The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Paul A. David *
From Keeping ‘Nature’s Secrets’ to the
Institutionalization of ‘Open Science’
Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History
University of Oxford
Number 23, July 2001
* All Souls
College, Oxford and Stanford University
Content
The
Problem: Why ‘Open Science’?
The
Argument: Noble Patrons, Mathematicians, and Principal-Agent Problems
Rival
Principals and Common Agency Contracting - The Legacy of European Feudalism
Sequelae: Open Science in
the ‘New Age of Academies’
This essay examines the economics of patronage and the
roles of asymmetric information and reputation in the early modern
reorganization of scientific activities, specifically their influence upon the
historical formation of key elements in the ethos and organizational structure
of publicly funded open science. The
emergence during the late 16th and early 17th centuries of the idea and
practice of ‘open science’ represented a break from the previously dominant
ethos of secrecy in the pursuit of ‘Nature’s Secrets.’ It was a distinctive and vital organizational
aspect of the Scientific Revolution, from which crystallized a new set of
norms, incentives, and organizational structures that reinforced scientific
researchers’ commitments to rapid disclosure of new knowledge. The rise ‘cooperative rivalries’ in the
revelation of new knowledge, is seen as functional response to heightened
asymmetric information problems posed for the Renaissance system of
court-patronage of the arts and sciences; pre-existing informational
asymmetries had been exacerbated by increased importance mathematics and the
greater reliance upon sophisticated mathematical technique in a variety of
practical contexts of application. Analysis
of the court patronage system of late Renaissance Europe, within which the new
natural philosophers found their support, points to the significance of the
feudal legacy of fragmented political authority in creating conditions of
‘common agency contracting in substitutes.’ These conditions are shown to have been
conducive to more favorable contract terms (especially with regard to autonomy
and financial support) for the agent-client members of western
Europe’s nascent scientific communities.
1
In the United States, indeed, throughout the community of industrially
advanced nations, a sense of urgency has surrounded discussions and debates about
the organization and funding of R&D by governments. Surely it is not entirely coincidental that
such issues were broached for serious discussion in the US during the late
1990s against the backdrop of unprecedentedly large
contractions in the projected levels of real federal expenditures for both
defense-related and civilian R&D during 1997-2002. [1] Lively debates concerning
science policy have erupted in the US on many previous occasions, but the most
recent episode would seem to have been the first sustained that has seen a
fundamental questioning of some of the infrastructure institutions and
organizational commitments that have framed the nation’s science and technology
system - at least since the major restructuring initiated by the 1945 report of
Vannevar Bush. [2]
Even when the federal funding picture seemed to improve for basic
research, opinion-leaders in the areas of science and education have continued
to ask whether American universities should continue to be supported as the
primary sites for conducting basic research in an ‘open’ fashion which
facilitates its close integration with teaching. Some are questioning whether the emphasis on
research is healthy for undergraduate teaching. Others wonder whether an ‘academic research’
environment is compatible with concurrent efforts to expand the sphere of
collaborative R&D with industry, pro-active forms of ‘technology transfer,’
and to make more extensive use of intellectual property and other means of
establishing a proprietary interest in the research activities of faculty,
staff and students? Might it not be
better to hive off both basic and applied research into specialized institutes,
thus resolving conflicts that arise between the universities’ conduct of their
traditional functions and the drive on the part of other organizations and
agencies (both private and governmental) to control information flows in order
to better exploit new findings? Issues
similar to those concerning the future role of the university in the ‘national
innovation system’ also have arisen in discussions of moves towards
‘privatizing’ other
1 See Boesman
1997, Koizumi, 1997, and Mowery 1997.
2 On the Bush Report, the recurring
issues in US science policy debates, and the prelude to the recent discussions,
see, e.g., David 1996, Boesman 1997 and references
therein.
publicly funded research institutions such as the National
Laboratories, and reorienting national research institutes towards commercial
application of their research output. [3]
At a time, when the reorganization of national science and technology
systems are under active consideration and the fitness of recent experiments
with innovations in institutional arrangements are undergoing re-assessment, it
may be especially useful to look backwards to the historical circumstances in
which some of the basic institutions of science first emerged; and, equally,
and to the economic, social and political forces that have shaped their
subsequent evolution. Economists quite
rightly will wish to continue to probe for deeper understanding of the insides
of the ‘black box’ of technology (Rosenberg 1982). But, by comparison with what has been learned
already concerning institutional arrangements and business strategies affecting
corporate R&D investments, and the mechanisms enabling private
appropriation of research benefits, it remains surprising that so much less is
known about the economics origins and effects of the corresponding
institutional infrastructures shaping the world of ‘academic’ science, and
about the organization of publicly supported R&D more generally.
