4. The KM Challenge to Knowledge in Theory and Practice
4.2. KM and the End of Knowledge in Practice
such goods to appear “public.” If public goods are akin to the prover- bial frictionless medium of intellectual exchange, then the welfare state contributes the relevant ceteris paribus clause. After all, absent regular government provision for activities such as park maintenance and educational quality assurance, the value afforded by the town commons and the university system would quickly devolve accord- ing to market-driven norms: those who can pay could gain access to an excellent private good; those who cannot would have to settle for an inferior product. Following Schumpeter (1950), it has become increasingly clear that what pass for “public goods” are part of the state’s strategy for facilitating the circulation and accumulation of capital, at the same time buffering the citizenry from its worst effects.
Little surprise, perhaps, that the knowledge manager’s demystifica- tion of public goods occurs at a time when many national govern- ments are failing to serve both capital and citizens within tighter budgetary regimes and an ideological climate that precludes the most obvious solution, namely, higher taxes on the private enterprises that most directly benefit from a healthy supply of public goods, espe- cially education (cf. O’Connor 1973).
treasury (regardless of how it was spent) or the amount of goods pro- duced (regardless of how many were sold).
Were Smith resurrected today as a KM guru, he would say that the state needs to invest in institutions that facilitate the development and mobility of human capital. Indeed, he might well warm to the phrase “social capital.” In any case, he would steer his clients clear of policies that smacked of academic bullionism, namely, the sheer accumulation of “big names” at universities whose enormous salaries and discretionary time allow them to generate a load of publications, while doing nothing to nurture local talent or even to ensure that the big names’ productivity has maximum impact—say, by establishing links with state, industry, or even other academics with the capacity of extending and applying the big names’ ideas. In the long term, this expenditure on big names is more likely to be judged an instance of conspicuous consumption than a productive investment. This is not surprising, since academic bullionism began as a consequence of the literal form of bullionism that Smith originally targeted in The Wealth of Nations(1776).
Spain lavished much of the wealth it gained from New World pre- cious metals on its university system, which by 1600 had consisted of 32 institutions (a figure matched by Germany in 1900) with 3%
of males in attendance (a figure matched by the United States in 1900). The result was the world’s first knowledge society: Its labor market had become so competitive that doctorates were required for entry into key state and church administrative posts (Collins 1998, 581–2). Many failed job seekers, such as Miguel de Cervantes, went on to found the Golden Age of Spanish literature by marketing their academic training to a more popular audience, thereby straddling the classical definitions of history and poetry. (Today that genre is called the novel.) Spain was also the largest publisher of academic works, most of which were scholastic syntheses that came to symbolize
“useless learning” in the emerging Scientific and Industrial Revolu- tions. Indeed, the demonstrable waste of resources that characterized Spain’s original knowledge society promoted an image of universities as bastions of decadent conservatism. This image began to change only in the early 19th century, when Wilhelm von Humboldt estab- lished the University of Berlin as an institution expressly devoted to the dissemination of new knowledge.
This cautionary tale of the first knowledge society should remind us that whether an expenditure counts as an instance of investment
or consumption depends on the perceived returns. An antipathy to universities is one of the few sentiments common to the revolution- ary European philosophers, scientists, and inventors who lived in the 200 years prior to Humboldt’s institutional renovation. Virtually all, at some point, expressed a desire to see all the scholastic tomes eaten by worms, engulfed in flames, or otherwise erased from historical memory. For them, universities represented a waste of talent and effort that was an affront to humanity. Interestingly, a very similar attitude to one readily found in Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Hume was also found among the Muslims who legendarily torched the Library of Alexandria in 641 a.d. (Fuller and Gorman 1987). Before Edward Gibbon’s revisionist account in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), this episode had been emblazoned in the Western psyche as the paradigm case of religious fanaticism tri- umphing over enlightened learning. As it happens, the celebrated Library was little more than an unorganized warehouse of stockpiled books. It did not so much advance human knowledge as demonstrate the wealth of the Pharaohs who could afford to acquire these books.
