High Educ DOI 10.1007/s10734-017-0115-3

Academic hierarchies in neo-feudal capitalism: how status competition processes trust and facilitates the appropriation of knowledge Tilman Reitz 1

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Abstract The article offers a socio-economic explanation of the much-discussed proliferation of evaluations, performance indicators, rankings and ratings in higher education and research. The aim is to show that these social technologies not only restructure the word of knowledge via status competitions but also serve to align academic stratification with socio-economic inequality. The theoretical framework is derived from critical analyses of the knowledge economy and from the credentialist theory of Randall Collins. Both accounts are further elaborated. With regard to the knowledge economy, the argument is that status hierarchies enable a privileged and profitable use of knowledge even where it is not feasible to establish intellectual property rights. In order to establish this argument, credentialism is extended from a theory about the labour market privileges of graduates to a theory about the social valuation of knowledge producers, knowledge products and knowledge institutions in general. Three main propositions are developed and defended: (1) A capitalist knowledge economy can only work as a status economy where income levels of qualified work and the exploitation of intellectual assets depend on accepted entitlements; (2) basic infrastructures of assessing the status of knowledge and knowledge workers are cultivated in higher education and research; (3) by codifying trust in knowledge, these academic (e)valuations facilitate its private appropriation in reputational capitalism. Keywords Sociology of knowledge . Sociology of evaluation . Knowledge economy . Credentialism . Cognitive capitalism . Neo-feudalism Economists quickly run into difficulty when they try to determine the value of goods, rather than just observing their prices. Neither the classical approach of turning to labour time nor neo-classical assumptions of equilibria under perfect competition are quite convincing. In the

* Tilman Reitz [email protected]

1

Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Carl-Zeiss-Str. 3, 07743 Jena, Germany

High Educ

context of globalized higher education, with its multiple linkages to the knowledge economy, it is even more difficult to determine the value of knowledge. Different aspects are at stake: the validity of propositions, recognition within the scientific community, the market value of intellectual assets, and the social status of knowledge workers and institutions. At the same time, a potentially unifying logic of (e)valuations (peer reviews, performance indicators, rankings and ratings) increasingly determines the ways in which academic knowledge is created and processed. The following reflections aim to show how this logic aligns academic stratification with socio-economic inequality. I will argue for three propositions: (1) A capitalist knowledge economy can only work as a status economy where income levels of qualified work, and the exploitation of intellectual assets, depend on accepted entitlements; (2) basic infrastructures for assessing the status of knowledge and knowledge workers are cultivated in higher education and research; (3) by codifying trust in knowledge, these academic (e)valuations facilitate its private appropriation in reputational capitalism. With these claims, I propose to connect two widely recognized trends in the sector of higher education: marketization and formalized status competition. The first trend includes the ascent of market-oriented university management, knowledge-intensive firms and high-income jobs for elite graduates in the US since the 1980s (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Berman 2012; Rivera 2015). The second trend is marked by a steep rise in peer evaluations and performancebased funding, especially in Europe since the 1990s (Burrows 2012; Musselin 2013; Maesse 2015). The processes of marketization and formalized status competition are obviously connected, but theoretical accounts tend to focus on one side of the dynamic or the other. Theories of ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997), or of academically mediated class reproduction (Hartmann 2004; Stevens 2007; Mettler 2014), say little about the logic of academic status competition. Most importantly, they neglect its evaluative infrastructures. Conversely, attempts to apply a ‘sociology of valuation and evaluation’ (Lamont 2012) to peer reviewbased competitions fail to specify their socio-economic role. The following analysis will use more explorative theorizing to unearth basic connections between both sides. Contemporary capitalism needs forms of assigning value to knowledge (Marginson 2008) and knowledge work (Vercellone 2009). When infrastructures of academic competition meet this demand, they acquire a double function. Evaluations, indicators and rankings not only structure the academic system internally, by guiding and justifying flows of attention, power and resources, but they also work as signals for external actors, such as governments, media, employers, investors and students (Münch 2016). My general question looks beyond these approaches. Instead of further exploring the factual or discursive economization of science, I will ask how academic status systems participate in an on-going transformation of industrial market capitalism into feudalized knowledge capitalism in the US and in diverse European countries. By using the term ‘knowledge capitalism’, I do not intend to suggest that knowledge has become the main productive resource. Rather, I use the term to address a problem: An economy centred on the private appropriation of wealth needs specific arrangements to derive profits from knowledge and information, which do not behave as classical private property goods. This is why feudal structures return. As I will explain in more detail, the terms ‘feudalized’ and ‘neo-feudal’ refer to an economic system that essentially rests on rents (i.e. income without labour) and positional privileges. Institutions of higher education play a specific role here. They not only grant or deny access to the positions that legitimately control (knowledge) assets, extract (information) rents and exercise (intellectual) authority, but they also help to recognize valuable knowledge. I will therefore

High Educ

generalize the concept of credentialism, which used to explain the role of degrees for individual careers, and can be seen today as one of diverse academic mechanisms that codify trust in the value of knowledge. Credentials will also be my starting point for this paper. In the first section, I will discuss the ever-increasing relevance of degrees in job markets and add systematic questions about the credentialing or valuation of research results. In my second section, this (e)valuation will be traced in the status competitions for publishing, funding and ranking success, which stratify the academic world and interact with the external distribution of power and resources. The result will be explicated in the third section, which looks at basic trust-building structures, from signals for valuable research to the interplay of credentials, accreditation and financial credit, required by all parties in teaching and research. In the fourth section, I present the most farreaching reflections of the paper: how the extended academic(e)valuation of knowledge interacts with its capitalist appropriation, and with neo-feudal trends in the knowledge economy. In the final part, I will highlight important divergences between US-American and European academic systems, and recapitulate my essential points.

