Abstract
Truth is for sale today, some critics claim. The increased commodification of science corrupts it, scientific fraud is rampant and the age-old trust in science is shattered. This cynical view, although gaining in prominence, does not explain very well the surprising motivation and integrity that is still central to the scientific life. Although scientific knowledge becomes more and more treated as a commodity or as a product that is for sale, a central part of academic scientific practice is still organized according to different principles. In this paper, I critically analyze alternative models for understanding the organization of knowledge, such as the idea of the scientific commons and the gift economy of science. After weighing the diverse positive and negative aspects of free market economies of science and gift economies of science, a commons structured as a gift economy seems best suited to preserve and take advantage of the specific character of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, commons and gift economies promote the rich social texture that is important for supporting central norms of science. Some of these basic norms might break down if the gift character of science is lost. To conclude, I consider the possibility and desirability of hybrid economies of academic science, which combine aspects of gift economies and free market economies. The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of these deeper structural challenges faced by science policy. Such theoretical reflections should eventually assist us in formulating new policy guidelines.
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Notes
A later correction of March 24, 2009 in the New York Times softened the accusation somewhat, claiming that ‘Reuben fabricated data in some or all of 21 journal articles’.
Arrow (1962), Johnson (1972), Goldman and Shaked (1991), Kealey (1996), Stephan (1996), Wible (1998), Stephan and Audretsch (2000), Audretsch et al. (2002), Foray (2004). See also the related field (and journal) of scientometrics, which deals with the mechanism of scientific research analyzed by means of (e.g. statistical) mathematical methods.
Radder’s ‘Commodification in the broader sense’ is useful, but it is fruitful to expand it even more so that it comes to include phenomena such as bibliometry, used e.g. to measure the value of scientists ‘objectively’. Such techniques, in themselves not directly aimed at increasing economic activity, are often deployed for the economic instrumentalization of science.
For ‘commodity’ see the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Commodification is ‘The action of turning something into, or treating something as, a (mere) commodity; commercialization of an activity, etc., that is not by nature commercial.’ According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, ‘commodification’ (from commodity + -fication) was first used in 1968, originally in Marxist political theory. It means ‘the assignment of a market value’ and is often used with a negative connotation. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary ‘commoditization’ (from commodity + -ization) is the businessman's form of the word, but the uses mentioned in the OED seem to contradict this.
I should add the caveat that there exist many different kinds of management models, some of which are better adapted to fostering creativity and invention (see also the discussion below). See e.g. the Competing Values Framework by Quinn and Rohrbauch, as well as new calls for leadership at companies instead of management. Historically, however, management was first developed in the factory, where management assured control of the many ‘workers’ needed to perform their task. (Etymologically, management originally meant handling horses and later came to stand for controlling persons.) Without the strict rules defined by management, it was thought that chaos would reign. When knowledge work became more important, management was still the solution for keeping people in line. It is to this original idea of management, aiming at controlling workers by standardization, focussing on efficiency and production, etc., that I will be referring to in this article.
Cf. ‘commodification is the process by which goods or services formerly outside a market enter a market, acquire exchange value, and are subsequently produced for profit’ (Nelson and Barley 1995, p. 623).
This characterization of commodification is different but compatible with the two components of commodification mentioned in Connelly and Gallagher (2007, p. 104): ‘the commodification of academic research has two components: the treatment of research products as interchangeable, and the assignment of a market value to these outputs. That which was once viewed as a ‘craft’ becomes a standardized product.’
Cf. the talk by Sir Tim Wilson, former vice-chancellor and ‘CEO’ of the University of Hertfordshire (and HEFCE board member) at the at the Conference Humboldt’s Model. The Future of Universities in the World of Research. Humboldt-Universität Berlin. 7–9 October 2010.
Although these journals work by means of peer-review, peer-to-peer evaluation is more and more under pressure because reviewers are also scientists under pressure to produce scientific results, and a critical engagement with their colleagues work is hardly valorized. Because almost no credit goes to peer-reviewers, more and more scholars refuse to do the work or they do it less thoroughly. Furthermore, counting discrete evaluations (e.g. acceptance by journals) does not necessarily lead to a good general evaluation (one evident example is self-plagiarism, in which each contribution might be good but the aggregate subpar.).
For market exchange, the parties do not need to agree on the same ‘value’ of the commodity, but they need to agree on a price-setting which is a reduction to a one-dimensional value. Accurate measurement or estimation procedures are crucial for this process. When it is difficult to estimate the value of the assets (e.g. financial assets that are very sensitive to economic conditions, which might be very uncertain in specific periods as in 2007–2008), price-setting breaks down and the markets freeze (cf. the recent market crisis in collateral debt obligations).
