History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Merle Jacob
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, mj.lpf@cbs.dk
Rethinking Science and Commodifying Knowledge
The marketization of higher education and research in most European countries is usually seen as a set of processes that are the consequence of attempts to transform European societies into knowledge economies. The heterogeneity of European societies would suggest that efforts to create knowledge economies would necessarily differ cross nationally. Remarkably however there has been a growing convergence with respect to the type of policy measures that are being used by European governments to harness their universities to ensure that they are able to contribute to knowledge society. Among these measures include demands for both research and education to be designed and undertaken in consultation with stakeholders, users, etc.
A second and more consistent point of convergence in the policies is that they all invoke the concept of innovation as objective and rationale. The promotion of the concept of innovation from its humble Schumpeterian origins as a descriptor of an economically successful invention to a discursive device is best illustrated by referring to the resurgence of interest in innovation systems by academics and the diffusion of the concept to the policy sphere. ‘Innovation systems’ may be said to have replaced ‘sustainability’ in the hearts and minds of policymakers who now invoke the term to refer to whatever infrastructure, real or imagined which facilitates the production of innovation. In Sweden, the power of innovation as a policy regulative is so compelling that a new agency was set up in 2001 charged specifically with the task of "promoting sustainable growth by financing RTD and developing effective innovation systems".
In other words, contemporary research polices appear to be employing innovation as a mechanism for determining, guiding and evaluating policy outcomes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the growing preoccupation with developing structures and processes for commodifying knowledge. It should come as no surprise therefore that the commodification of knowledge is now a phenomenon to which a great deal of academic attention is devoted. Opinions and positions vary but what is clear is that there is very little discussion of what exactly constitutes commodification of knowledge. This paper will attempt to elucidate this question by focusing on the objectives which are usually described as part of the commodification process as well as examining the concept of commodification prior to its migration to the knowledge discourse with a view to determining how much if any adaptation of perspective has been necessary to arrive at the thesis that knowledge is and/or can be commodified.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006