The desirability of closing this particular lacuna in the economics and
economic history literatures has been just as evident to those who have noticed
it within a broader framework of concern with the economic analysis of
institutions, as to those who have begun to approach that task by bringing the
perspectives and methods of industrial organization economics to bear in the
area of science and technology studies. [4] Even
before the ‘new economics of science’ had begun to direct attention to such a
program, Douglass North (1990:75) saw a significant challenge and a promising
opportunity in explicit exploration of ‘the connecting links between
institutional structures... and incentives to acquire pure knowledge.’
A variety of historical inquiries may be seen as responses to that
challenge, by examining key episodes in the institutional evolution of ‘public
science’ and its complex and changing relationship with the other
organizational spheres of contemporaneous scientific activity. [5] The latter include, of
course, both those in
3. For entry
points to the vast literature, see e.g., David, Mowery and Steimnueller
(1994) on university-industry R&D collaborations; Guston
and Kethston (1994) on university relations with the
federal government; Branscomb (1994), Cohen and Noll
(1994) on the National Labs.
4. Within the
past decade the situation has begun to change. See Dasgupta
and David (1987, 1988, 1994), David (1994), and the more recent surveys by
Diamond (1996), Stephan (1996), and David, Foray and Steimnueller
(1997).
5. See, for a
recent effort to bring this historical experience to the attention of
economists, the special session in the American Economic Association Proceedings
on ‘Clio and the [Economic
Organization of Science’ (May 1998), which included brief, chronologically
ordered contributions by David 1998, Lenoir 1998, Lécuyer
1998, and Blumenthal 1998.]
HHC: [bracketed] displayed on page 4 of original.
3
which
industrial research was conducted for private commercial gain under
‘proprietary rules,’ and the ‘defence-related’
pursuit of scientific and engineering knowledge under conditions of restricted
access to information about basic findings and their actual and potential
applications. Much fascination is
imparted to the study of institutional evolution in that sphere by the
complexity of the organizational details, and the high stakes attached to
issues arising from the immediate entanglement of R&D programs and project
with matters of national security; or, alternatively by the strategies and
fortunes of business corporations that turn on the capabilities of their
research organizations. Nevertheless,
the historical emergence of the other, academic sphere of research poses a
number of questions to which the answers seem less intuitively obvious and
straightforward, and yet critically important as a guide in the formation of
constructive science and technology policies.
Although the conceptualization of science as the pursuit of ‘public
knowledge’ and an object of public-minded patronage today seems a natural, even
a ‘primitive’ notion, it is in reality a complex social contrivance. Moreover, ‘open science’ is a social
innovation of comparatively recent historical origin. This has afforded historians of scientific
institutions the archival material to examine the evolution of its outward
forms of support in considerable detail. But the circumstances and interests that gave
rise to this innovation, and their relationship to the economic forces that
have sustained and shaped its subsequent development have not received the
attention that the importance of the subject in the modern world would seem to
warrant.
Within university-based research communities, especially, there are
recognized norms and conventions that constitute a well-delineated professional
ethos to which scientists generally are disposed to publicly subscribe, whether
or not their own behaviors always conform literally to its strictures governing
the organization and conduct of research. The norms of ‘the Republic of Science’ that
have famously been articulated by the sociologist Robert K. Merton (1973: esp.
Ch. 13; 1986: Pt. III) sometimes are summarized under the mnemonic CUDOS:
communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, skepticism. (See Ziman 1994, p. 177). The ‘communal’ ethos emphasizes the
cooperative character of inquiry, stressing that the accumulation of reliable
knowledge is an essentially social process, however much individuals may strive
to contribute to it. The force of the universalist norm is to render entry into scientific work
and discourse open to all persons of ‘competence’ regardless of their personal
and
ascriptive attributes. A second aspect of ‘openness’ concerns the
disposition of knowledge: the full disclosure of findings, and methods, form a
key aspect of the cooperative, communal program of inquiry. Full disclosure, in turn serves the ethos
legitimating and, indeed, prescribing what Merton called ‘organized
skepticism’; it supports the expectation that all claims to have contributed to
the stock of reliable knowledge will be subjected to trials of replication and
verification, without insult to the claimant. The ‘originality’ of such intellectual
contributions is the touchstone for the acknowledgment of individual scientific
claims, upon which collegiate reputations and the material and non-pecuniary
rewards attached to such peer evaluations are based.
