalism towards an aestheticeconomy in that knowledge has been elevated from an auxiliary role in the creationand production of other commodities to the status of being a commodity in itself.

A second extension would be to include insights from Mauss analysis of the giftas any object or service, need or luxury, transacted as part of social, rather thanpurely monetary or material relations. The Maussian gift economy is marked bythree related obligations: the obligation to give; the obligation to accept and theobligation to reciprocate. This explains why, in contemporary social theory, the

394 M. Jacob

123


5/15

notion of commodity is usually haunted by the spectre of gift. Maussian gifts andMarxist commodities are both exchange relations but while gifts are assigned to theprivate realm, commodities belong indubitably to the realm of the market.Anthropological analysis unites production and consumption by showing that gift

and commodity, rather than representing two mutually exclusive relations, arepoints along the same continuum.

The problem of the commodication of scientic knowledge demonstrates onceagain the inextricable linkages that exist between production and consumption. Infact, one of the most popular arguments advanced by European policymakers forpromoting commodication in science is its potential for increasing the number of consumers of science. This policy argumentation ignores the fact that knowledgeproduction in science bears a great deal of similarity to Mauss gift economy in sofar as it is dependent on a system in which the three related obligations of Mauss

gift economy are met. A typical example of this would be the scientic seminar inwhich the author presents a paper and the audience reciprocates by attending theseminar and providing comments which the author uses to develop the paper. Thiscycle continues with the publication of the paper.

A third extension to Marxs initial approach to commodication would be tofollow in part Kants line and investigate the ethical implications of commodi-cation. This particular type of inquiry is common among those who wish toproblematize, for example, issues related to the new possibilities raised by bio/ genetic technologies for reproduction, cosmetic surgery and organ donation

(Krimsky 2003 ;Green 2001 ; Holland 2001 ).

Science: Gift or Commodity

Scientic knowledge is a controversial object for commodication since it is feltthat the social norms and procedures which constitute the organization of scienticknowledge production and the nature of knowledge inhibits commodication, or atthe very least makes it difcult to sustain the monopolistic control necessary forcommodication. One of the institutionalized myths about science is that scientistsare devoted to the creation and communication of knowledge and that this sharedpreoccupation requires a certain openness, sharing and dedication to quality that isincompatible with the exchange value logic of commodity transactions. Altruism inthe service of knowledge is an undeniable aspect of the scientic community, and isone of the issues that divides those who conceptualize science solely in economicterms (Walstad 2002 ) and those who are less convinced of the plausibility of thisargument (Mirowski and Mirjam-Sent 2002 ; Ma ki 1999 ). The advent of theknowledge society/economy leitmotif in policy has contributed an additionalimpetus to the debate about the possibility and/or desirability of commodifyingknowledge.

Attempts to understand science in economic terms have been for the most partfocused on revealing the hidden economics of the purported altruism of thescientic community by establishing that there is a market within science and thatthese purported gifts are part of this market (Coase 1974 ; Stephan 1996 ; Kitcher


123


6/15

2001 ; Turner 2002 ). These arguments give testimony to the existence of a marketinternal to science which is a necessary but not sufcient condition for science to becommodied. Notwithstanding the fact that such issues have for a long time been of interest to a small community in economics, they have not, for instance, been

integrated into policy for governing higher education and/or research.Mertons normative ethos of science both illustrates and explains how the three

related obligations associated with the Maussian gift are enacted in science (Merton1942 ). Callon and others have also shown that gift giving in science relies on thecreation and afrmation of social ties usually referred to by anthropologists as afeature of gift economies, gift giving in science does give rise to social relations.

Further, a Maussian analysis of exchange in science would necessitate that wefocus on questions such as what is the social understanding of the nature of science?, what is the nature of the relationship(s) that scientists share with each

other? And how does the exchange of knowledge reect and recreate researchnetworks and their relationships? All of these types of questions have been hithertoposed by those working in the tradition of the social studies of science. However,with the possible exception of a few contributions (Latour and Woolgar 1986 ; Rip1994 ; Callon 1994 ; Mirowski and Mirjam-Sent 2002 ), this tradition has not beeninterested in characterizing the exchange relations in science in terms of gift orcommodity. Moreover, attempts to develop a Maussian understanding of theexchange economy in science encounter a hard limit because of the sacricialelement which Mauss posited as a necessary condition.

