The contrast in the action orientation of experimental scientists and knowledge managers should alert us to the unholy alliance lurking behind any corporation’s R&D division, regardless of the resources and freedom lavished upon its employees. Scientists regard knowledge as an end in itself, whereas managers regard it as a means toward market-driven ends. Thus, absent some striking discovery or invention that quickly enables a corporation to improve its market share, scientists and managers often find themselves at loggerheads.
Indeed, a minor scandal of knowledge management is that corpora- tions routinely flourish—even today—without spending much on R&D. From a managerial standpoint, scientists want to waste endless time and space searching for the ultimate truth, whereas from a sci- entific standpoint, managers want something that will work just long enough to make a killing in the market. Of course, each side has demonized the other’s utopia perfectly, but luckily ours is a world of negotiated settlements. Scientists have been known to persuade man- agers (who have not been already persuaded by the KM literature!) that robust investment in research is an insurance policy against the effects of long-term market competition.
To appreciate the awkward status of scientists in the KM univ- erse, it is worth recalling how “scientist” came to denote someone professionally engaged in the systematic pursuit of knowledge, a.k.a. “science.” When William Whewell introduced “scientist” into
English in the 1830s, he had to overcome the time-honored objec- tion enshrined in the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysicsthat knowl- edge is something anyone with sufficient leisure at his or her disposal can—indeed, should—pursue. The suggestion that salaried special- ists are uniquely entitled to the mantle of science was initially received with as much skepticism as the idea that only professional athletes have a serious interest in physical fitness. As it happens, Whewell, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, was partly reacting to the recent coinage of “artist” to capture those trained in “mechanics col- leges” (precursors of the British polytechnics), who were contribut- ing more palpably to the ongoing Industrial Revolution than university graduates. If it now seems odd that people called “scien- tists” and “artists” originally competed for the same social and eco- nomic space, simply consider that until the end of World War II (when a period specifically called the “Scientific Revolution” was coined), the Italian Renaissance was normally portrayed as the pin- nacle of both science and art, as exemplified by that fading cultural icon, Leonardo da Vinci.
The origin of the word “scientist” raises some very large questions about the political economy of knowledge production. Before Whewell, knowledge was not something systematically acquired in order to save time or make money. On the contrary, it took up time (that was otherwise not productively employed) and spent money (i.e., wealth that was above what was needed for maintaining one’s household); hence, it was the quintessentially leisured pursuit.
Indeed, it would not be far-fetched to envisage such pursuits as a high-grade form of gambling: Sometimes the hours conducting exper- iments and observing nature turned up something genuinely useful, but for the most part it was a hit-or-miss affair that attracted only the most “speculative” of human capital investors. Typical was early Royal Society member Robert Boyle, a gentleman–farmer who lived off his inheritance while engaged in scientific pursuits that would lay the foundations of modern chemistry. In Whewell’s own time, this lifestyle was pursued by Charles Darwin, whose failure as a medical student was more significant as a loss of face than of income.
To be sure, the life of inquiry was pursued by more than curious men of leisure. Those who suffered a decline in family and personal fortunes have also been prime candidates for assuming the risks that have occasionally been issued in scientific innovations. For example, Galileo’s career approximated that of the entrepreneur who, in
Joseph Schumpeter’s classic phrase, “creatively destroys” markets (Brenner 1987). As for that greatest of scientists, Isaac Newton, he was the model for Whewell’s professional scientist. Newton, of relatively humble origins, was one of the few early Royal Society members who had to draw a regular salary from a university in order to survive. Yet, even he wrote Principia Mathematica in his spare time. He needed external funding only to publish his arcane and hefty tomes, not to conduct the research reported in them. A measure of the long-term significance of Whewell’s semantic innovation is that most professional scientists today find themselves in a situation that is the exact opposite of Newton’s: If one can find the money to do research in the first place, the publishers are more than happy to oblige in communicating its results.
At the popular level, KM’s rise can be seen as a backlash against professionalism in the pursuit of knowledge—but without the inter- est in reviving the original amateur ethic. At a popular level, the KM mentality resonates with the perceived lack of scientific genius in our time. We are more impressed with such early 20th century physicists as Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, for whom the chalkboard was the laboratory, than with the battery of physicists continuing their work on multibillion-dollar particle accelerators today. We even rank those seat-of-the-pants discoverers of DNA’s structure, Watson and Crick, over that well-financed and methodical mapper of the human genome, Craig Venter, even though the latter has enabled the promise of biotechnology to become a reality. Perhaps genius will not be ascribed to people who require enormous resources priorto the pro- duction of new knowledge. To be sure, considerable resources—both economic and cultural—may be needed aftera putative breakthrough to enable it literally to “break through” existing scientific and social practices. Indeed, there may be a trade-off here. After all, once the human genome was mapped, relatively little had to be spent to pub- licize its boon to medicine.
In other words, a “most bang for the buck” principle seems to rule our intuitive judgements of genius. Television producers know this all too well. It explains why viewers are more impressed by a John Doe who invents something that stumps the experts than by a bat- talion of well-financed lab scientists who arrive at some equally counterintuitive and probably better grounded discovery. But the consequences of requiring payment for research run deeper than the topic of the next science documentary. If the people who are regu-
larly paid to produce knowledge find publication relatively easy, then it should come as no surprise that the ratio of useful to useless research turns out to be unacceptably low, at least to the untrained eye. The knowledge manager promises to sort out this situation.