Cognitive productivity or social selection? Structural functions of higher education (and research) In late 2015 and early 2016, two publications on US elite universities and labour markets attracted some media attention: Lauren Rivera (2015) investigated the habitudinal mechanisms at work in elite firm job recruitment, and Amy Binder et al. (2016) showed how students learned to desire such jobs—finance, law, consulting and, increasingly, hightech—during university. A remarkable common point was that neither employers nor students relied on specific skills. Rivera stressed that institutional prestige and extracurricular activities mattered more than academic performance for hiring (84–104). Binder and her colleagues even identified the insecurity of students about their competences as a main factor in directing their expectations towards elite firms. As one Harvard interviewee put it: ‘The first week of freshman year, I don’t think anyone ever says “I want to work at McKinsey.” But like it starts to be your junior year, and you start to worry about what you're going to do after college. Because, really, you don't have any skills!’ (Binder et al. 2016: 32) Such insights point to a well-known sociological dispute: Is it the predominant role of (higher) education to cultivate the specific competences needed in a knowledgeintensive society, or do academic systems select privileged individuals for prestigious positions? Asking this question not only helps to understand elite reproduction in the information age but can also direct attention towards a less researched dimension—the ways in which knowledge itself is credentialed. The question can be divided into two parts. The first, the descriptive-empirical aspect, is to what extent success in (higher) education depends on a privileged family background. For a long time, the basic answer seemed to be clear: educational expansion did not stop the transmission of inequality, because it generated new institutional stratifications whenever the given top stratum ceased to be socially exclusive. But it mitigated this inequality and favoured social mobility. As the analyses collected by Shavit et al. (2007) demonstrate, higher education in most nations has seen ‘more inclusion than diversion’ between the 1950s and 1990s. At the start of the twenty-first century, however, new waves of inequality in different countries tend to reverse this trend:

High Educ

–

–

In the US, several studies have observed an increasing importance of wealth at all levels of the stratified system. College attendance in general, entry to four-year colleges, graduation rates, and access to elite institutions strongly differ between students with higher- and lower-income backgrounds, even when test scores are equal (Carnevale and Strohl 2010: 154–159), and since 1980, family resources have continually gained importance (Bailey and Dynarski 2011; Mortensen 2012; Mettler 2014). This trend is supported by a widening gap between prestigious research universities and community colleges or forprofit teaching institutions, where graduation rates remain low and loan levels are high (Schulze-Cleven and Olson in this volume). Such numbers cast revealing light on a different and distant development: In a number of European countries, higher education officials pursue ‘vertical differentiation’ of academic systems. With the main goal of promoting ‘world class’ science, they have introduced competitive programmes, which reinforce a Matthew effect between institutions. The German Excellence Initiative is a good example of such a campaign. While the first two rounds of the programme, in 2005 and 2012, were criticized for helping to concentrate resources in few institutions (Hartmann 2015), a recent official evaluation simply recommends more vertical differentiation (Internationale Expertenkommission zur Evaluation der Exzellenzinitiative 2016: 17f.). Germany seems to be on its way towards upper-class friendly institutional hierarchies (Hartmann 2004).

In order to understand the more or less relevant contributions of academic stratification to social inequality, a second, explanatory aspect of the question is crucial: Do successful students merely gain access to income positions, or do they also develop (or reveal) superior skills through attending higher education? The first possibility would have strong (anti-academic) policy implications,1 and it would fit with scenarios of re-feudalization (Collins 1979; Neckel 2013). The second possibility speaks for different (meritocratic) policies, and it implies only market logics. This position is informing studies of ‘skill biased’, competence-related technological change: ‘technological progress will necessarily widen inequality among skill-groups unless it is countered by increases in the supply of human capital.’ (Acemoglu and Autor 2012: 427) To test this hypothesis, the numbers, income levels and tasks of highly educated workers have to be compared over time. A reflected overview suggests compromises between skill bias and credentialist theory. In all technologically advanced countries, the digital revolution pushed upwards the numbers of expert workers, whereas job distributions and education premiums differed nationally (Castells 1997: 201–279). One reason is the difference between systems with strong vocational credentialing, such as in Germany, and more generalist systems, such as the British one (Leuze 2010: 180). But higher education also leads to highly paid non-routine work in the UK and the USA, where even post-graduate degrees yield additional wage premiums (Lindley and Machin 2014). And especially in these countries, average gains are modest compared to the income increases of the top 1 and 0.1% (Piketty 2013: 314–321). The non-skill-intensive elite professions described by Rivera and Binder

1

The direction of these consequences is ambivalent. While credentialists like Bourdieu are left-leaning, there is also a right-wing, anti-intellectual version: ‘There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard everyday and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor.’ (Rick Santorum, cit. in Mettler 2014: 19f)