In fact, many of the social relations in science are founded on rationales that areclosely akin to those one nds elsewhere. The supervisor-student relationship, forinstance, can and often does lead to a life-long association and dependence whichmimics kinship relations. In some scientic communities, the relationship betweenstudent and supervisor continues after graduation insofar as the student trades on thesupervisors reputation in order to gain access to postdoctoral positions. This type of connection is more common and explicitly acknowledged in the U.S. than in Europebut plays a role in both systems. Likewise, placing students in particularcommunities may also generate future research funds etc. to the supervisor and/orresearch group. Thus, an exchange situation clearly exists. However, the jury is stillout on how these transactions relate to market principles and to what extent theydepend on science existing in a commodied state. Such transactions morediscernably embody the logic of related obligations outlined by Mauss, and may infact owe their existence in part to a resistance to commodication.

Although the extant debate about markets in science has consequences for theprocess of commodication, it has not hitherto dealt explicitly with the subject of commodication. Instead, the economics of science has limited itself to discussingmarkets and how markets operate in science without recognizing the need for whatPolanyi described as the commodity ction. This is the narrative which preparesthe thing to be commodied and re-presents it in a form that can be exchanged. Thisoversight may in part have to do with the elusive nature of the market in science.Here, I refer to three issues primarily. The rst is the tendency of researchers totransform resources into different forms of capital. This is the issue that has beendiscussed the most and here I refer to notions such as the credibility cycle, invisible

396 M. Jacob

123


7/15

colleges, etc. which demonstrate how scientic communities, groups circulate ideas,money and prestige (Callon 1994 ; Owen-Smith 2003 ).

The second way markets in science are elusive is that it is a taken for grantedaspect of the conduct of science that one may transform gifts into commodities, as in

when individuals give time or even their bodies to scientic research. Theknowledge produced in this context may later be applied in the creation of a drug orother medical intervention which would later exist as commodity. This commod-ication move is usually justied by making a strict distinction betweenknowledge and product, a process that is alternatively known as downstreamcommodication (Holland 2001 ; Kaushik Sunder 2006 ).

Downstream commodication is one way of describing the point when a gift hasbeen signicant in the creation of a commodity for example patients providingtissue samples as gifts to science. Science is given free rein to later transform these

gifts into products, for instance, when the tissue is used in research that later leads toan identiable product. One of the functions of patent applications is to provide adistinction between the gift input and the eventual product and seek legal protectionfor its enforcement in the marketplace. Even with such distinctions, controversy canarise over the difference between the product and the gift. For instance, those whosolicit donations of tissues and other such resources for scientic use readily admitthe need for a level of ambiguity about the ends to which the donated material willbe used. One bio bank representative states that telling potential donors aboutprots and ties to companies would complicate the consent process (Katches et al.

2000 , italics added). The well known Moore case in which a commercial cell linewas developed from a blood sample is a telling example of the fact that theappellation downstream is not always successful in avoiding contestation of commodication.

The third aspect of elusiveness of market relations in science is thatpropertization does not necessarily involve commodication. By this I refer to thenotion of academic intellectual property on which practices in science such ascitation and acknowledgement depend. The publication or in some instances thepresentation of a paper is an ownership claim to those ideas circulated in the paperthat are not explicitly attributed to another author. Plagiarism is the failure torecognize someone elses authorial claim. This particular form of propertization isnot strictly speaking recognized as commodication. Thus, the rendering of knowledge into property is a necessary but not sufcient condition for thecommodication of knowledge. This brings us to the question of what propertieswould have to be present for scientic knowledge to be successfully commodied.

When is Scientic Knowledge Commodied?