Whence did we come by this distinctive set of governance norms for the
search for reliable knowledge? How did
they become institutionalized as the legitimate ethos - even where they are not
strictly adhered to in practice - among the class of academic organizations
that flourish in the democratic societies of the modern world? These questions about the nature and origins
of the fundamental lines of cultural and institutional demarcation that
distinguish the sphere of ‘open science’ activities - supported by state
funding and the patronage of private foundations, and carried on in
universities and public (not-for-profit) institutes - form the central
substantive historical problem that I address in this paper. [6] It will be seen that in
the particular answers to which I have been led, there is also a broader
message for contemporary science and technology policy-making.
The Problem: Why ‘Open Science’?
Judged by historical standards, ‘open science’ is a comparatively
recent organizational innovation. Accompanying the profound epistemological
6. This paper draws upon
David (1997: December), which should be consulted for fuller historical documentation
and references to the relevant literature.
Space there also permits proper acknowledgement of the help of Avner Greif, Mario Biagioli, Partha Dasgupta, Weston Headley, Scott Mandelbrote,
Joel Mokyr, Noel Swerdlow,
and many other colleagues, institutions and foundations who generously contributed
both intellectually and materially in support of my researches in area since
1991. The present essay has benefited
from the comments and suggestions by Kenneth Flamm, Zvi Griliches and David Mowery,
which could not be accommodated within David 1998 - the very abridged version
read at the January 1998 AEA Meetings in Chicago, and published shortly
thereafter in the AEA Proceedings.
5
transformations
effected by the fusion of ‘experimentalism’ with Renaissance mathematics, the
cultural ethos and social organization of western European scientific
activities during the late 16th and 17th centuries underwent a significant
reorganization, a departure from the previously dominant regime of secrecy in
the pursuit of Nature’s Secrets. This
development should be seen as a distinctive and vital aspect of the Scientific
Revolution, from which there crystallized a new set of social conventions,
incentive structures, and institutional mechanisms that reinforced scientific
researchers’ commitments to rapid disclosure and wider dissemination of their
new discoveries and inventions. Yet, the
puzzle of why and how this came about has not received the notice it would seem
to deserve, especially in view of the complementarities and tensions that are
recognized to be present today in relations between the regimes of ‘open’ and
‘proprietary’ science.
Even superficial reference to the antecedent intellectual orientation
and social organization of scientific research in the West suggests the utter
improbability of the historical bifurcation in which a new and quite
antithetical mode of conducting ‘the hunt for knowledge’ emerged alongside (and
in some sense in competition with) the older, secretive search for ‘Nature’s
Secrets.’ Virtually all of the
intellectual traditions and material conditions in the medieval West inveighed
against ‘openness’ of inquiry and public disclosure of discoveries about the
natural order of the world, let alone the heavens. Medieval experimental science,
was shaped by a political and religious outlook that encouraged withholding
from the ‘vulgar multitude’ arcane knowledge that might bring power over
material things (see Thorndike 1950: vol. II; Eamon
1985, 1994). The imperative of secrecy
was particularly strong in the medieval and Renaissance traditions of Alchemy,
where, indeed, it persisted side-by-side with the emergent institutions of open
science throughout the 17th and into the 18th century (see Dobbs 1975, Vickers
1984, Westfall 1980). Social and economic regulations during the Middle Ages, along with the relatively primitive and costly
technologies available for scientific communications, also reinforced the moral
and philosophical considerations arrayed against open disclosure of discovered
secrets. Economic rent-seeking worked in
the same direction: knowledge of recently discovered geographical secrets that
were held to be of potential mercantile value, such as trade routes, would be
kept from the public domain. Similarly,
technological recipes normally were closely held by
craftsmen, even when they were not compelled by guild
restrictions to preserve the ‘mysteries’ of the industrial arts. [7]
Why then, out of such a background of secrecy and obfuscation, should
there have emerged a quite distinctive community of inquiry into the nature of
the physical world, holding different norms regarding disclosure, and being
governed by a distinctive reward system based upon priority of discovery? Why so, especially when in the modern context
we see that there is little if any difference between the methods of
(scientific) inquiry used by university scientists working under the
institutional norms of open science, and the procedures that they (or others
with the same training) employ in the setting of a corporate R&D
laboratory? Can the social organization
of open science then be simply an epiphenomenon of the profound philosophical
and religious reorientations that have been presented as underpinning the
Scientific Revolution, if not the epistemological transformation that latter
had wrought? Or, should the intellectual
achievements of that epoch instead be read as consequences of what might be
called the ‘Open Science Revolution’? To
state the problem more synthetically, is it not plausible that these two
discontinuities - the one taking place in the social organization of scientific
inquiry and the other transforming its intellectual organization - were
interdependent, and entangled with each other in ways that need to be more
thoroughly understood?
