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Abstract
Our article addresses the question how to assess and measure the value or price of knowledge, and probes the issue from a variety of social scientific and practical perspectives. Against the background of a sociological concept of knowledge, economic, political, social, and juridical perspectives that may lead to a price of knowledge are discussed. We observe that knowledge is seen to play an ever greater role within as well as across economies and politics; that its embodiment makes it difficult to divorce it from its carriers; and that knowledge is deeply entrenched in questions of social relations and stratification. As such, it is cannot be captured in a straightforward manner, especially given the persistent stand-off between its individual, economic, and public relevancies and benefits. A simple arithmetic of the price of knowledge fails.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Scott McNall for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Notes
1 Leppälä (Citation2015) summarizes the intellectual origins and the defining characteristics of the economic analysis of knowledge; he employs the “standard epistemological definition” of knowledge as “justified belief.” It is also noteworthy that Leppälä does not raise the issue of the price or value of knowledge in his survey of the diverse economics literature that attends to the economic role of knowledge.
2 On the other hand, Gossner (Citation2010, 95) defines matter-of-factly that “‘knowledge’ refers to the information possessed by the agent.”
3 In his discussion of “the nature of capital” more than a century ago, Veblen (Citation[1908] 1919, 325–326) refers to part of the capital of a community as “immaterial equipment” or “intangible assets” mainly consisting of knowledge and information that “in the early days at least, […] is far and away the most important and consequential category of the community’s assets or equipment.”
4 After all, the doubt expressed toward efforts to monetarize knowledge at times even refers to Socrates teaching his students without demanding any monetary compensation. Socrates expressed nothing but malice for teachers who claimed to be able to generate a lofty income from their wealthy students. But what was the reason for Socrates to refuse to take money in return for knowledge? If he charged for his teaching, Socrates maintained, he would be forced to teach students he did not appreciate; in other words, he wanted to protect his liberty (see Bertram Schefold, “Die Ökonomisierung der Wissenskultur,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 12, 2010).
5 Forey (Citation2006, 9), for example, emphasizes that “knowledge is largely unobservable” and “most phenomena relating to knowledge are largely unmeasurable.”
6 An early critique of treating persons as human capital that constituted individuals—not based on moral or ethical actors—but on the logic of economic discourse may be found in Shaffer (Citation1961). Harry Shaffer objects that the term “investment” is not really applicable to the issue of human capital; “investment” in individual employees should not be used as a basis for policy formation.
7 An exceptional, deviant definition of human capital that extends to so-called innate abilities of individual agents can only rarely be found in economic discourse; but see Laroche and Mérette (Citation1999, 88) for such a conception.
8 Human capital theory resonates strongly with post-war mainstream sociological theory of social stratification, for example, Talcott Parsons’ (Citation[1949] 1954, 327) theory of social stratification: “the status of the individual must be determined on grounds essentially peculiar to himself, notably his own personal qualities, technical competence, and his own decisions about his occupational career and with respect to which he is identified with any solidary group … […] It is nevertheless fundamental that status and role allocation and the processes of mobility from status to status are in terms of the individual as a unit and not of solidary groups, like kinship groups, castes village communities etc.”
9 It is on the basis of such considerations that Feher (Citation[2007] 2009, 27) argues that “an investor in his or her human capital is concerned less with maximizing the returns on his or her investments—whether monetary or psychic—than with appreciating, that is, increasing the stock value of, the capital to which he or she is identified. In other words, insofar as our condition is that of human capital in a neoliberal environment, our main purpose is not so much to profit from our accumulated potential as to constantly value or appreciate ourselves—or at least prevent our own depreciation.”
10 PIAAC attempted to measure cognitive and workplace skills necessary to advance both on the job and in society. In 23 countries, a representative sample of adults was interviewed. Information about three fields of cognitive skills were collected: literacy, numeracy and problem solving in a high-technology environment. Literacy, for example, was defined as “ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential” (Hanushek, Schwerdt, and Wiederhold Citation2015, 108).
11 It might be pointed out that Bourdieu’s discussion of cultural capital resonates strongly with Georg Simmel’s observations (Citation[1907] 1978, 439–440) in The Philosophy of Money about the role of the “intellect” in modern society. Simmel notes “the apparent equality with which educational materials are available to everyone interested in them is, in reality, a sheer mockery. The same is true for other freedoms accorded by liberal doctrines which, though they certainly do not hamper the individual from gaining goods of any kind, do however disregard the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them. For just as the substance of education—in spite of, or because of its general availability—can ultimately be acquired only through individual activity, so it gives rise to the most intangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinction between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socio-economic differences) by a decree or a revolution, nor by the good will of those concerned […]. There is no advantage that appears to those in inferior positions to be so despised, and before which they feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education.”