High Educ

participate in this process. Rather than specialist tasks, their non-routine work comprises executive roles or other—legal, consulting and financial—functions related to capital. In general terms, this source of high income was already explained by Collins, who proposed to distinguish between two classes—‘the working class engaged in productive labor, and the dominant class engaged in political labor’—in processing ‘positional property’, the structure of tasks and of income. ‘Both classes expend energy, but it is the subordinated class that produces the wealth, whereas the dominant class determines the distribution’ (Collins 1979: 52; 54). A similar distinction between ‘professionals’ and ‘managers’ has been proposed in diverse studies on the (upper) middle classes since the 1980s (Oesch 2006: 54–58). Although the income sources of the groups differ—specialist skills on the one hand, leading organizational positions on the other—higher education has become their common basis. From ‘economists and corporate lawyers employed in corporate management’ to ‘business administrators’ (ibid., 60), capitalist generalists also have to display degrees. Credentials are thus needed on both sides: as an indicator of special qualifications and as a selection mechanism for positions of capitalist control. This account, however, is limited in scope. It is not only restricted to parts of the upper and middle classes (and to economically leading regions), but it also leaves out an important factor: the value of knowledge itself. This value demands theoretical effort for two different reasons. On the one hand, no matter how they distribute revenues, sectors from biotech and computing to financial services have found ways to make money from knowledge, often benefitting from academic research. This is puzzling because knowledge is usually not produced as commodity (Jessop 2007), and it even tends to function as a public good. Given its non-rival character— knowledge is not used up in consumption—economic theory offers good reasons to provide free access even where exclusion is possible (Stiglitz 1999). Indeed, practises of voluntary non-commercial knowledge production have become popular since the early 2000s (Benkler 2006), and strategies of appropriating results hit practical and normative limits, as in attempts to enforce copyrights or to withhold medication from poor populations. On the other hand, the academic evaluation of knowledge is by no means restricted to grades and degrees anymore— it also includes a proliferation of competitions between researchers and institutions. In this context, ‘knowledge flows are vectored by a system of status production that assigns value to knowledge and arranges it in ordered pattern’ (Marginson 2008: 8). As Marginson and others suggest, such valuation could even constitute a response to the tensions between the new ‘open-source knowledge ecology’ (ibid.) and principles of private property. Knowledge economies might need academic status assignment to give the ‘general intellect’ (Marx) a privately appropriable, marketable and exploitable form (Vercellone 2009). In order to specify this connection, academic ways of assigning value to knowledge should first be introduced in their own right. The preliminary results of this analysis will also help to include non-elite knowledge work(ers) in credentialist theory.

Dimensions of academic stratification: internal standards, external signals Since their late-feudal origins, universities have combined hierarchies of research decisions and authoritative speaking with open intellectual emulation. The ways to reconcile hierarchy and (e)quality varied, as did external demands and sources of power. Since the late twentieth century, two main hierarchies stand out: While traditional hierarchies rest on professional power (the authority of established scholars, the enculturation of newcomers, ties of loyalty

High Educ

between both and alliances or feuds between schools), new hierarchies are structured by success in markets, with a strong trend towards quasi-markets. Bourdieu (1984) still saw the book market as a central corrective to traditional hierarchies, and since then, the impact of (partly) market-regulated tuition fees has steeply increased in the Anglophone world (as well as in Latin America) (Douglass 2012). But almost everywhere, the value of academic knowledge has essentially come to be measured in the (partly) arranged competition(s) for publications, citations, grants, awards, supervised work, or for individual and institutional ranks based on performance indicators of these factors. In spite of a vast literature on this measuring logic, its success remains to be explained. In the following argument, I will try to work with a basic differentiation between internal academic and external socio-economic functions. At the outset, a functional continuity should be emphasized. In contrast to book markets or even the market of effective student demand, the games of academic performance are highly compatible with old professional hierarchies. What took place there is partly de-personalized, but not abandoned: An already established group of scholars puts the new generation through a long series of test situations in which they collect cultural capital, are awarded chunks of recognition and require the assistance of mentors to learn the rules of the game.2 Even schools of thought and networks of obligation play a role in the process, and raw market rule is directed to the lower ranks of adjunct faculty (see e.g. Bérubé and Ruth 2015: 14–26) or useoriented research, which is scarcely translated into reputation (Wieczorek et al. in this volume). This might be an indication that old hierarchies and loyalties have not just been replaced by academic capitalism but are at least partly turned into neo-feudal structures. Especially where leading actors and institutions remain the same, quasi-markets only change the justifying procedures or produce a shift from mere feudal dependency to courtly status competition. However, competition with clear and widely accepted rules has gained importance. A main line of justification leads to characteristics that are indeed crucial to (e)valuation markets. Peer reviews of papers and projects have a notoriously low reliability but count as largely unbiased and relatively ‘valid’ in predicting citation success (Reinhart 2012). In citations themselves, proven interest from other researchers testifies to the importance of journals, papers and books: Those who publish successfully and earn grants are therefore probably deserving of good academic jobs. Finally, while abstract systems of measuring ‘impact’ or ‘quality’ should be used with extreme caution (Hicks et al. 2015), even quantified results of mutual evaluations give the scientific community voice in the new academic management. Reviewers ‘constitute an academic elite which decides who will get resources and rewards. They therefore provide a counterbalance in the relationship between the academic profession and the state and have a strong influence on the regulation of the academic profession’ (Musselin 2013: 1168). At the same time, scholars are to some degree released from examining uncontrollable amounts of research because one can rely on the processed assessments of other researchers who have looked closely to determine what deserves attention. In other words, the system of peer evaluation gives scholars a strong infrastructure for putting trust in the knowledge of others. The effects that this system has on how accurately research results are presented, on the cultivation of mainstream orientations or innovation, cannot be discussed here. In the context of trust or credentialing, the central aspect is that researchers’ mutual evaluations are also used 2

This last point has been demonstrated for young German scholars by Rogge (2015): Publication strategies are not only deliberately cultivated but also taught.