The immediate response to the question of when is science commodied would beto refer to the well known artefacts of commodied knowledge such as licenses,patents and of course technology based start ups and their products. If we conneour discussion of scientic knowledge to that which is produced at universities, onewould recognize that discussions about the sale of knowledge include more than just


123


8/15

these more well known examples. Equally well known are executive trainingprogrammes, tuition fees and consultancy assignments. I would, however, like toreserve the term commodication for those instances when scientic knowledge ispackaged in a form that allows it to be traded and bought without the intervention of

its creator. Executive training programmes, tuition, etc., all forms of sellingknowledge which are dependent on the presence of the creator will be referred tohere as commercialization. In order to develop a conceptualization of commodi-cation that can be usefully applied to academic knowledge, this paper employsRadins conceptualization of commodication (Radin 1996 ). Radins interest is inexploring legal and ethical aspects of commodication in order to ground anargument about its limits, but the resultant categorization can be successfullyapplied to clarifying the conditions under which scientic knowledge may be said tobe commodied. Radin builds upon Marxs argument and suggests four conditions

must apply for commodication to be said to have occurred: objectication,fungibility, commensurability and money equivalence.

Objectication

This is the most intuitive aspect of the process of commodication, i.e. the act of ascribing thing status to some, or some aspect of, a social or material entity. Socialand material entity includes the human body and/or its constituent parts. Thus, thecells of a particular individual or even a group of individuals could be objectied in

much the same manner as her/their labor.

Fungibility

Following Radin, any object destined for exchange should be able to be tradedwithout any loss of value to the holder. Thus, a public research organizations(PRO) exchange of a patent for money should accrue no loss of value to the PRO orthe research group employed by the PRO. This argument appears to beunproblematic initially but becomes less so when applied to scientic knowledge.

The crux of the contention lies in the assumption that the trading parties share anidentical conception of the value of the article. Even when academic science isbundled and sold as a commodity, fungibility may be contested because of a varietyof reasons. Consider the example of ctional Professor W. Win who has producedresearch results which were later patented by his employer, the University of Flybynight (FU). The technology transfer ofce at FU has subsequently sold thepatent to a local rm, Acme Inc. Subsequent to the purchase, Professor Winsresearch team nds that they are now unable to continue to do research downstreamfrom the line of inquiry that led to the patent without paying royalties to Acme Inc.In this case, one might argue that the sale of the patent did lead to a loss of value interms of future ability to pursue research in that area. Of course, one might contendthat this is no different from the case of someone selling a product for one pricetoday and becoming aware one year later, that had she waited, she could haveincreased the price tenfold. The rules for market transactions clearly disallow a later

398 M. Jacob

123


9/15

claim by the seller to being cheated, but can these rules be said to apply forProfessor Wins case?

Commensurability

Thirdly, and closely related to this dilemma, is the commensurability condition forcommodication, i.e. that all things destined for exchange can be ordered against acommon metric and compared in terms of more or less value. This would imply thatone would be able to not only put a value on a particular knowledge product, but beable to express that value relative to other products. This practice is already quitecommon in higher education and research. For instance, scientic texts are routinelyassigned different prices by publishers and these prices are a function of the costs of production and a valuation of the potential worth of the book in the market. Likewise,

within the context of publicly funded education, governments price different types of education differently. The Swedish government, for instance, remunerates univer-sities at a higher rate for engineering students as opposed to social science students.Although the Swedish market for education is monopsonistic, the differentiation of pricing for social science and engineering education may arguably be said to be areection of their potential use value vis-a -vis each other.

Money equivalence is the fourth condition and this simply means that there is acommon metric for exchange of the commodity in question and that metric ismoney. This particular condition introduces some of the issues mentioned earlier in

this paper with respect to the gift-market nature of the economy of science. Theinstance of downstream commodication, for example, shows that the use of moneyas a common metric may be restricted to certain points. In such cases, knowledgecommodication follows the pattern outlined by Kopytoff who argues that the statusof being a commodity is not xed but part of a biography in which this status issubject to change.

In summary, one may argue that while scientic knowledge can be packaged in amanner that allows it to meet all of Radins conditions for commodication, asignicant number of unresolved problems remain. In the next section of this paper,

I turn to the second question of concern, i.e. how does commodication exertimperatives of governance?

Commodication and Governance

The governance of public science, otherwise known as research and innovationpolicy, is usually pursued via a number of steering mechanisms that involve amongother things: (1) the allocation of scarce resources to different areas of inquiry; (2)the pursuit of the common interest (ensuring that science pursues problems of interest to society and not just to science); (3) compensating for market failure 1 and

1 Compensating for market failure is one of the central arguments for public investment in R&D and therationale is that the state invests in R&D that would be unlikely to or have difculty in attracting privateinvestors.