A start towards answering this question is provided by considering the
economic logic of the organization of knowledge-producing activities, for, it
is possible in such terms to give a complete functionalist account of the
institutional complex that characterizes modern science (see, e.g., Dasgupta and David 1987, 1988, 1994). In brief the norm of ‘openness’ is ‘incentive
compatible’ with a collegiate reputational reward
system based upon accepted claims to priority; and it is conducive to
individual strategy choices whose collective congruence reduces excess
duplication of research efforts, and enlarges the domain of informational complementaries. This
brings socially
7. From the
14th century to the early 18th century in Europe, the issuance of letters
patent’ and granting of royal privileges’ conferring monopoly rights in
exchange for the disclosure of technological information was aimed primarily at
effecting the transfer and application of existing industrial arts and
engineering practices, i.e., techniques already known to master-craftsmen and
engineers in other territories; and not at inducing fresh inventive activity. Many early patent monopolies were, in effect,
local franchises designed to shelter immigrating expert-practitioners from the
subsequent competition of the apprentices and journeymen they were expected to
train, or others who would try imitate them once their particular ‘mysterie’ had been successfully established in the new
cities and principalities to which they were recruited. See David and Olsen (1992), David (1993 a),
and sources cited therein.
7
beneficial ‘spill-overs’ among
research programs, and abets rapid replication and swift validation of novel
discoveries. The advantages of treating
new findings as ‘public goods’ in order to promote the faster growth of the
stock of knowledge, thus, are contrasted with the requirements of secrecy for
the purposes of securing a monopoly over the use of new information that may be
directly or indirectly exploited in the production of goods and services. This functionalist juxtaposition suggests a
logical basis for the existence and perpetuation of institutional and cultural
separations between two normatively differentiated communities of research
practice, the open ‘Republic of Science’ and the proprietary ‘Realm of
Technology’: the two distinctive organizational regimes serve different and
potentially complementary societal purposes.
The foregoing, ‘logical origins’ style of explanation for the
institutions of modern science (and technology), however, is one in which all
details of their historical evolution are ignored. Such a rationale would seem, at best, to
presuppose a form of ‘creationist’ fiction - namely that these arrangements
were instituted ab initio
by some external agency, such as an informed and benevolent political
authority endowed with fiscal powers. That
objection calls for an explicit examination of the ‘historical origins’ of the
institutions of open science, since these remain outside the set of ‘logical
origins’ that one arrives at by simply considering the present-day functional
value of an already extant, cooperative mode of scientific research.
The Argument: Noble Patrons, Mathematicians, and
Principal-Agent Problems
Rather than trying to construe the reorganization of scientific
activities in early modern Europe as having somehow derived automatically from
the intellectual changes represented by the new style of ‘scientific’ activity,
I contend that the historical emergence of the norms of disclosure and
demonstration, and the rise of ‘cooperative rivalries’ in the revelation of new
knowledge, had independent and antecedent roots. These are to be found in the social and
institutional contexts in which the new breed of scientists in that era were
working. My central thesis here is that
the formation of a distinctive research culture of open science was first made
possible, and, indeed, was positively encouraged by the system of aristocratic
patronage in an era when kings and nobles (both lay and ecclesiastical) were
immediately concerned with the ‘ornamental’ benefits to be derived by their
sponsorship of philosophers and savants of great renown.
To support this interpretation, I argue that the economic logic of the
patronage system in post-Renaissance Europe induced the emergence and promoted
the institutionalization of reputation-building proceedings, all of which
turned upon the revelation of scientific knowledge and ‘expertise’ among
extended reference groups that included ‘peer-experts.’ The mechanisms involved spanned the range from
participation in informal networks of correspondence, to public challenges and
contests, open demonstrations, and exhibitions, and the certification of
individuals by co-optation and election to ‘learned societies.’ Patronage, however, was an old system in the
17th century, and the sponsorship of intellectuals was a long-standing
prerogative and responsibility of Europe’s social and political elites. It is necessary, therefore, to explain why
something new appeared on the scene; why some of the conventions and norms now
associated with open science - in particular, the reliance upon peer appraisal
and collective evaluation expressed through the formation of professional
reputations - were induced in primitive form at this particular juncture in
history. The key propositions for this
part of my argument derive from first considering the economics of patronage in
general, and then noticing the specific implications of the newly arising
problems of ‘principal-agent contracting’ that were created by the encounter of
the late Renaissance patronage system with the new (mathematical) form of
natural philosophy practiced by Galileo, Kepler and
their contemporaries. [8]
Aristocratic patronage systems have reflected two kinds of motivation:
the utilitarian and the ornamental. Most
political elites, in addition to recognizing some need in their domain for men
capable of producing new ideas and inventions to solve mundane problems
connected with warfare and security, land reclamation, food production,
transport facilities, and so forth, also have sought to enlist the services of
those who professed an ability to reveal the secrets of Nature, and of Destiny.