High Educ

by parties who care little for research as such. These external agents are interested in a value of knowledge that pays out elsewhere: governments that want their universities to rank high in global competition, supranational organizations that aim to develop policy frameworks, individuals who strive to acquire credentials for the job market, and businesses that want to employ respected experts and to control desired knowledge assets. Such actors can only rely on ‘reputation’, not on genuine judgements of intellectual quality (Luhmann 1968). Academic valuations tend to become a currency for their non-academic purposes (Maesse in this volume). This is the functional context of the more dubious evaluations of higher education institutions that circulate in the public sphere, most importantly comparative university and department rankings. Some of these rankings—such as the Shanghai ranking—started with a specific functional goal, while others—namely newspaper rankings—began as media events. Most of the rankings rely on similar basic data as science bureaucracies, some use transparent and plausible indicators, and others less so (Marginson and van der Wende 2007; Hazelkorn 2011). Since the uses are manifold, inexactness is necessarily part of the picture. The same qualities which diminish specificity, however, widen the range of relevant—namely financial—effects and of institutional reactivity (Espeland and Sauder 2007). The rise of rankings thus addresses systemic needs to process knowledge with a status index. Standardized scales of performance and reputation facilitate exchange between academic stratifications and the external inequality of income positions, status and resources. Via the ‘k[nowledge]-status system’ (Marginson 2008), flows of money can be coordinated with orders of reputation, which codify the value of knowledge. A schematic overview of these exchange processes reveals a double functionality. In all contexts discussed so far, they combine a general function of shaping trust (-worthiness) with a specific function of structuring privilege: 1. Economic stratification. For a long time, firms and capital owners could only rely on formal certificates, institutional traditions and personal experience to decide how to fill their ranks, acquire expertise and allocate venture capital. Now, they can refer to an entire status system for orientation.3 2. Transmission of class privilege. While exchange between universities and upper class families historically had only one formal medium—money—now objectified status patterns make it easier to calculate the value of higher education. The academically mediated transfer of parents’ class status to their children can thus take place on a new scale.4 3. A new spirit of academic meritocracy. Traditional academic hierarchies are hard to defend in times of universal higher education and increasing costs in the sector. By contrast, status competition can demonstrate and ensure that teachers and academic researchers really work for their money and that performance pays. 4. Justification of positional privilege in general. The new media of stratification through competition generally have a legitimizing function. They not only stage the relative value (and thus funding-worthiness) of institutions of higher education and research but also justify wage differences and hierarchies of competence in the economy and give cultural capital a new form of globally cherished academic credentials. 3

It must be noted, however, that (non-academic) employers often prefer established connections and informal reputation to (e)valuations and even rankings; formalized credentialing counts more in academic competition. 4 Ironically, Bourdieu’s analysis of this process has become empirically contestable in the case of France where, since the 1970s, inheritance is increasingly economic, while the explosion of super-wages in the USA more and more interacts with academic pre-selection (Piketty 2013: 379–424; 286–321).

High Educ

Two additional steps need to be taken in order to see more clearly how the functions of processing trust and cultivating positional hierarchies interact. First, it should be determined to what extent trust in knowledge is really elemental, and second, its economic effects need to be examined in greater detail. While the first task only requires drawing conclusions and adding extensions (in the following section), the second task demands fundamental reflections about the knowledge-based economy (in the fourth section).

The credential function: trust in knowledge To serve the different needs listed above, the system of knowledge (e)valuations must have a general, multi-purpose function: organizing trust in the knowledge of others. Such trust is obviously necessary in any developed division of intellectual labour. Due to specialization, one knowledge worker can only partially know what other knowledge workers know. More specifically, (e)valuations help to guide expectations and behaviour concerning costintensive knowledge production and transmission, such as decisions about where and which subjects to study, investing in research, employing experts and high-potential individuals, relying on professional advice, and entering into cooperation across organizations. I propose to capture this functional complex with the idea of a general credential function, of which credentialing is just one specific case. Whereas the classical concept referred to the ascribed competences of graduates—testified to by degrees and trusted by employers—a generalized concept extends to the value of all academic knowledge subjects, institutions and products, which is codified in scales of knowledge status and trusted by deciders of all kinds, inside and outside the academic context. Before turning to the non-academic part, it is useful to see that the credential logic also works at the lower levels of higher education. A chain of etymologically related words can provide guidance. For most central Europeans, the Bologna Process was their first introduction to credit points, which represent the average number of work hours students are supposed to spend with their topics. As implied by the Latin root credere, they are ‘trusted’ to have done so. This new ‘currency’ (Draheim and Reitz 2005) was introduced to make pre-graduate, sub-credential achievements easily transferrable between national systems throughout Europe and the Anglophone world. The notion of trust also translates directly into money where courses must be paid for, and credit points are used to calculate teaching workloads. In most countries (and in the Bologna agenda), the points are used in conjunction with a system of accreditation, which ensures that the credentialing institutions are themselves trustworthy. Europeans often see this as a useless exercise because their public institutions already exert quality control. However, the case of for-profit higher education in the US shows that accreditation can serve a necessary function. These for-profit suppliers—with their high tuition fees, high marketing budgets and shareholder revenues, but low spending on teaching, low completion rates and low rates of employment for graduates—have preyed on the credulity of students (see Schulze-Cleven and Olson in this volume). Struggles between the Obama administration and accreditation agencies resulted in a federal publication of such data,5 and the market (for once) brought a correction. Students have begun to withdraw from for-profit 5 The data can be found at the following webpage, introduced by a warning about student debt: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/.

High Educ

institutions and many have closed down. A crucial factor in this reassessment has been financial credit, namely defaulting on student loans. Wherever such loans have become fundamental, higher education for the lower and middle classes can be described as requiring financial credit to acquire credit points and credentials in accredited institutions. Beyond basic mechanisms of quality assurance, competitive hierarchies remain vital for the credential process. Scales of knowledge status make clear what one can realistically aim for, and they provide motivation to strive upwards—also inside the academic system.6 Moreover, collectively created and accepted knowledge is regularly turned into private advantage7— mostly in external markets for intellectual labour and goods. But the analysis of the academic credit-system also highlights the insecure foundations of knowledge-related hierarchies. As the problem of student loans shows, trust in knowledge has an important temporal aspect. Credit represents a belief in future operations: in the potential earnings of graduates, patents from research and benefits of professional status. This explains why the knowledge economy needs a component of pure, truth-indifferent status. Knowledge in action can be judged directly: Some procedures work better than others, some workers are more productive. But knowledge that is only expected to bring advantages is subject to contingent cultural construction and mere attribution as knowledge. The remaining task is to examine how such status hierarchies and the concrete uses of knowledge interact in academically supported capitalism.

