The New Entrepreneurial History of Shared Social Infrastructures

Overview

In this volume we propose conceptualizing market sustaining social infrastructures as a knowledge commons while focusing on entrepreneurial activities that help govern, alter, and sustain these knowledge commons. We are interested in analyzing actions and interactions through which agents create, cultivate and sustain (or harm and destroy) market enabling conventions and norms; we hope to better understand, for example, when and why would entrepreneurs abide by existing rules and when might they rebel against them. We ask how do entrepreneurs envision and effectuate future opportunities under institutional uncertainty, how do they transform and assemble different kinds of resources, including the various kinds of knowledge commons, and how do they legitimize novelty.

The edited volume brings together theoretical and empirical approaches that develop and apply the theory of commons governance to the evolution of shared knowledge structures necessary to sustain markets. We propose a volume that will contribute and develop the Governing-Knowledge-Commons (GKC) research program including both theoretical analyses of the joint production and reproduction of market sustaining social infrastructures as well as case studies illustrating the complementary nature and the co-evolution of the “play of the game” and “the rules of the game” thus connecting the GKC research framework with the New Entrepreneurial History.

Proposed Content

We organize our project around four basic theoretical building blocks:

1. Markets are cultural; they depend on various kinds of knowledge some of which are governed as common pool resources. Markets coincide with a form of culture that we call civilization.
2. Civilization (understood as a set of impersonal rules) is a shared good which is – unlike physical commons – produced and reproduced by contributions and sharing (an example of a shared good is a conversation, a friendship, a set of classifications, etc.). The more one uses a shared good, the more there is of it; shared goods are “anti-rival”.
3. The knowledge that constitutes a civilization includes various kinds of intellectual and legal infrastructures. These social infrastructures are a part of a shared capital structure and act as inputs to everyday production processes and entrepreneurial actions.
4. Entrepreneurs sustain and (marginally) change the shared social infrastructures through breaking rules, slight evasions, and justifications. There is particular scope for this type of entrepreneurial action when there is some friction or rule uncertainty.

Research topics may include but are not limited to:

• Critical contributions to the discussion of market design calling for more attention to market evolution while taking into account a particular context (legal, cultural, etc.) within which social infrastructures that enable markets evolve.
• Case studies comparing the effects of impersonal (open access) social infrastructures with various forms of personal social infrastructures that depend on limited access to certain resources. Who are the agents who can buy and sell, for example? Who are the community members who can own certain artifacts?
• What is the history and the narrative of a particular institutional framework (a market, a commons), in what way do these narratives situate institutional frameworks within existing social infrastructures?
• Analyses of knowledge commons that enable markets by way of transforming diverse artifacts into goods that can be owned and transferred. How do the institutions of property and contract emerge when new artifacts are introduced?
• What are the goals and objectives of the knowledge commons and its members, including obstacles or dilemmas to be overcome by their actions and interaction?
• Examining processes of knowledge assembly as opposed to assuming common knowledge in terms of shared schemes of thought that provide classification schemes.
• How do entrepreneurs contribute to shared social infrastructures, how they transform and change them? Who are the decision-makers and how are they selected within knowledge commons?
• What if the existing institutional and legal infrastructures do not reflect the current state of technological development? How do entrepreneurs envision and effectuate future opportunities under institutional uncertainty?
• Historical case studies looking into how do entrepreneurs transform and assemble different kinds of resources, including various kinds of knowledge commons.
• Highlighting the importance of intellectual and legal infrastructures that enable markets, and thus providing a better understanding of the threats and obstacles to such functioning.
• Case studies examining ways through which entrepreneurs legitimize novelty. Cases of rule breaking, cheating, evasion, persuasion, justification negotiating away tension and rule uncertainty.
• How do entrepreneurs overcome resistance to particular markets, for example in the form of moral repugnance or social resistance to for example the sharing economy?
• How do new governance technologies change the way we can govern the shared social infrastructures that underpin markets?

Selected References

Beckert, Jens: “The social order of markets”, Theory and society, pp. 245—269, 2009.

Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot: On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton University Press, 2006.

Dekker, Erwin and Pavel Kuchař: “Exemplary Goods: The Product as Economic Variable”, Schmollers Jahrbuch, pp. 237—255, 2016.

Dekker, Erwin and Pavel Kuchař: Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons: Introduction, 2018.

Dekker, Erwin and Pavel Kuchař: Heterarchy in Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, 2017.

Dekker, Erwin: “Exemplary goods: Exemplars as judgment devices”, Valuation Studies, pp. 103—124, 2016.

Dekker, Erwin: The Viennese students of civilization. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Elias, Norbert: “The civilising process: sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations”, London: WileyBlackwell, 2000.

Fourcade, Marion and Kieran Healy: “Moral views of market society”, Annual Review of Sociology, 2007.

Frischmann, Brett M., Michael J. Madison, Katherine Jo Strandburg: Governing knowledge commons. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Frischmann, Brett M.: Infrastructure: The social value of shared resources. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Hadfield, Gillian: Rules for a at world: why humans invented law and how to reinvent it for a complex global economy. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Hall, Robert E. and Charles I. Jones: “Why do some countries produce so much more output per worker than others?”, The quarterly journal of economics, pp. 83—116, 1999.

Hess, Charlotte : “Constructing a new research agenda for cultural commons”, Cultural Commons. A New Perspective on the Production and Evolution of Cultures, 2012.

Hess, Charlotte and Ostrom, Elinor, ed.: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. The MIT Press, 2006.

Klamer, Arjo : Doing the Right Thing: A Value Based Economy. Ubiquity Press, 2017.

Kuchař, Pavel and Erwin Dekker: “Emergent orders of worth: Must we agree on more than just price?”, Cosmos+ Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization, pp. 23—34, 2017.

Kuchař, Pavel and Erwin Dekker: Lachmann and Shackle: On the Joint Production of Interpretation Instruments, 2017.

Kuchař, Pavel: “Entrepreneurship and institutional change”, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, pp. 349—379, 2016.

Madison, Michael J., Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg: “Constructing commons in the cultural environment”, Cornell L. Rev., pp. 657, 2010.

Ostrom, Elinor: Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Potts, Jason: “Governing the innovation commons”, Journal of Institutional Economics, pp. 1—23, 2017.

Schumpeter, Joseph A.: Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 1911.

Schumpeter, Joseph A.: “Development”, Journal of Economic Literature, pp. 108—120, 2005. URL

Strandburg, Katherine J. and Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison: Governing Medical Knowledge Commons. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Wadhwani, R. Daniel and Christina Lubinski: “Reinventing Entrepreneurial History”, Business History Review, pp. 767—799, 2017.