Kings and princes, and lesser nobles too
sought to surround themselves with creative talents whose achievements would
enhance not only their self-esteem, but their public image - those aspects of
8. Galileo’s involvement in
the system of court patronage in Italy, and his communication during 1610 with Kepler, then in the service of Emperor Rudolph II in
Prague, is documented by Biagioli (1993), and further
considered in David (1997:November, pp.32-36). The situations of many other notable
scientific figures elsewhere in Europe also can be mentioned e.g. as by Mokyr (1990: p. 73 on Leibntz; p.
84 on Torricei; p.l69 on Borelli.)
See also the extensive discussions in
Moran (1991) on the patronage of science and medicine in the court o Prince Henry
of Wales (d.1612) at Richmond Palace, the Court of Rudolph II and the Habsburg
circle in the mid-seventeenth century, the Munich Court of Ferdinand Maria, the
Elector of Bavaria (r. 1654-1679), and elsewhere in Europe.
9
grandeur and ostentatious display which might serve to
reinforce their claims to rightful authority. Thus, poets, artists, musicians, chroniclers,
architects, instrument-makers and natural philosophers found employment in
aristocratic courts, both because their skills might serve the pleasures of the
court, and because their presence ‘made a statement’ in the competition among
nobles for prestige. These dyadic
patron-client relationships, which offered the latter material and political
support in exchange for service, were often precarious, uncomfortably subject
to aristocratic whims and pleasures, and to the abrupt terminations that would
ensue on the disgrace or demise of a patron.
Nonetheless, they existed in this era as part of a well-articulated
system characterized by elaborate conventions and rituals that provided
calculable career paths for men of intellectual and artistic talents (see Biagioli 1990, 1993; Moran 1991).
Those motives for entering into a patron’s role that reduce to symbolic
acts of self-aggrandizement are here subsumed under the heading ‘ornamental.’ Such reasons, however, should be understood to
have been no less instrumental in their nature and roots than were the
utilitarian considerations for the patronage of intellectuals. The public display of ‘magnificence,’ in which
art and power had become allied, was a stock item in the repertoire of
Renaissance state-craft (see Strong, 1984). This is significant, because inventions and
discoveries that met utilitarian needs in some instances would have to be kept
secret if they were to be most useful, whereas it is in the nature of the ornamental
motive that its fulfillment elicits the disclosure of new, marvelous
discoveries and creations; that the client’s achievement on behalf of the
patron be widely publicized. Indeed, it
was very much in the interest of a patron for the reputations of those he
patronized to be enhanced in this way, for their fame augmented his own. [9] A second point of
significance is that only some utilitarian services but most ornamental
services had ‘positional’ value from the patron’s point of view. Although having a skilled artist or a clever
astronomer in one’s court was altogether a good thing, it was far better if
such clients were personages of greater accomplishments and renown than those
who happened to be in the service of a rival’s court. The pressure on Europe’s ruling families to
have intellectuals of recognized eminence in their service was thus exacerbated
by the
9. Galileo
understood this well, as was evident from the adroit way in which he exploited
his ability to prepare superior telescopes for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici: he urged his patron to present these
to other crowned heads in Europe, whereby they too might observe the new-found
moons of Jupiter which the Sidereus Nuncius (March 1610) had proclaimed to be ‘the Medicean stars.’ See
Drake (1957, 1978), Westfall (1985), and Biagioli
(1990, 1993: Ch.1).
existence of rival rulers and their courts, and so lent
additional strength to the ornamental motives for their patronage of such
clients.
Into this setting a new element had been interjected during the 16th
century. The more extensive and rigorous
use of mathematical methods formed an important aspect of the work of the new
breed of natural philosophers. [10] But, one surely
unintended side-effect of this intellectual advance was to render the basis of
the mathematically sophisticated savants’ claims and reputations less
immediately accessible for evaluation by the elites in whose service they
wished to be employed. The difficulties
thereby posed by the asymmetric distribution of information were rather
unprecedented, not having been encountered to the same degree in the patronage
of intellectuals and artists who followed other, less esoteric callings. The new breed of scientists, however, claimed
to specialize in revealing the unfamiliar. Opportunities for charlatanry here were more
rife, and so were the risks of embarrassment for the patron, should it turn out
that one had sponsored a fraud - or much worse, a heretic. Thus, even where the services of the
mathematically trained intelligentsia might be sought for essentially
practical, utilitarian motives (such talents being useful in designing
machinery for public spectacles, surveying and cartography, ballistics and
correct use of perspective in pictorial arts), the soundness of the candidates’
qualifications had become more problematic and far from inconsequential.