Status and rents: functional needs of (neo-feudal) cognitive capitalism The economic functions of credentialed knowledge are multi-layered. I will examine three paradigms: (a) the flow of research resources between public funding, private investment and appropriation; (b) the complex relationship between intellectual property and information rents; and (c) the nexus between expert status and knowledge sinecures. In general terms, knowledge rents are extracted in all of these contexts. They occur when economic actors harness publicly funded intellectual work, when they succeed in claiming intellectual property and when they achieve privileged bargaining positions by being able to claim superior knowledge status. 1. The obvious contribution of higher education and research to the knowledge economy is to supply knowledge. Expert workers in the high-tech industries are (partly) trained at colleges and universities, infrastructures of information processing are often developed at these institutions, and research results are implemented in marketable goods. Sometimes this involves industry funding, but in most contexts, business users do not fully pay for the public supply of knowledge. Often money flows from public sources through academic filters to firms and entrepreneurs. Apple’s strategies of research appropriation and tax evasion may be the most striking example of this process (Mazuccato 2013). The biotechnology industry also involves complex interactions of academic and private research and development (Sunder Rajan 2006), Marginson plausibly speaks of a ‘prestige motivation’: ‘especially in the elite universities […] finance is less an end in itself than a means to the real end, status’ (Marginson 2008: 9). This is especially likely where media of measuring status have been established. Sometimes knowledge status as such, or for unspecified use, is also pursued on political and institutional levels, with massive costs, as in the German Excellence Strategy. 7 This point has already been made by Gouldner: ‘The New [intellectual] Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of a historically and collectively produced cultural capital’ (Gouldner 1979: 19). 6

High Educ

and the platform power of Google, Uber and others is built upon on the initially academic (and military) infrastructure of the internet. In theoretical reflections, it is possible to contain the scandal of this transfer by demanding more taxation or larger knowledge commons, or by recommending the ‘triple helix’ of government, business and universities (Etzkowitz 2008). But there is also the option to see a new system of exploitation. From this perspective, most prominently developed in postoperaist thought, organized public and spontaneous social production provide a reservoir of cultural commons, which are appropriated by powerful, politically and legally backed market actors (see e.g. Negri and Hardt 2009; Moulier-Boutang 2007). Others have identified the enclosure of intellectual commons as a first step towards treating knowledge as a ‘fictitious commodity’, with the buying and selling of ‘future revenue streams’ as a vantage point (Jessop 2007: 123). Such theories have the advantage of including a wide range of elements: voluntary, ‘commons-based peer production’ (Benkler 2006) and the ‘highly developed mechanisms of cooperation and circulation’ in science (Negri and Hardt 2009: 145), as well as political strategies of ‘protecting or enclosing of the commons’ (Jessop 2007: 127). But the theories in question also have basic problems. Authors like Negri and Hardt (2009: 142) simply deny a relevant role for capital in the organization of knowledge production. And although trade-offs between the free usability and the private appropriation of knowledge are central to almost all Marxist accounts (Jessop 2007: 124–126), they scarcely explicate how this ‘contradiction’ is processed. A closer look at the function of academic institutions might help to deal with both problems. 2. To some extent, the new economic role of universities is evidently linked to intellectual property. Encouraged by legislation of the early 1980s—in particular the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980—American universities have massively increased their efforts to create patents, support start-ups, and generally put knowledge to work via selling and licensing (Berman 2012). European institutions have taken similar paths since the 1990s. Universities only rarely make net financial profits in the process (Powell et al. 2007), but they strengthen a trend towards ‘information feudalism’ (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002): the extraction of rents for the use of non-tangible goods. Insofar as these goods are non-rival and reproducible at virtually zero cost, charging for their use resembles feudal rents or colonial tributes. Drahos and Braithwaite use both analogies: ‘New colonies today are universities. Scientists increasingly are vassals of knowledge corporations. They starve scientifically unless they generate ideas corporations are interested in buying and selling. […] Freedom of enquiry is blocked at various turns by patent and copyright obstacles.’ (2002: 201). With specifications, it is indeed possible to give the feudal-colonial concepts a technical sense. Universities can act as feudal lords when they patent and licence products themselves; researchers can act as beneficiaries (Wieczorek et al. in this volume) when funders claim their results as corporate intellectual property, and they can become new feudal players when they found firms of their own. All of these actors colonize cultural commons, and real colonial traditions are revived when the knowledge economies of the global North succeed in extracting tributes for the use of their property in other parts of the world (Brand et al. 2008). However, a satisfying account also needs to include limits of propertization. In important knowledge-intensive sectors, new strategies involve information sharing between public and private agents. Since enquiry is often really ‘blocked’ or decelerated by intellectual property rights, corporations have started to harness peer production ecologies, build common databases and engage in open-ended collaboration. The most famous case is the strategy of software firms to save development costs by relying on open-source-based peer

