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Paper short abstract:

What happens to knowledge when defined as a global public good, and how does this affect our social theory? This paper examines the science-society framework underpinning the notion of knowledge as a public good, and explores the institutional places where knowledge appears as productively public.

Paper long abstract:

Economists' traditional definition of the ideal public good has two main features: its benefits are non-rivalrous in consumption and non-excludable. Non-rivalry means that my consumption of a good does not prevent others from consuming it too; my consumption is no rival to yours. Non-excludability means that everyone has access to the good, that no one is excluded from it. Public goods are also often defined as a special case of externalities: where the positive or negative effects of the externality are seen to 'spill over' into the public sphere.

Bringing these two definitional strands together, what stands out about the economists' definition of knowledge as a global public good is how the consumption function carries its 'externality' within: that is, how publicness becomes defined by an internal moment of the market, in this case, consumption. The question of the 'public goodness' of knowledge is therefore subsumed under the question of the kinds of market movements that it elicits. This allows for two further concessions to the commoditisation of knowledge: talk of 'claims over', or 'rights in' knowledge evokes the notion of distribution, and the associated rhetoric of the efficiency of resource allocation.

In this paper I take issue with the social theory that locates the public goodness of knowledge in the institutional workings of the market. I intend to show that neither 'distribution' nor 'efficiency' are things or events that take place 'outside', in the market; nor are they qualities of the market, that define whether a good is public or not. The public (as a signifier or community of value) can never be something outside society, but must be seen instead as a point of inflection in society's own re-distributional moments: the public as simultaneously means-and-end of social self-consciousness.

. In particular, I want to suggest that an important space for the creation of public value for knowledge today lies in processes of institutional administration. Administration stages 'the public' for an institution's use of knowledge. It is often through administrative processes (e.g. research proposals, email correspondence, grant review processes, institutional audits, etc.) that knowledge internalizes its 'external' publics. Institutional administration is thus a first stop in the consolidated distribution and allocation of knowledge as a fund of public value.

The paper draws on and contrasts examples of administrative processes in higher education environments in the UK today, and the history of corporate welfarism and state-business relations in 1920s Chile, in order to ask questions about the objectification and movement of knowledge 'inside' or 'outside' institutions. My interest is to explore how and when 'public goodness' makes knowledge, morality and institutional sociality come together, and to further interrogate the conditions under which knowledge becomes productively public.