Egypt’s Muslim conquerors regarded this gesture as a blasphemous use of our God-given powers. Islam’s own seminal contribution to KM was the deployment of its trading language, Arabic, to consolidate the Greco-Roman intellectual heritage for purposes of elaboration and evaluation. This was its ultimate legacy to the original European universities, whose charters enabled the autono- mous pursuit of knowledge in a way that had been prohibited under Islamic law.
Knowledge management updates the spirit that led to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the stigmatizing of universities during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. An ironic conse- quence of the traditional belief that knowledge is produced and consumed rather differently from other material goods is that its indefinite pursuit has been presumed to be an unmitigated good. This has led to a set of knowledge policies that, from a KM standpoint, look nothing short of superstitious (Fuller 1997, Chapter 4). The dogma of “trickle-down effects” (from knowledge production to eco- nomic well-being) codifies this superstition. Even the founder of “sci- entometrics,” Derek de Solla Price (1978), had already seen that the best predictor of a research-intensive society is electricity consump- tion per capita—not, say, income per capita. (Think about the costs of maintaining research facilities, especially after the computer revo-
lution.) In other words, a Martian scanning Earth’s economic indi- cators would naturally conclude that so-called knowledge produc- tion is designed to show off how much wealth nations can afford to waste. (“Knowledge accumulation” would be a better phrase.) To be sure, this was Aristotle’s original point about leisure as a prere- quisite for pure inquiry, which Michael Polanyi (1957, 1962) pro- moted to a moral imperative, given the temptations to harness knowledge production to military–industrial concerns. Yet, knowl- edge managers fail to be impressed, and universities as the principal knowledge-producing institutions in modern society have responded unimpressively.
In the words of former Fortuneeditor Thomas Stewart (1997, 76), universities are “dumb organizations” that are “high on human capital” but “low on structural capital”: A fast food chain such as McDonalds is a “smart organization” because it makes the most of its relatively ill-trained staff by maximizing the interconnectivity of the staff’s activities. Business as usual in academia proceeds almost exactly in reverse, which is why its well-educated staff must be specif- ically required, if not begged, to attend department meetings and declare office hours. Thus, from a KM standpoint, the traditional university is a whole that is much less than the sum of its parts, and academic administrators are little more than high-paid custodians of car parks, classrooms, and other campus facilities. Imagine a firm whose goals are dictated almost entirely by the various trade unions from which its labor force is drawn. Each union has the final say on the performance standards to which its members are held. Manage- ment ensures that the firm’s employees do not interfere with each other’s work, without aspiring to any greater level of cooperation and coordination of effort. If we replace “trade union” with “academic discipline” or “professional association,” the firm starts to look like a university.
However, universities have begun to take the “dumb organization”
label to heart by modeling themselves on McDonalds’ performance measures and the conclusions drawn from them. McDonalds famously records its success on its “golden arches” signs, not in such conventionally economic terms as profits, but the number of prod- ucts sold—or rather, “served,” which evokes (without demonstrat- ing) the idea of “satisfied customers.” This practice, limited to U.S.
outlets, is a brilliant stroke of public relations in a country that fancies itself full of “informed” consumers. The genius of this move
is to appeal to a quantitative indicator that can never decrease, yet at the same time it can suggest room for improvement. The down- side of such an open-ended metric is that it can easily become an end in itself, which is precisely the situation in which British academia finds itself today. Unlike the United States, whose educational sector is constitutionally devolved to a mix of public and private institu- tions, the United Kingdom largely follows the European pattern of state centralization. Whereas the McDonalds mentality has typically entered U.S. education through the hiring of professional managers at particular institutions, in 1988 it became the official U.K. policy for higher education’s accountability to the taxpayers. Thus, every 4–5 years, the United Kingdom is subjected to the Research Assess- ment Exercise (RAE), which ranks every discipline in every univer- sity. The result is a set of academic “league tables”—the implied metaphor is from football—that ranks every department at all of the U.K.’s 100-odd universities. These are then published in the leading broadsheet newspapers and become the basis for student choice, cor- porate sponsorship, and most of all, state funding.