High Educ

production, as IBM did with Linux (Tapscott and Williams 2006). Other examples include bioengineering, where pharmaceutical corporations improved their position towards small biotech firms by building shared databases (Sunder Rajan 2006). In order to prepare access to future markets, those corporations also cooperate with nonprofit organizations, for instance to find medication for ‘neglected tropical diseases’ (Lezaun and Montgomery 2015: 8–12). Even if the direct results cannot be profitably marketed, the big players speculate on their superior facilities once a market has been established (ibid.: 18). In such cases, (shared) intellectual property rights change their function: Instead of immediately yielding returns, they attract powerful partners to engage in future collective projects (ibid.: 15). Academic status plays an important role in this context. The privilege of acting as a partner, rather than merely delivering information for money, depends on economic or cultural capital, and calculations of economic gains also rest on the academic status of non-profit participants. The dividing line between public and private is thus partly replaced by a division between highand low-status agents, and rent is based less on enforceable intellectual property rights than on the institutional capacity to dominate a sector of knowledge-intensive production. 3. Even redefined intellectual property is not necessarily part of the game. Legal scholars, such as Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, have argued that important parts of the knowledge economy can function without intellectual property rights. Other economic uses are at least as relevant and could constitute the sole basis of a knowledge capitalism with a free culture. Firms can cultivate superior know-how and knowledge of markets, they can sell expensive cognitive services, which are needed even when goods are freely appropriable (e.g. adapting operating systems to customers’ needs), and they can use the academic reputations of their employees, e.g. legal scholars (Benkler 2006: 43), as advertisement. What is implied in this last example, but rarely made explicit, is that the service part of the knowledge economy is probably the most status-dependant of all. Professions, from law to medicine, constitute a clear paradigm: a vital dependency of clients on experts, high levels of income and high entry barriers, usually educational and controlled by professional associations (Abbott 1988; Freidson 2001). Under such conditions of closure, entering the professional class means getting a sinecure. This mechanism has been adopted by sectors such as consulting and finance, although ‘barriers to professionalization’ (Wilensky 1964: 146) continue to exist, and credentialed status is not needed everywhere. In technical sectors like computing, degrees are hardly central. The relative importance of credentialed status and functional knowledge can be roughly situated along Collins’s distinction between productive and position-processing tasks. On the one hand, the status value of knowledge becomes most important where the existence of actual knowledge is questionable. The fact that elite service firms hire employees from elite research universities has more to do with social status than knowledge-based qualifications. In consulting and finance, it is even hard to say which aspects of decision making rely on specific knowledge rather than routines, conventions or performative inventions (Willke 1998; MacKenzie 2006). On the other hand, knowledge status systems enable public and capital functionaries to fund the innovative, experimental work of researchers and other experts. A huge apparatus of managing, lending, investing, selecting, legal consulting and political work is necessary to connect intellectual innovation to capital flows, regardless of whether the latter are state or market regulated, directed by property rights in goods or by income levels of experts. Academic-economic hubs, where experts and funding functionaries mingle, effectively facilitate this cooperation. And it can run even more smoothly when functionaries can rely on status signals to help them place and justify risky or long-term investment.

High Educ

All three paradigms of drawing profits from knowledge can be interpreted as mechanisms of rent extraction. A sufficiently general account of rents has been developed by Aage B. Sørensen, who uses the term for all market situations in which the exclusive control of ‘income producing assets, […] understood in a broader sense than legal property rights’, gives one party ‘an advantage at the expense of persons without these rights’ (Sørensen 2000: 19; 21). Examples are manifold: monopolies on natural or cultural resources, professional or union control of labour, and educational credentials. In the cases examined here, the diversity of rent yielding assets is equally obvious. The clearest case is intellectual property, which enables individuals or organizations to use knowledge exclusively or to charge others for using it. But a general concept of rent also applies where legal exclusion is not possible. High knowledgestatus positions facilitate privileged collaborations and allow for increasing prices for knowledge goods and services. The most complex case, in Sørensen’s terms, is the use of public research results to innovate private production. When a combination of factors, including publicly cultivated knowledge, enables firms to establish a (temporarily) unrivalled market position, one can speak of ‘composite rents’ or ‘quasi-rents generated by asset specificity’ (ibid.: 23). The overall picture is clear enough. The new rent economy serves not only those who have the power to claim intellectual property rights but also those who occupy high positions in organized knowledge use and in the hierarchies of knowledge status.

Varieties of valuation: national differences The aim of this paper has been to theorize how the academically assigned value and the private appropriation of knowledge interact. Except for some examples, however, this interaction has not been reconstructed in concrete settings. Given the path-dependency of academic systems and their relationship to political cultures and specific (labour) markets, national differences are likely to matter. Before I conclude, I will point to divergent tendencies that matter most for the general account. Higher education and research in the US matches the theoretical model constructed here in crucial respects—for specific historical reasons. Market mechanisms were introduced on a large scale at an early point (around 1980), while inherited stratifications remained intact, and the US has come to play a globally hegemonic role in research and in the enforcement of intellectual property. Due to these factors, the US academic system is now a vital part of a capitalism with strong neo-feudal traits: a rent-seeking economy, a caste-like reproduction of social status, a para-statist power elite with alliances between the relative political, academic and corporate centres (Mathies and Slaughter 2013), and a post-democratic public sphere based on the representation of institutional prestige (Habermas 1961). The reputation of elite universities, such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Yale, is not only an economic factor but has also played an influential role in the reproduction of elites and the production of hegemonic world views. In this context, the infrastructures of knowledge-status were able to develop without major frictions and with great effect. The preeminent role of US institutions in the global academic system (Marginson 2011) has led to imitations in other countries, especially in Europe. However, a closer look reveals deviations: –

In British higher education, which also entered its neoliberal phase in the 1980s, change was more disruptive because status competition and market mechanisms were installed by New Public Management. Financial cuts were accompanied by performance-based