In other words, this line of argument directs attention to the
emergence of especially compelling reasons for noble patrons in the late
Renaissance to delegate part of the responsibility for evaluating and selecting
among the new breed of ‘savants’, devolving those functions upon the
increasingly formalized communities of their fellow practitioners and
correspondents. Except for those few who
were themselves versed in mathematics or other experimental practices
associated with the new learning, patrons were inclined to refrain from passing
personal judgement on scientific assertions and
involving themselves in substantive controversies (see Biagioli,
1993). It was left to the initiative of
the parties dependent upon such patronage to organize
the production of credible testimonials to their own credibility and scientific
status.
10. Following the fusion of Arabic
and classical mathematics, the significance of algebra, the geometry of conic
sections, trigonometry, and still more esoteric developments was recognized and
openly proclaimed in terms that drew upon a rhetorical tradition reaching back
to the great Renaissance mathematician ‘Regiomontmus’
- as Johannes Muller of Konigsberg (1432-1476) styled
himself. See Swerdlow
(1993), Boyer (1985: Ch. XV) on Renaissance mathematics; Keller (1985) on the
program and rhetorical developed on behalf of mathematical training during the
1570’s and 1580’s; Feingold (1984:Ch.IV), Westfall (1985), Biagioli
(1989, 1990, 1993) on the patronage of mathematicians.
11
Not altogether surprisingly, therefore, the mid-l6th century, which is
frequently taken as the beginning of the era of modern mathematics, also
witnessed the formation of active networks of correspondence among Europe’s
adepts in algebra, announcing newly devised techniques and results; this era
initiated the modern tradition of publicly posing mathematical puzzles, issuing
scientific challenges, announcing prizes for the solutions of problems, and the
holding of open competitions to test the claims of rival experts in the
mathematical arts (see e.g., Boyer 1985: esp., 310-312; Feingold 1984; Keller
1985). On the interpretation proposed
here, the new practices of disclosure constituted a functional response to
heightened asymmetric information problems that the mathematization
of natural philosophy and the practical arts posed for the Renaissance system
of court-patronage.
Rival Principals and Common Agency Contracting - The
Legacy of European Feudalism
The conditions I have sketched regarding the late Renaissance and early
modern system of court patronage present a situation economists would describe
as ‘common agency contracting’ involving the competition among incompletely
informed principals for the dedicated services of multiple agents. This correspondence suggests several
noteworthy points about the economic organization of scientific activities in Europe
during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
First, since what the scientist-clients had to offer was ‘novelty,’ at
any point in time the welfare of several patrons could not be jointly advanced
in the same degree. As a consequence of
the dominance in the early history of modern science of patrons who were
concerned with the ornamental rather than the utilitarian value of
scientist-philosophers, the services a client provided to his several patrons
were essentially ‘substitutes’ rather than ‘complementary’ commodities.
Second, in the majority of cases the material rewards offered to
clients by any single patron were not sufficiently large and certain to free
the former from the quest for multiple patrons. The situation typically being that of common
agency, we may draw on Avinash Dixit’s
(1996) recent theoretical exposition to point out that in the absence of full
information, and concerted action on the part of principals, the nature of the
incentive contracts offered by the latter would reflect their awareness of the
possibility that a client/agent could use the means provided by one patron to
serve the ends of another. The resulting
Nash
equilibrium in the game among rival principals would then be
a set of patronage-contracts that offered clients comparatively weak material
incentives to devote their efforts exclusively to the service of any one
patron. Such an equilibrium outcome, of
course, would be consistent with the necessity of seeking to serve a number of
patrons concurrently (however arduous and demeaning a scientist like Galileo
might feel that to be); it would thereby reinforce the choice on the part of
would-be clients of research and publication strategies that would lead towards
widening the circle of their repute.
Third, as has been shown by Lars Stole’s (1990) analysis of mechanism
design under common agency contracting, the equilibrium outcome in the case of
‘contract substitutes’ is in general more favorable to the agent than is the
case when the services performed for different principals are complements. In effect, the competition among patrons to
command the faithful attention of an agent/client would lead to contracts that
allowed the latter to retain more ‘rents’ from the specialized information he
possessed. This provided greater rewards
for scientific activities than would have resulted otherwise, were there only a
single possible patron on the scene, or had the patrons predominantly enjoyed
positive externalities from others’ support of the agent’s efforts - the
characteristic situation where there are significant ‘spillovers’ of
utilitarian benefits from new knowledge.