12 For Coleman (Citation1988, 100–101) social capital “comes about through changes in the relations among persons that facilitate action […]. Just as physical capital and human capital facilitate productive activity, social capital does as well. For example, a group within which there is extensive trustworthiness and extensive trust is able to accomplish much more than a comparable group without that trustworthiness and trust.” Coleman’s definition of social capital indicates that is impossible to quantify the value of individual social capital.
13 See Adolf and Stehr (Citation2014) and Stehr and Adolf (Citation2015) for an extensive discussion of the concept of knowledge as a “capacity to act.”
14 More specifically, symbolic capital represents a social process and accomplishment; symbolic capital refers to intellectual or cognitive capacities; symbolic capital “is made […] by those who are submitted to it but if, and only if, the objective structure of its distribution is at the basis of the cognitive structures that they bring into play in order to produce it—as, for example, with such structuring oppositions as masculine/feminine, young/old, noble/common, rich/poor, white/black. etc.” (Bourdieu Citation1999, 336).
15 André Gorz’s (Citation[2003] 2004, 9) notion of knowledge capital or, rather, the knowledge that counts in the modern knowledge economy can be found in his introduction to the German edition of his book on The Immaterial. Knowledge, Value and Capital (Citation[2003] 2010). However, Gorz’s idea is closely linked to economics; it is knowledge that is requisite in all branches of the economy and due to the growing “informatization,” knowledge not in the forms that are acquired in formal education institutions but, rather, “non-formalized forms of knowledge […]. What is required is empirical knowledge, judgment, coordination, self-organization and communication ability, i.e. forms of living knowledge that can be acquired in everyday social dealings and is part of popular culture.” It is only on the basis of his specification of relevant knowledge forms that a proximity to the concept of knowledge capability becomes visible.
16 Mara Squicciarini and Nico Vogtlaender (Citation2014) demonstrate that human capital (in the sense of worker skills) is a strong predictor for economic development not only today but was so already at the beginning of the industrial revolution (also Mokyr Citation2005).
17 In Bourdieu’s defense one has to recognize that the actual acquisition, however strongly the quantity of capital acquired may depend, for example, on the stock of capital already accumulated in the family of an individual, is—as Simmel (Citation[1907] 1989, 439) already observed—ultimately an individual activity. Moreover, Bourdieu (Wacquant Citation1989, 41–42) defends himself against the charge of a narrow “economism”; his choice of the term “capital” for example does not signal that he also adopts the narrow, economic conception of interests manifest in a single universal interest.
18 Sympathetic critics of Bourdieu’s capital theory have pointed to other attributes of his approach as problematic; for example, reference is made to the holistic presupposition as a general theoretical assumption. Bourdieu tends to postulate cultural capital as a generalized medium of accumulation and distinction that is unsuitable for the analysis of a society with multiple cleavages and divisions (see Halle Citation1992; Lamont and Lareau Citation1988).
19 An informative discussion and description of intellectual property concepts and procedures including a brief reference to patent law systems may be found in Knight (Citation2013, 1–48) A history of the idea of intellectual property rights may be found in Long (Citation1991) and Hesse (Citation2002)
20 On the sociological definition of private property rights and its implicit utilization ban, see Popitz (Citation1986, 111–112).
21 As the Guardian (12 February 2013) reported, “the agricultural giant Monsanto has sued hundreds of small farmers in the United States in recent years in attempts to protect its patent rights on genetically engineered seeds that it produces and sells”; a report by the Center for Food Safety and the Save Our Seeds campaigning groups “has outlined what it says is a concerted effort by the multinational to dominate the seeds industry in the US and prevent farmers from replanting crops they have produced from Monsanto seeds.”
22 The resistance by NGOs to TRIPS-inspired legislation is chronicled in Matthews (Citation2011).
23 Economic or innovation-centric perspectives have indeed dominated the discussion surrounding patents. More recently, a broader view relies on a “rights-based” perspective. As Hilgartner (Citation2002, 945) has argued that “decisions about intellectual property are about much more than simply finding ways to stimulate and reward innovation; they are also about accountability, control, and governance” leading to a politics of patents conception.