High Educ

–

–

funding and, later, increased tuition fees. These policies formally integrated Oxford and Cambridge into a unified competitive system (Soares 1999; Vaira 2009) without compromising their privileged status, and gave the middle class both incentives and disincentives to seek opportunities in higher education (Dearden et al. 2014). As a result of these tensions, students and faculty have been (sometimes violently) reluctant to accept the new system. In France, where policies of performance measuring were introduced much later, the grandes écoles already constituted a complete system of elite reproduction (Bourdieu 1989). Although the écoles are traditionally not research-oriented, since the 2000s authorities have begun to tie research performance to funding (Musselin 2013: 1168f) and to support research clusters between universities and grandes écoles (van Zanten and Maxwell 2015). While the institutional hierarchy is likely to survive these changes, the value of knowledge, which is used to recruit French elites, is currently being redefined. In Germany, the desired vertical differentiation in terms of ‘excellence’ and financial resources is about to change a long-standing relative equality between universities (Münch 2011). As a result, winner-take-all markets emerge on all levels. As enrolments have continued to rise, spending per student—which was already very low—has decreased in Germany over the course of the last ten years, and teaching duties—traditionally high—have increased, especially for the large non-professorial faculty (Internationale Expertenkommission zur Evaluation der Exzellenzinitiative, 2016: 11–16; 23–29, Rogge 2015). While the external social effects of this competitive stratification are not yet clear, it results in a devaluation of large parts of the academic system.

These differences show that further theorizing on the (e)valuation of knowledge will have to study national variations. The differences also highlight junctures at which the social processing of knowledge value can succeed or collapse. Hierarchies of research institutions are not always coordinated with the value of degrees on the labour market: National systems of elite reproduction can be more or less compatible with internationally prevailing standards of excellence, and adaption of these standards can increase or decrease the recognized quality of research. The positive results of this paper can be summed up as more general specifications of the role of academic stratification in neo-feudal knowledge capitalism. As the analysis has revealed, the interaction between both sides demands a relative autonomy of knowledge. Credentials not only select people for income and power positions but also hint at qualifications. Systems of assigning value to knowledge not only provide signals for external parties but also support a new (elitist) self-governance of the scientific community. The extraction of information rents not only rests on the propertization of cultural commons but also demands investment in ecologies of peer production and academic status. Consequently, there is a need for further research on the side of knowledge capitalism to understand these complex dynamics. While this (part of) capitalism obviously affords rentgranting privileges and status hierarchies—and thus deserves the epithet ‘neo-feudal’—it remains to be seen how far it is or will become dependent upon the new academic system of assigning value to knowledge. On the side of higher education and research, the renewed relative autonomy ironically implies a process of structural adaptation. Although academic institutions are not likely to turn into capitalist enterprises, they are restructured through mechanisms of status production, which change the social constitution of knowledge itself. Academic institutions today are not merely ‘sites where knowledge is rendered alienable’ (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004: 16)—knowledge is already alienated in the process of its production.

High Educ

References Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: an essay on the expert division of labour. Chicago: Chicago UP. Acemoglu, D., & Autor, D. (2012). What does human capital do? A review of Goldin and Katz’s the race between education and technology. J Econ Lit, 50, 426–463. Bailey, M. J., & Dynarski, S. (2011). Gains and gaps: changing inequality in U.S. college entry and completion. NBER working paper no. 17633. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven/Conn: Yale UP. Berman, E. P. (2012). Creating the market university: how academic science became an economic engine. Princeton/NJ: Princeton UP. Bérubé, M., & Ruth, J. (2015). The humanities, higher education, and academic freedom: three necessary arguments. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Binder, A. J., Davis, D. B., & Bloom, N. (2016). Career funnelling: how elite students learn to define and desire ‘prestigious’ jobs. Sociol Educ, 89(1), 20–39. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo academicus. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P. (1989). La noblesse d’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Brand, U., Görg, C., Hirsch, J., & Wissen, M. (2008). Conflicts in environmental regulation and the internationalization of the state. Contested terrains. London, New York: Routledge. Burrows, R. S. (2012). Living with the h-index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy. Sociol Rev, 60, 355–372. Carnevale, A. P., & Strohl, J. (2010). How increasing college access is increasing inequality, and what to do about it. In R. D. Kahlenberg (Ed.), Rewarding strivers: helping low-income students succeed in college (pp. 71– 190). New York: Century Foundation. Castells, M. (1997). The rise of the network society. The information age: economy, society and culture. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Collins, R. (1979). The credential society. A historical sociology of education and stratification. New York: Academic Press. Dearden, L., Fitzsimmons, E., & Wyness, G. (2014). Money for nothing: estimating the impact of student aid on participation in higher education. Econ Educ Rev, 43, 66–78. Douglass, J. A. (2012). Money, politics, and the rise of for-profit higher education in the US: a story of supply, demand and the Brazilian effect. Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education. Draheim, S., & Reitz, T. (2005). Währungsreform: Die neue Ökonomie der Bildung. Neue Sammlung, 45(1), 3–13. Drahos, P., & Braithwaite, J. (2002). Information feudalism. Who owns the knowledge economy? London: Earthscan Publications. Espeland, W., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: how public measures recreate social world. Am J Sociol, 113(1), 1–40. Etzkowitz, H. (2008). The triple helix: university-industry-government innovation in action. New York et al.: Routledge. Freidson, E. (2001). Professionalism: the third logic. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gouldner, A. (1979). The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class. New York: Oxford UP. Habermas, J. (1961/1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hartmann, M. (2004). Elitehochschulen: Die soziale Selektion ist entscheidend. Prokla, 34, 535–549. Hartmann, M. (2015) Die Exzellenzinitiative und die Hierarchisierung des deutschen Hochschulsystems. In: H.P. Müller & T. Reitz (eds.), Bildung und Klassenbildung. Kritische Perspektiven auf eine Leitinstitution der Gegenwart. Weinheim: Beltz, 208–230. Hazelkorn, E. (2011). Rankings and the reshaping of higher education. The battle for world-class excellence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L., de Rijcke, S., & Rafolds, I. (2015). The Leiden manifesto for research metrics. Nature, 520, 429–431. Internationale Expertenkommission zur Evaluation der Exzellenzinitiative (2016). Endbericht. Berlin: Institut für Innovation und Technik. Jessop, B. (2007). Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: insights and limits of a Polanyian perspective. In A. Bugra & K. Agartan (Eds.), Reading Karl Polanyi for the twenty-first century: market economy as political project (pp. 115–134). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lamont, M. (2012). Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation. Annu Rev Sociol, 38, 201–221. Leuze, K. (2010). Smooth path or long and winding road? How institutions shape the transition from higher education to work. Opladen et al.: Budrich Uni Press.