123


10/15

(4) promoting the dissemination of scientic knowledge to the society as a whole.The aforementioned are the primary tasks of governance regimes for science insociety. This is rst and foremost a denition of governance as praxis which isdistinct although not unrelated to governance as outlined in philosophy of science

inspired discussions about the conduct of science such as Fullers The Governanceof Science or Poppers Open Society .

The praxis of governance has both normative intent and consequence, and manyof the disputes between scientists and governance practitioners often revolve aroundguidelines from the realm of praxis which conict with long established norms. Thedebate on the role of science in society and its implications for how research shouldbe conducted is one such example. Reasoning from the goals of research andinnovation policy and taking into account the four criteria outlined in the previousparagraph, one may deduce the way in which commodication could be used as a

policy tool for the governance of science. For the European policymaker,commodication is a useful tool in governance because it simultaneously providesa vehicle for proving the utility of science and generating wealth.

Commodication further assists in governance in that it contributes to resolvingthe problem of linking academic science to industry, which has been seen byEuropean policymakers to be a missing link in European policy for public R&D.The plausibility of these two arguments rests on yet another policy narrative whichhas two principal axioms: (1) that the knowledge economy demands that publicinvestment in science must give return in terms of contribution to economic

development and (2) that Europe lags behind the U.S. and Japan in terms of itsability to reap innovation benets from public investments in R&D. Commodi-cation is one, although not the only, means of achieving the aforementioned ends.Commercialization forms such as consultancy and commissioned research are alsoemployed as means to this end but the objectication and propertization of knowledge outputs are considered to be important ends in themselves. For instancein the case of Sweden, while the national legislation requires that universities focuson a very broad denition of dissemination, funding available for this task is almostexclusively earmarked for supporting patenting, rm formation and support servicesfor these activities.

Commodication is not only itself a governance mechanism but is often linked tomore principled issues such as the accountability of science to society. Thus,commodifying research results becomes a means of fullling the terms of thesciences contract with society. Interestingly enough, the re-presentation of commodied science as a means of promoting public accountability ignores earliermovements to democratize science which explicitly argued for a wide range of stakeholder voices in science, not simply those who could pay for inuence.

The Limits of Commodication as a Governance Mechanism

There are several consequences of this preference for the governance of science butI want to focus on three in particular. One is that the interchangeability of resourcesin science makes commodication a risky strategy since it is likely to increase the

400 M. Jacob

123


11/15

number of priority disputes due to additional monetary incentives to pursue suchdisputes. A second consequence of commodication in the context of the elusivenature of the market in science is that it ironically subverts the very accountabilitythat it is intended to promote by encouraging the blending of public and private

resources. This particular problem has been obscured but not avoided as a result of the legitimacy given to publicprivate partnerships rendered by the adoption of newpublic management as a hegemonic ideology in the public sector of OECD states. Athird is that the logic of commodication inevitably makes the university complicitin undermining the very process of knowledge dissemination that commodicationis intended to promote. This paradox arises from the need for the university tomaximize the monopolistic control over patents through extensions in order tosecure incomes accruing from such patents.

The above, taken together with the fact that research is a social process, creates

the potential for disputes over who owns what. Ownership disputes are arguablynot exclusively connected to commodication as science is rife with them, IssacNewton and Robert Hooke being among the more legendary of combatants in thisregard. However, whereas Newton and Hooke were ghting over priority andperhaps a place in history, contemporary disputes often involve more materialstakes. The nature of the stakes almost always implies that the conict will be public(i.e. not restricted to a small and initiated community as in the NewtonHookeconict) but will give rise to multi stakeholder involvement. The diversity of stakeholder interests is not unimportant for the potential of the intensity of the

conict but also for the ability of the governance mechanisms of science toanticipate and adequately regulate. Additionally, and not unimportantly, in a contextwhere scientic knowledge is commodied, the university and/or the spin-off rmbecome liable. In the case of the university, the liability may not strictly speaking belegal but takes the form of a byproduct in the form of reduced credibility.