In some respects, the RAE has been a clear success. Few academics have complained about it, which may be explained by the U.K.’s seemingly limitless sense of gamesmanship. (In the U.S., someone would have by now found something sufficiently unjust about the RAE’s implementation to bring a lawsuit that would have halted the exercise.) Moreover, the U.K.’s research productivity has increased and become more prominent internationally. Indeed, the exercise is now emulated by other countries in need of an academic audit. It has even spawned, within the U.K., a periodic exercise in “teaching quality assessment” (TQA). Yet, whatever their respective merits, the RAE and TQA have little, if anything, to do with each other. The TQA is driven by a desire to maximize the number of highly skilled workers. And if well-trained workers continue to be paid less in the U.K. than in other parts of the world, TQA should contribute to an effective global market strategy. The motives behind RAE are more elusive, since a high rate of scientific publications and patents is more a striking indicator than an underlying cause of a nation’s wealth.
In the symbolic world of politics and public policy, this is not a trivial point but one worth keeping in perspective. In effect, the RAE is about the cultivation and identification of knowledge prod- ucts that are “high quality” in a sense not unlike that of an unal- loyed precious metal.
In short, because of some lingering superstitions about the instan- taneous impact of new knowledge on social and economic well-being, an academic bullionist model of universities coexists with some KM- style knowledge policies. Thus, in his 1999 keynote address to the annual meeting of the Higher Education Funding Council of England, the United Kingdom’s minister for science and technology (and heir to a major supermarket chain) Lord David Sainsbury praised aca- demics on the following grounds: The United Kingdom has 1% of the world’s population, does 6% of the world’s science, produces 8%
of the world’s scientific publications, and gets 9% of the world’s sci- entific journal citations—this despite a 20% reduction in government spending on scientific research over the last 10 years (i.e., since the end of the Cold War). Instead of querying the logic that links these statistics (e.g., is the accumulation of publications and citations any- thing more than bullionism?) or perhaps recommending that U.K.
academics could make good use of moreresearch funding, Sainsbury concluded that the results justified the continued use of RAE-led competitive rationing as a national funding policy, without necessar- ily increasing the overall pot of funds.
The problems with Sainsbury’s assessment are manifold but not uncharacteristic of contemporary confusions over how exactly one assesses the state of knowledge production. I can only list the prob- lems here, but together they provide a strong argument for knowl- edge management returning to basics:
1. Even academics working in public institutions are increasingly reliant on private funding for their research. Indeed, many are now virtually self-funding, often obtaining more than they would from public sector agencies. Yet, however helpful this development is to balancing state budgets, it does not consti- tute increased “productivity” as measured by “the most bang for the buck” principle.
2. But even if we accept that British research activity has become more productive, that may be an artifact of researchers being paid wages that are low relative to the quality of the work they do. After all, even in our high-tech world, most research expen- diture is still for labor. A revisit to Marx’s theory of surplus value may not be amiss here.
3. To what extent does funded research contribute to “human capital development,” i.e., seeding the next generation of
researchers—say, through quality undergraduate education and graduate training—or, for that matter, the next generation of informed non-specialist consumers of new research?
4. Lacking a clear productive relationship between academic pub- lications and economic well-being, perhaps the major long-term benefit of an increasingly competitive system is the unintended one of people exiting the mainstream knowledge production markets (i.e., academic appointments) in order to establish their own niches which, as with the Scientific and Industrial Revo- lutions, eventually “creatively destroy” those markets: Is the next Cervantes to be found among science-fiction writers and cyberwarriors?