Good science usually leads to good effective products, but sometimes false science or pseudo-science is less expensive and a better sales strategy, especially in cases of uncertainty, when clients have no means of assessing the quality of the product (cf. in medicine or the nutrients industry).
Later in this article I will characterize funding without strings attached as part of a gift economy. Charitable private funding of cancer research obviously presents few problems, but professorial chairs in astrology (cf. the Sophia Project at Bath Spa University) and para-psychology (cf. the chair of parapsychology at Utrecht) funded by interested benefactors or societies are another matter. The creation of the Polanyi Center for fostering Intelligent Design research at Baylor University is also an interesting case. Yet even the charitable private funding of cancer research might generate bias in research topics (cf. Resnik 2007).
Management at some industrial research laboratories and in some creative industries is aware that research results cannot be judged according to the normal standards of efficiency. In a specific set of examples, Shapin (2008, pp. 127–164) estimated that less than a quarter of the companies had formal methods to evaluate the scientific output, and even less calculated whether the benefits outweighed the costs. In these cases, although some of the research products were commodified and sold for profit, the management structure was not.
Personal discussion with Helga Nowotny and discussions at the Conference Humboldt’s Model (see note 9).
This is not to deny that individual scientists may have all kinds of motives for doing their research. These motives are, however, not institutionalized. For an integrative theory about individual open source software developer motivation, integrating intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, see Krishnamurthy (2006).
Resnik explains that 90 % of biomedical funds are spent on the research of 10 % of the known diseases. These 10 % include the most common diseases but also the (often not live threatening) diseases that affect the wealthy and the diseases typical for the developed world. Money determines which research is executed and which is left aside. See also Carrier (1995) and concretely on biomedical funds, Benatar (2000).
Even if the corporate world, in rare cases, needs to take a longer term view (e.g. the building of a nuclear power plant takes almost a decade), the sciences are one of the few areas were long-term phenomena are studied, from climate change to cosmic time.
Hardin also describes an open access system rather than a commons. The latter is a resource shared between a particular set of people, with boundaries and rules of access in place.
Coase (1960) has argued that externalities can be thought of in terms of the costs of transacting over rights to undertake actions that affect other people. Demsetz (2003) has objected, however that externalities would still exist when transaction costs are zero. For a discussion, see McChesney (2006).
Callon (1994), in contrast, has argued that science is not a public good because of its intrinsic properties, but because being a source of diversity and flexibility.
There are different kinds of knowledge, some more fundamental, applied, technical or practical, etc. In principle, nonrivalrousness and almost nonexcludability hold for most kinds of knowledge (even top secret intelligence knowledge is spread worldwide by Wikileaks, showing that it is nonexcludable) while other properties are more specific for scientific knowledge.
Intellectual property protection allows circulation by prohibiting fee use, and is preferred to trade secrecy, which is a more extreme case of privatization of knowledge. On the tension between knowledge production and circulation, see Foray (2004, pp. 113–118).
Shapin (2008, pp. 127–164).
Cf. also Shapin (2008, pp. 269–303), who argues that even venture capitalists, often regarded as the wolves or vultures of the capitalist system, know that objective measures do not work for assessing the creative industry. Before they decide to invest, they do not run mathematical models and crunch numbers about efficiency and output; they rather judge the characters of the investigators, their motivations and ideas on a direct and personal basis.
Ironically, many current writers on the commons model their topic on the scientific commons, ignoring the increasing commodification of science.
See Mauss (1924), Malinowski (1932), Sahlins (1972), Macherel (1983), Cheal (1988), Godbout (1992), Godelier (1999); for a historical perspective, see Carrier (1995) and Davis (2000); for the gift in the arts, see Hyde (2007). See also my chapter in Krijnen et al. (2011) on which the following paragraphs are based.
On 18 February 2009, the Dutch philosopher Hans Radder was asked by the Dutch Science Foundation to referee a grant application. In his reply, he states that according to market rates, this kind of consulting would cost 2700 euro for the referee report. In an e-mailed circular, he argued that he wanted to take a stance against the managerial university and the valorization of research, by extrapolating the market reasoning of current research policy, showing that it leads to a reductio at absurdum. In a reaction to the circular, Radder’s colleague Christian Krijnen calculated that at this rate, one funding program of the Dutch Science Foundation would cost 700.000 euro on referee costs only—which would mean an unsustainable cost.
As many social forms, the gift system can of course be cynically manipulated, but if this is publicly expressed or exposed, the exchange of gifts ceases and the manipulator becomes excluded from the gift system.