The above case raises two signicant yet not unknown limitations of commodication as a strategy for disseminating scientic knowledge. The rst isthat scientic impartiality is always subject to question in a context where it isknown that scientists are engaging in market activity. The second is that one of thelongstanding arguments against university-industry partnership has been that it willnecessarily lead to incursions on the right of science to make its ndings publicregardless of its implications for economic interests. This argument is usually takento be indicative of a fundamentalist stance against academic entrepreneurialism. Themost common solution to this problem is that the university invests more of itsresources in legal advice to avoid potential disputes. There is, however, very littlethat a university or research group can do to protect itself against potential corporatesuits against ndings that are perceived to be damaging or potentially damaging toits interests apart from departing from the ethos of public disclosure of results. Thus,rather than functioning as an aid to the dissemination of knowledge, commodi-cation can be an obstacle as some stakeholders may choose to discredit rather thanadopt new knowledge. To be fair, one may argue that as long as economic interestsare involved, even public science that is in no way linked to industry may besubjected to defamation strategies and other similar techniques.


123


12/15

Discussion

In the above, I have explored the conditions that scientic knowledge would have tomeet in order to achieve the status of commodity. This status is and does not have to

be complete as scientic knowledge as commodity would display the sameproperties as other commodities, i.e. it would move from commodity to non-commodity and back in the course of its lifetime.

Limiting the understanding of commodication to the Marxist approach of focusing on use and exchange value is insufcient for understanding the dynamicsinvolved in the commodication of science because of the uidity inherent in thenature of science as a commodity. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that capitalismhas since Marxs seminal account transformed as a result of the fact that in mostOECD countries, consumption is now driven as much by desire as by need (Bo hme

2003 ). This shift in the rationale for consumption has opened up more and moreareas of social life to commodication. That being said, it is still difcult, asobserved by Williams ( 2002 ), to evidence the claim that commodication hascompletely colonized the lifeworld of wealthy societies. The rise of new forms of exchange such as open source as well as the symbiotic relationship betweenpublication and propertization that now characterizes some subelds in the scienceall point to an overall expansion in both the commodity and gift dimensions inscience. Moreover, it appears that this duality is moving into a more central positionin the formal market economy. This may in part be due to the fact that far from

being opposites, gifts and commodities are mutually dependent in that one wouldhave to exist in order for the other to surface.This uidity raises problems for the ability of commodication to function as a

governance mechanism because the locus of control in the governance process willalso shift over time. At this point, one may argue that the commodication of academic knowledge seems to be relatively unproblematic in the context of theUnited States, and by extension should work in a similar fashion in the Europeancase. This claim is itself an idealization but functions well as a starting point for theargument. Although it goes outside the remit of this paper to explain why what isgood for U.S. higher education and research is not always good for European highereducation and research, it is difcult to discuss commodication without dealingwith this issue. The main reason for this is that much of European policymaking inthis regard is explicitly inspired by American models.

Three arguments would sufce to illustrate and explain. One is that publicfunding of research and development in most European countries is motivated byvarious arguments, ranging from distributional and welfare issues to industrial andrecently innovation policy. Thus, the very heterogeneity of the missions of theuniversity sector makes commodication an unsuitable governance instrument forthe state and one that all but a few universities would be able to use to any greatadvantage without risk of losing public trust. A second is the argument about costswhich was alluded to earlier. The costs of commodication thus far continue tooutweigh the benets it brings in terms of making science more governable. Thethird is that the process of commodifying science is one that, in the Europeancontext, has required an active engagement on the part of policymakers in creating

402 M. Jacob

123


13/15

commodity ctions. These ctions are also remarkably similar to those that wereused in the U.S. process. The important difference is, however, that the meta rules of the institutional context of the majority of European public universities gives themlittle room to complete this commodity ction. Thus, while the Swedish state for

example advocates commodication as a governance mechanism for research, itwill expect this to be colocated with education which it insists should not be subjectto the same logic.

Commodication does not appear to be an adequate response to the thorniestproblem for the governance of science, i.e. how to allocate resources amongdifferent branches of science. In one sense, commodication taken together with theproblem of dwindling science budgets exacerbates the resource allocation problemas more and more resources have to be devoted to commodication infrastructureand defending patents. Likewise, commodication as a strategy for increasing

access to science is also problematic since access becomes limited to those who canpay.