High Educ Lezaun, J., & Montgomery, C. M. (2015). The pharmaceutical commons. Sharing and exclusion in global health drug development. Sci Technol Hum Values, 40(1), 3–29. Lindley, J., & Machin, S. (2014). The rising post-college wage premium in America and Britain, IZA Discussion Paper No. 5981. Luhmann, N. (1968). Selbststeuerung der Wissenschaft. Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft, 19(2), 147–170. MacKenzie, D. (2006). An engine, not a camera: how financial models shape markets. Cambridge/Mass: MIT Press. Maesse, J. (2015). Economic experts. A discursive political economy of economics. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 10(3), 279–305. Marginson, S. (2008). A funny thing happened on the way to the k-economy. In New world order in higher education: research rankings, outcome measures and institutional classifications. Paris: OECD. Marginson, S. (2011). The new world order in higher education. In M. Rostan & M. Vaira (Eds.), Questioning excellence in higher education (Vol. 3, pp. 3–20). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Marginson, S., & van der Wende, M. (2007). To rank or to be ranked: the impact of global rankings in higher education. Journal on Studies in International Education, 11(3–4), 306–330. Mathies, C., & Slaughter, S. (2013). University trustees as channels between academe and industry: toward an understanding of the executive science network. Res Policy, 42, 1286–1300. Mazuccato, M. (2013). The entrepreneurial state. Debunking public vs. private sector myths. London.: Anthem Press. Mettler, S. (2014). Degrees of inequality. How the politics of higher education sabotaged the American dream. New York: Basic Books. Mortensen, T. C. (2012): Family income and educational attainment. Postsecondary Opportunity 221, Nov. 2012. Moulier-Boutang, Y. (2007). Cognitive capitalism. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Münch, R. (2011). Akademischer Kapitalismus. Über die politische Ökonomie der Hochschulreform. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Münch, R. (2016). Die Macht der Zahlen in der Evaluation wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Eine soziologische Erklärung, in J. Hamann, J. Maeße, V. Gengnagel & A. Hirschfeld (2016). Macht in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Diskurs- und feldanalytische Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: Springer. Musselin, C. (2013). How peer review empowers the academic profession and university managers: changes in relationships between the state, universities and the professoriate. Res Policy, 42, 1165–1173. Neckel, S. (2013). Refeudalisierung – Systematik und Aktualität eines Begriffs der Habermas’schen Gesellschaftsanalyse. Leviathan, 41, 39–56. Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2009). Commonwealth. Belknap: Cambridge/Mass. Oesch, D. (2006). Redrawing the class map. In Stratification and institutions in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Piketty, T. (2013). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge/Mass: London: Belknap. Powell, W. W., Owen-Smith, J., & Colyvas, J. A. (2007). Innovation and emulation. Lessons from American universities in selling private rights to public knowledge Minerva, 45, 121–142. Reinhart, M. (2012). Soziologie und Epistemologie des Peer Review. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Rivera, L. (2015). Pedigree. In How elite students get elite jobs. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton UP. Rogge, J.-C. (2015). The winner takes it all? Die Zukunftsperspektiven des wissenschaftlichen Mittelbaus auf dem akademischen Quasi-Markt. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 67, 685–707. Shavit, Y., Arum, R., & Gamoran, A. (Eds.). (2007). Stratification in higher education. A comparative study. Stanford/Cal: Stanford UP. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism. In Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore/Md: Johns Hopkins UP. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. S. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. Markets, state, and higher education. Baltimore/Md., London: Johns Hopkins UP. Soares, J. (1999). The decline of privilege. The modernization of Oxford university. Stanford: Stanford UP. Sørensen, A. B. (2000). Employment relations and class structure. In R. Crompton, F. Devine, M. Savage, & J. Scott (Eds.), Renewing class analysis (pp. 16–42). Oxford: Blackwell. Stevens, M. (2007). Creating a class. College admissions and the education of elites. Cambridge/Mass: Harvard UP. Stiglitz, J. (1999). Knowledge as a global public good. In I. Kaul, I. Grunberg, & M. A. Stern (Eds.), Global public goods: international cooperation in the twenty-first century (pp. 308–325). Oxford: Oxford UP. Sunder Rajan, K. (2006). Biocapital. The constitution of postgenomic life. Durham, London: Duke UP. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics. How mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Portfolio. Vaira, M. (2009). Towards unified and stratified systems of higher education? System convergence and organizational stratified differentiation in Europe. In B. Kehm & B. Stensaker (Eds.), University rankings, diversity, and the new landscape of higher education (pp. 135–153). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

High Educ van Zanten, A., & Maxwell, C. (2015). Elite education and the state in France: durable ties and new challenges. Br J Sociol Educ, 36(1), 71–94. Vercellone, C. (2009). Cognitive capitalism and models for the regulation of wage relations: lessons from the anti-CPE movement. In Edu-factory Collective (Ed.), Toward a global autonomous university (pp. 119– 124). New York: Autonomedia. Wilensky, H. L. (1964). The professionalization of everyone? Am J Sociol, 70, 137–158. Willke, H. (1998). Organisierte Wissensarbeit. Z Soziol, 27(3), 161–177.