This is clearly not the case in all professions and there are also big differences within a profession. Within the law, for instance, practicing attorneys receiving high fees for writing papers have a high standing in the profession. For a judge, on the other hand, taking money for writing an opinion is a subversion of his social role and a sign of corruption (Benkler 2004a, p. 327).
Klein (2012): ‘Campaign contributions are part of the cash economy. Lobbyists are hired because they understand how to participate in the gift economy.’
Lessig (2008b) has argued that our youth becomes more and more criminalized by current law, when 70 % of young people obtain digital information from ‘illegal’ sources. Lessig concludes that the law should be changed.
As Benkler (2004a) argues, new technologies can make sharing more efficient than traditional markets, and decentralized social sharing can be an economically attractive modality of production.
Indeed, understanding science as a gift economy can help explaining why academic researchers in general are so surprisingly honest—especially when compared to other domains of society. (See also Benkler and Nissenbaum (2006), who argue that commons-based peer production is conductive to virtuous behavior, and that a society providing opportunities for virtuous behavior will be more conducive to virtuous individuals.) Truthfulness is one of the central values that constitute science socially as well as epistemically. Scientific fraud is at variance with the core norms of academic science, and it is therefore severely punished and perpetrators are ostracized from the scientific community. A gift culture also explains why academic researchers work so hard for a remuneration that is hardly comparable to other jobs of similar qualification. They do not value their contributions according to the standards of the market. Scientists receive a gift from society—the gift of time and resources they can devote to the problems that they are passionate about—and they return this gift in the form of scientific contributions.
The notion of disinterestedness is somewhat fluid in the definition of gifts as well as in science, and its exact meaning depends on the particular situation, the context and the culture. See e.g. the historical examples in Davis (2000).
Note, however, that as I have shown above, imbalances and abuse of power exist also in gift economies, especially if they are local and personalized. See also Bergquist and Ljungberg (2001, p. 315) for an interesting case for power abuse in impersonal gift economies, although the actual impact of such power abuse is forcefully put into question by the practitioners themselves. Gift exchange normally confirms the existing social relations, hierarchical or egalitarian, and if a community is based on egalitarian principles, gift exchange will usually not change this.
Note that scientists are not alienated from the results of their work, but this does not mean that these results cannot be common property.
If fraud occurs, it is usually discovered after a while, however, because of the interconnectedness of topics and projects, but this may take a considerable time, as in the story in the introduction of this paper.
Accountability has also a good side, of course: society may expect something back, even in a gift economy. It is only not measurable by a cost-benefit analysis. Furthermore, it is not only economic interest, but also immeasurable benefits such as increase in civilization, culture, knowledge, tolerance, Bildung, etc. that should be accounted for in discussions of accountability.
The much vaunted transparency, objectivity and accountability can just as well become a cover up for bias and abuse of executive power. For discussions about rankings, see e.g. Connelly and Gallagher (2007); about the danger of rankings: the interested parties and the public easily accept rankings because they provide simple information, ready to be consumed (AUBR 2010).
As I have argued, much of science is about the exchange of tacit knowledge, and the positive effects of gift exchange do require a rich social texture, but this social texture should not become too personal and should not be confined to the local level only.
On the one hand, there is the commons of the scientific community, determined by the gift economy that I described above. This gift economy is partly personal (close colleagues), partly impersonal (unknown colleagues, blind review), and exchanges of goods (ideas, drafts, results, sometimes funding) are between peers. On the other hand, there is also the public commons of science, in which scientific research is available to all. This gift economy is impersonal, and involves translations of public funding in scientific results, which should be accessible to the public.
This distinction is also clear in the difference in remuneration between academic service and external consultancy service given by academic scientists (see Sect. 4, and the problems with full commodification, cf. note 36).
The Bayh-Dole Act (1980), the Stevenson-Wydler Act (1980), and the Federal Technology Transfer Act (1986) allow the commodification of scientific products (Cf. Rhoades and Slaughter 2004).
Foray (2004) suggests that different types of knowledge production are useful and a diversity of systems seems to promote productive synergies.
In the past, publishers were paid for the service of distributing scientific knowledge. Recent technological advances seem to suggest that open access is the best way to disseminate scientific knowledge, for instance, and science publishers will have to adapt (Cf. Willetts 2012).
For mechanical objectivity and expert judgment as different regimes of objectivity, see Daston and Galison (2007).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Michael Matthews, the general journal editor, Gurol Irzik, the editor of this special issue, and the three anonymous referees for their incisive comments which greatly improved this article. Acknowledgments are also due to the CNRS for the financial and institutional support of this research.
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Vermeir, K. Scientific Research: Commodities or Commons?. Sci & Educ 22, 2485–2510 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9524-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9524-y