There is in the story related here an historical irony well worth
remarking upon, especially as it serves also to underscore the tenacity of the
past’s hold on the incrementally evolving institutions that channel the course
of economic change. [11] The
nub of it is simply this: an essentially pre-capitalist, European aristocratic
disposition to award patronage for the purposes of enhancing rulers’ political
powers symbolically (through displays of ‘magnificence’), came to confer value
upon those who pursued knowledge by following the ‘new science’ in the late
16th and 17th centuries. The norms of
cooperation and information disclosure within the community of scientists, and
their institutionalization through the activities of formal scientific
organizations, emerged - at least in part - as a response to the informational
requirements of a system of patronage in which the competition among noble
patrons for prestigious clients was crucial.
Those rivalries, in turn, were a legacy of western European feudalism:
it was the fragmentation of political authority that had created the conditions
of
11. On the
theme of ‘path dependence’ in the dynamics of economic systems, see, e.g. David
(1988, 1993b, 1994,2000).
13
‘common agency contracting in substitutes.’ An instructive contrast therefore might be
drawn with the alternative circumstances of a monolithic political system, such
as had prevailed elsewhere - as in the Heavenly Empire of China during an
earlier epoch, to cite a well-known case of a society that clearly possessed the
intellectual talents yet failed spectacularly to institutionalize the practice
of open science.
Sequelae:
Open Science in the ‘New Age of Academies’
The foregoing necessarily brief treatment of immensely complex matters
has focused upon the economic aspects of patronage in the production of
knowledge, and the latter’s influence upon the historical formation of key
elements in the ethos and organizational structure of open science. Those developments preceded and laid the
foundations for the later seventeenth and eighteenth century
institutionalization of the open pursuit of scientific knowledge under the
auspices of State-sponsored academies. The
Royal Society of London was founded in 1660 and received charters from Charles
II in 1662 and 1663, and within another few years, in 1666, the Academic Royale des Sciences was created on the initiative of
Colbert. The activities of these two
State foundations, and the ensuing formal institutional ‘reorganization of
science’ in Europe which they inspired, have received much attention from more
than one generation of historians of science. [12] Although from some
perspectives this concentration of scholarly focus might be judged inordinate,
it may also be justified by the fact that another 70 officially recognized
scientific organizations have been identified by McClellan (1985) as having
been established between the 1660s and 1793, specifically on the models
provided by those archetypal institutions.
Just as I have argued in the foregoing text that the intellectual
reorientation represented by the scientific revolution cannot be held to have
been a motor cause of the emergence of the ‘open’ mode of searching for
Nature’s Secrets, so there are good grounds in the work of other scholars for
resisting the interpretation of the ‘new Age of Academies’ as constituting a
radical organizational departure. Furthermore,
there is reason also to contest the view that the so-called ‘New Age of
Academies’ had been called forth by the enlarged scale and costs of the new
modes of scientific inquiry, and the supposed failures of private patronage in
the mid-seventeenth century. [13]
12. See, e.g., Brown
(1934/67), Orenstein (1963), Haim (1971), Hunter
(1981), McClellan (1985).
13. See, e.g., Lux (1991) for discussion and references to the relevant
literature.
The post-1660s phase in the evolution of the institutions of modern
science is better viewed essentially as the continuation of a much broader
cultural movement that had been taking place in Europe outside the medieval
universities. One aspect of this
movement manifested itself in the appearance, around the turn of the sixteenth
century, of numerous privately patronized scientific societies and
‘academies’. Seventeenth century science
proper thus has been found to have played only a very minor part of that wider
intellectual reorganization: of the 2500 learned societies that are known to
have been instituted in Europe between 1500 and 1800, at least 700 were formed
during the sixteenth century alone. Although
some among these organizations were scientific in purpose, they were not in the
pre-1550 vanguard; according to McCllelan (1985), the
overwhelming majority were formed in response to interests broader than
anything that resembling the organized pursuit of science.
The following passage from the work of David Lux
(1991:pp.189, 196) serves well to articulate the present state of understanding
about the nature of the causal relationships in this complicated sequence of
developments:
[T]he traditional points of departure
for discussing organizational change in science - della
Porta’s Accademia
Secretorum Naturae [founded
in Naples, 1589] or Cesi’s Accademia
dei Lincei [founded in
Rome, 1604] - offer nothing to suggest the intellectual novelties of
sixteenth-century science produced real organizational change... Rather than
producing organizational change, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science
followed other intellectual activity into new organizational forms. Indeed, in strictly organizational terms there
is no obvious justification for attempting to isolate science from other forms
of intellectual activity before the end of the seventeenth century. Nor is there any obvious justification for
portraying science as honing the cutting edge of organizational change. Despite the literature’s claims about novel
science creating needs for new organizational forms, the institutional history
of science across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries actually speaks to a
record in which scientific practice changed only after moving into new
organizational forms.’