Conclusions

In summary, the intention of this paper has been to outline a conceptualization of what is commodication in science and some of the implications of its use as agovernance mechanism. This is therefore not an argument against the commodi-

cation of science per se. That being said, one may legitimately raise two questionsin the light of the foregoing, one instrumental and oriented towards policy and theother internal and oriented towards science. For policy, one immediate insight isthat there is a need to recognize that researchers tend to transform resources intodifferent forms of capital. This is not just with respect to what is addressed in, forexample, the credibility cycle since credibility is the generalized medium of thiscycle, but rather with respect to how items of knowledge are transformed from giftsto commodities and sometimes back to gifts. This uidity needs to be addressedthrough the invention of new governance mechanisms which are sensitive to thesecircumstances. Furthermore, every choice along the gift-commodity chain implieschoices which may alternatively foreclose or create new opportunities for futureaction, e.g. research trajectories and social options. For science, the reputational andother opportunity costs that may result from commodication have to be evaluatedon a case basis. Thus, for European public universities, the rst order of businessought to be to acquire a realistic appreciation of the costs (capital, labor and social)for engaging in various commodication processes. This will be an important inputfor regulating the way in which commodication conditions set the agenda forfuture public science, the allocation of resources in science, and the disseminationof knowledge.

By focusing on the commodication of science as a process and the elucidationof the properties of science as commodity, the paper connects the broad more casedriven discussions about commercialization and commodication in science to thebroader social theoretical discussion about commodication. In particular, the use of the anthropological conceptualization of commodication provides a way to give


123


14/15

theoretical expression to a property of science which has long been recognized. Lastbut not least, by connecting commodication and governance at the macro policylevel, it is hoped that the paper will make a contribution to starting a debate betweenthose who do work on research and innovation policy and those who do higher

education research.

References

Biagioli, Mario. 2006. Patent republic: Representing inventions, constructing rights and authors socialresearch. Social Research 73: 11291172.

Bohme, Gernot. 2003. Contribution to the critique of the aesthetic economy. Thesis Eleven 73: 7182.Callon, Michel. 1994. Is science a public good? Science, Technology and Human Values 4: 395425.Coase, Ronald H. 1974. The market for goods and the market for ideas. American Economic Review

Papers and Proceedings 64: 384391.Dale, Roger. 2007. Repairing the decits of modernity: The emergence of parallel discourses in higher

education in Europe. In World yearbook of higher education , eds. Debbie Epstein, Rebecca Boden,Rosemary Deem, Rizvi Fazal, and Susan Wright, 1431. UK: Routledge.

Everett, Margaret. 2003. The social life of genes: Privacy, property and the new genetics. Social Scienceand Medicine 56: 5365.

Geuna, Aldo, and Alessandro Muscio. 2009. The governance of university knowledge transfer: A criticalreview of the literature. Minerva 47: 93114.

Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The enigma of the gift . Oxford: Polity Press.Green, Ronald M. 2001. What does it mean to use someone as a means only: Rereading Kant. Kennedy

Institute of Ethics Journal 11: 247261.Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of capital: Towards a critical geography . Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh

University Press.Haug, Wolfgang F. [1971] 1986. Critique of commodity aesthetics , trans. R. Bock. Cambridge: Polity

Press.Holland, S. 2001. Contested commodities at both ends of life: Buying and selling gametes, embryos, and

body tissues. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11: 263284.Katches, Mark, William Heisel, and Ronald Campbell. 2000. Donors dont realize they are fueling a

lucrative business. Orange County Register (16 April). Online at http://www.ocregister.com/health-tness/features/body/ index.shtml. cited in Holland, Suzanne 2001. Contested commodities at bothends of life: Buying and selling gametes, embryos, and body tissues. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11: 267.

Kaushik Sunder, Rajan. 2006. Biocapital: The constitution of post-genomic life . Durham: DukeUniversity Press.

Kitcher, Phillip. 2001. Science, truth, and democracy (Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science). Oxford,UK: Oxford University Press.