24 Consider the following recent example: “During the past few years, as the cost of TV rights for sporting events has escalated apparently without limit, so has the ease by which conventional broadcast methods can be circumvented. Despite the best efforts of global authorities, including the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), the proliferation, accessibility and reliability of sport streaming sites have only increased. “Historically, most arrests and attempted prosecutions are made under the provision of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which prohibits the broadcast of material without the license of the copyright owner. However, in February 2012, during a case between the Premier League and a pub landlady from Portsmouth named Karen Murphy, the European Court ruled that live sporting events could not be regarded as “intellectual creations”. They were instead “subject to rules of the game, leaving no room for creative freedom”. The court decided that “accordingly, those events cannot be protected under copyright”.” (see http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/aug/01/faster-easier-free-illegal-football-streams (accessed 1 August 2015) and http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/24/pub-landlady-karen-murphy-premier-league (accessed 1 August 2015).
25 See Roland Reiss, “Eine Kriegserklärung an das Buch” [A war declaration on books], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 13, 2015.
26 Boldrin and Levine (Citation2013, 3) sum up their case against the economic efficacy of patents as follows: “There is no empirical evidence that [patents] serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity.”
27 We have to recognize—although this attribute of the concept of intellectual property is not part of our analysis of the value of knowledge—that the notion of intellectual property is an essentially contested concept across different cultures, for example, in cultures that mainly rely on oral or written transmission (cf. Garmon Citation2002) or in societies that recognize hybrid ownership between strictly individual or collective (public domain) ownership (e.g. Ghosh and Soete Citation2006; Strathern Citation2005; for the case of software, see Ghosh Citation2005).
28 With 157 US universities responding to a 2011 survey of the Association of University Technology Managers they reported an earned income of “more than $1.8-billion from commercializing their academic research in the 2011 fiscal year, collecting royalties from new breeds of wheat, from a new drug for the treatment of HIV, and from longstanding arrangements over enduring products like Gatorade.” See “Universities Report $1.8-Billion in Earnings on Inventions in 2011,” Chronicle of Higher Education 28 August 2012.
29 Whether or not monopolies are a burden on value-adding activities, even encourage desirable innovations or lead to overpricing and undersupply is not at issue in our examination of patents (but see Boldrin and Levine Citation2005; Crampes and Langinier Citation2009; Nordhaus Citation1969).
30 As a matter of practical considerations, the strength, the design and the range of IPRs has a strong influence on the “extent to which innovation adds or subtracts from the pool of ideas that are available to be commercially exploited, i.e. to technological opportunities” (Stiglitz Citation2010, Citation2014, 1).
31 Interview with André Gorz, “Entsinnlichung des Wissens,” Die Tageszeitung, August 8, 2003.
32 There are of course legal remedies to enforce the rights inherent in a patent, trademark and copyright. The recognition of the considerable economic value, perhaps also economic power and prestige, has led to an increase in litigation activity surrounding IPRs (cf. Hoti and McAleer Citation2006).
33 An initial discussion of the taxation regime on the price of knowledge can be found in Stehr (Citation2015)
34 The discussion in the scientific literature of the “direct” taxation of knowledge or intangible resources is in its infancy. The only discussion of the practice of taxation, in the United States in this case, we could find is a brief article by Luscombe (Citation1996).
35 A comparable and equally drawn-out legal dispute between the State of New Jersey and plaintiffs who argued that the state provided inadequate funding to some school districts in order to ensure the “provision of educational services sufficient to enable pupils to master the Core Curriculum Content Standards” was settled by the Supreme Court of New Jersey on 24 May 2011 in favor of the plaintiffs. The court enjoined the State of New Jersey to increase state education aid by $500 million in the coming school year, distributed among 31 school districts in historically poor cities. The Court concluded that the State failed to meet its constitutional burden to make sure that a “thorough and efficient education” was provided. The New Jersey constitution indeed charges the State with the fundamental responsibility to educate schoolchildren: “The Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years” (N.J. Const. art. VIII, § 4, 1.). The fundamental right to an adequate education extends to all children in the State. The court relied in its decision on Special Master’s Opinion/Recommendations to the Supreme Court, submitted by Judge Peter E. Doyne (source http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/opinions/index.htm and Winnie Hu and Richard Pérez-Peña, “Court orders New Jersey to increase aid to schools,” New York Times, May 25, 2011).
36 We rely on the accounts of the conflict between the State of New York and the City of New York found in the New York Times, especially the article dated 30 June 2002 (“Johnny can read, not well enough to vote?”); and subsequent coverage in the same newspaper, especially “School financing case argued before State’s highest court,” New York Times, October 11, 2006 (also Scherer Citation[2004] 2005).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nico Stehr
Nico Stehr is Karl Mannheim Professor of Cultural Studies at the Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany. He is a fellow of the Royal Society (Canada) and a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. His most recent publication is Information, Power and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Marian T. Adolf
Marian T. Adolf is a professor for Media Culture at the Department of Cultural Sciences at the Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany. He is the chairman of the Media Sociology section of the German Communication Association (DGPuK).