Thus, the institutional context provided by the early academies had
readily accommodated the needs for ‘social legitimization’ and, for theatres
for disclosures where patronage-seeking practitioners of the new natural
philosophy might enhance their public repute. Subsequently, the institutionalization of the
15
nascent ‘open
science’ mode of organization was carried forward upon an elevated stage under
the aegis of the early modern state, where it mobilized augmented resources and
applied the new methods of scientific inquiry on a scale that eventually
altered the character of scientific practice.
In a still later era, beginning mid-way through the nineteenth century
with the introduction of modern scientific research into the German
state-sponsored universities, mimetic inter-institutional competition created a
new set ‘academic market’ conditions that proved propitious for the
establishment of research scientists, and graduate research seminars within the
ambit of the university. In this new
setting, the fundamental problems of reputation and agency - upon which the
foregoing economic analysis has been focused - soon re-emerged in different,
but nonetheless recognizable forms. [14] Even today, university
patrons, both private and public, along with academic administrators, and
members of the professoriate find themselves confronted by informational
asymmetries, agency problems, and reputational reward
mechanisms that parallel in many respects those that once had characterized the
system of European court patronage.
Some things change, however. As
the ornamental value of supporting esteemed scholars and scientists has given
way to the instrumental power of scientific knowledge, the ability of
individual members of ‘the Republic of Science’ to extract a large part of the
‘information rents’ has been circumscribed; correspondingly, there has been an
enlargement of the relative share of the benefits that flow - in the form of
‘knowledge spill-overs’ - to the ultimate patrons the
publicly supported regime of ‘open science. Yet, some continuities are preserved: in the
modern system of devolved patronage of science, those having the responsibility
for the management of academic institutions and non-profit research institutes
appear simultaneously in the roles of agents vis-à-vis the public, and principals
vis-à-vis the research agents upon whose expertise they must rely. In their dual capacities the administrators of
academic institutions (and the individuals who staff them) must continue to
seek effective ways of mediating conflicts between the divergent interests of
the principals and their respective agents. On the one hand, they are enjoined to seek the
larger societal, public goals that are best served by preserving the
organizational modes and norms open scientific inquiry; while, on the other
hand, they are being encouraged to try to appropriate a larger portion of the
‘information rents’ for use in more narrowly parochial institutional and
private undertakings - even
14. See, e.g., Ben-David
1991:Ch.8; Lenoir 1998, and references cited therein.
when to do so entails circumscribing open access to the new
knowledge gained from the research conducted under their auspices.
The moral of all this goes further than merely
providing another attestation to the truth in the aphorism that the more things
seem to change, the more they stay the same. Some important part of the power of modern
science today derives from the radical social innovation that the ‘open
science’ regime constituted. A corollary
proposition, to which the historical experience recounted here also lends
support, is that the methods of modern science themselves have not been, and
still are not sufficient to create the unique cultural ethos associated with
‘the Republic of Science.’ Nor can they
be expected to automatically induce and sustain the peculiar institutional
infrastructures and organizational conditions of the open science regime,
within which their application has proved so conducive to the rapid growth of
the stock of reliable public knowledge, and all that flows therefrom.
Rather than emerging and surviving as robust epiphenomena of a new organum of intellectual inquiry, the institutions of open
science are independent, and in some measure fortuitous, social and political
constructs. They are in reality
intricate cultural legacies of a long past epoch of European history, which
through them continues to profoundly influence the systemic efficacy of the
modern scientific research process.
Major features of the institutional infrastructure of public science,
thus being to a considerable degree exogenous to actual scientific practice in
the contemporary world, can be subjected to substantial amounts of experimental
tinkering, and even major re-design, without jeopardizing the methodology of
current inquiry. In one sense, this
freedom this affords the manipulation institutional incentives and constraints
as instruments of modern science and technology policy can be read as ‘the good
news.’
It should be taken with a grave caution, however: wise policy-making in
this sensitive area must pay especial heed to those organizational instruments’
own complex and contingent histories, and so respect the potential fragility of
the institutional matrix within which modern science evolved and flourished. Along with a sense of awe and gratitude for
the good fortune of having received this remarkable gift from the past, we
shall do well to maintain a sobering awareness of the extent to which our
future welfare has come to depend upon the continued smooth workings of an
intricate and imperfectly understood piece of
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