Kleinman, Daniel Lee, and Steven P. Vallas. 2001. Science, capitalism, and the rise of the KnowledgeWorker: The changing structure of knowledge production in the United States. Theory and Society30: 451492.

Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective , ed. A. Appadurai. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Krimsky, Sheldon. 2003. Science in the private interest. Has the lure of prots corrupted biomedicalresearch? . New York: Rowman and Littleeld Publishers Inc.

Latour, Bruno, and Woolgar, Steve. 1986. Laboratory life: The construction of scientic facts . Princeton,

USA: Princeton University Press.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1991. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Oxford, UK: Manchester University Press.

Maki, Uskali. 1999. Science as a free market: A reexivity test in an economics of economics.Perspectives on Science 7: 486509.

404 M. Jacob

123
http://www.ocregister.com/health-fitness/features/body/http://www.ocregister.com/health-fitness/features/body/http://www.ocregister.com/health-fitness/features/body/http://www.ocregister.com/health-fitness/features/body/


15/15

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A critique of political economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes , vol. 1. New York:Penguin.

McSherry, Corynne. 2001. Who owns academic work? Battling for control of intellectual property . USA:Harvard University Press.

Merton, Robert K. 1942. The normative structure of science. In The sociology of science: Theoretical and

empirical investigations , ed. Robert K. Merton. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1973.Mirowski, Philip, and Esther Mirjam-Sent. 2002. Introduction. In Science bought and sold: Essays in the

economics of science , eds. Philip Mirowski, and Esther Mirjam Sent, 166. Chicago, IL: TheUniversity of Chicago Press.

Mirowski, Philip, and Robert van Horn. 2005. The contract research organization and the commercial-ization of scientic research. Social Studies of Science 35: 503548.

Morris, Ian. 1986. Gift and commodity in archaic Greece. Man 21: 117.Owen-Smith, Jason. 2003. From separate systems to a hybrid order: Accumulative advantage across

Public and Private Sciences at Research One Universities. Research Policy 32: 10811104.Pestre, Dominique. 2005. The technosciences between markets, social worries and the political: How to

imagine a better future? In The public nature of science under assault: Politics, markets, science and the law , eds. Helga Nowotny, Domique Pestre, Eberhard Schmidt-Amann, Helmut Schultze-Fielitz, and Hans-Heinrich Trute. Berlin: Springer.

Prasad, Amit. 2009. Capitalizing disease: Biopolitics of drug trials in India. Theory, Culture & Society 26:129.

Radin, Margaret. 1996. Contested commodities: Trouble with trade in sex, children, body parts and other things . Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press.

Rhoten, Diana, and William Powell. 2007. The frontiers of intellectual property: Expanded protection vs.new models of open science. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3: 345373.

Rip, Arie. 1994. The republic of science in the 1990s. Higher Education 28: 323.Siegel, Donald S., Mike Wright, and Andy Lockett. 2007. The rise of entrepreneurial activity at

universities: Organizational and societal implications. Industrial and Corporate Change 16(4):489504.

Stephan, P.E. 1996. The economics of science. Journal of Economic Literature 34: 11991235.Thrift, Nigel. 2006. Re-inventing invention: New tendencies in capitalist commodication. Economy and Society 35(2): 279306.

Tinic, Serra A. 1997. United colors and untied meanings: Benetton and the commodication of socialissues. Journal of Communication 47: 325.

Turner, Stephen. 2002. Scientists as agents. In Science bought and sold: Essays in the economics of science , eds. P. Mirowski, and E. Mirjam Sent, 362384. Chicago, IL: The University of ChicagoPress.

Valentin, Finn, and Rasmus Lund Jensen. 2006. Effects on academiaindustry collaboration of extendinguniversity property rights. The Journal of Technology Transfer 32(3): 251276.

Walstad, Allan. 2002. On science as a free market. Perspectives on Science 9: 324330.Weisbrod, Burton, Jeffrey Ballou, and Evelyn Asch. 2008. Mission and money: Understanding the

university . New York: Cambridge University Press.Williams, Colin. 2002. A critical evaluation of the commodication thesis. The Sociological Review

525542.


123

Documents

On Com Modification and the Governance of Academic Research