Introduction
Ceaseless acts of bargaining, haggling, buying, and selling happen around us all the time. Places where people gather to buy and sell goods and services emerge all around the world: in parts that are poor, in parts that are rich, at the old-fashioned market square, and in the modern digital world. We call these gatherings markets. Market forms vary from highly personalized services to commodities that are sold to millions of people at a time, from illicit goods to some of the most revered works of art. Originally, markets were meeting places that emerged at the frontier between villages as grounds where strangers could meet to trade. Trade generally did not emerge within a family or a tribe.Footnote 1 Today buyers no longer have to be physically present, although personal connections remain a crucial part of many markets. What small-scale and global markets have in common is the requirement of communication. Buyers and sellers must communicate and they must share some kind of a common understanding.Footnote 2 When they trade, buyers and sellers must share a system of signs and interpretations, an enforceable set of rules, customs, and laws governing contracts and an established system of property rights.
We tend to take for granted that people in markets can buy low and sell high without much trouble in understanding or trusting one another. Markets appear so natural, that Adam Smith (1776/Reference Smith1981) considered that the propensity to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’ to be an innate part of human nature. It was the original sin of modern economics to proceed as if markets were natural phenomena. As if their emergence and continued existence itself did not have to be explained. As if self-interest alone was sufficient to explain why people would engage in exchanges of various kinds with each other.
Behind these seemingly natural interactions there is an intricate web of mostly invisible relationships that specify the peculiar conventions of different markets. Who can buy and sell? What are legitimate objects of exchange, and which things are off-limits? Is money an acceptable means of exchange, or should one pay in kind? What is a just price? And what is the appropriate way of valuing a particular good? Should customers tip, or sellers reward the buyer for their loyalty? Should one haggle? We take for granted that entrepreneurs can retain their profits; that at times, they might even enjoy a monopoly position after their invention is patented. All these assumptions require formal rules and informal norms to be in place. This book is about the routines, conventions, and shared pools of knowledge that underpin market exchange generally and specific markets in particular.
The legal framework is probably the most studied of these market-enabling social infrastructures. Within law and economics, the legal infrastructure has received ample attention, albeit with a strong emphasis on formal rights of property and contract. The rules of property and contract are the most basic defining characteristics of markets. But there is nothing natural about these rules. In fact, the rules of property and contract come in a great variety extending beyond formal rights; they include informal norms and enforcement mechanisms, which together make up the legal infrastructures on which markets rely (Hodgson Reference Hodgson2001; Ostrom Reference Ostrom2005). Our work extends beyond formal legal infrastructures and takes into account social infrastructures that may facilitate or hamper markets. We suggest that these infrastructures are of crucial importance in legitimizing markets; they create shared understandings, facilitate trust and, more generally, transform transaction costs to facilitate exchanges (van Waarden Reference van Waarden and Levi-Faur2012).Footnote 3
Elinor Ostrom argued that the social infrastructure that sustains a “competitive market – the epitome of private institutions – is itself a public good,” this, as Ostrom points out, is because once the market is there, “individuals can enter and exit freely whether or not they contribute to the cost of providing and maintaining the market” (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1990: 15). This volume shows, following the late work of Elinor Ostrom, that the social infrastructures that sustain markets are not public goods but rather a form of knowledge commons. Social infrastructures are key resources required for the emergence and continued existence of markets and their production and maintenance is not costless.
Increasingly, scholars across disciplines have realized the importance of social infrastructures made up of institutionalized classificatory systems within which voluntary private interactions take place. Development economists have come to argue that historically determined social infrastructures captured in part by language are central in explaining long-run economic performance (Hall and Jones Reference Hall and Jones1999). More recent work in economic sociology has explored the moral nature of markets. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy (Reference Fourcade and Healy2007), for instance, talk about the moralized-markets approach, in which scholars are concerned with ‘social sources of moral ideas’; Jens Beckert (Reference Beckert2009) discusses the problem of valuation emphasizing the moral orders that support markets. In law and economics, Brett Frischmann (Reference Frischmann2012; see also Kornberger et al. Reference Kornberger, Bowker and Elyachar2019) highlights the importance of shared intellectual infrastructures in sustaining market orders. Gillian Hadfield (Reference Hadfield2016) has extended the analysis of normative frameworks to legal infrastructures while Kaushik Basu (Reference Basu2018) emphasized the coordinative role of shared beliefs about the rules of the game.
We are critical of naturalistic accounts of markets that assume that private interests and opportunities for exchange alone are sufficient for the emergence and continued existence of markets. But we are equally critical of the standard assumption that infrastructural resources should be publicly provided. Two recent volumes entitled Manufacturing Markets (Brousseau and Glachant Reference Brousseau and Glachant2014) and Marketcraft (Vogel Reference Vogel2018) argue that states are crucial in the design and governance of markets. While we do acknowledge that states have a role in limiting violence (North, Wallis, and Weingast Reference North, Wallis and Weingast2009), we also suggest that key infrastructural resources for the emergence and continued existence of markets are developed by market participants and related communities. Markets require organization (Eucken Reference Eucken1940). But governance structures are often organized communally, not purely privately or publicly (although entanglements abound). The key analytical question is how and why such resources are developed and maintained.
Foundations and the Theoretical Framework
How do markets emerge? Who bears the costs and efforts of producing the market-sustaining knowledge commons? How are knowledge commons, such as the intellectual and legal infrastructures maintained? Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, in their book on Governing Knowledge Commons, highlighted the concept of a contribution to a shared resource (Hess and Ostrom Reference Hess and Ostrom2006: 52). They defined it as a right to change (contribute to) a content of a common resource. The concept of a contribution is key to understanding the creation and maintenance of knowledge commons.
Along with access, extraction, management, exclusion, and alienation, the right to contribute is, according to Hess and Ostrom, a kind of a property right. The right to contribute to a common resource is a kind of a right that is particularly important when we zero in on knowledge commons. We have every reason to think that, rather than being a public good, a market is made up by rules that are closer to a particular form of a knowledge commons that is produced and reproduced by way of contributions and that might be adjusted by removals. Who has the power and the right to contribute, and who can be excluded from contributing and removing the shared aspects of the infrastructure that sustains markets become key issues in the analysis of market governance. Who has access to markets, how goods are supposed to be produced, bought, and consumed, how is exchange supposed to take place? These questions are directly related to how the market at hand is understood.Footnote 4 The wide variety in rules means that it makes little sense to talk of markets in the abstract, instead markets should be studied as specific institutional settings. And the meaning attributed to the institutions of exchange will depend on the place of markets in social life (Hodgson Reference Hodgson2001).
These questions can be better understood when considered in context of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators. This framework was first developed to study the governance of commons in the natural environment (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1990) and later modified for use in the study of Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) series by Brett Frischmann, Michael Madison, and Katherine Strandburg (Reference Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg2014; Strandburg, Frischmann, and Madison Reference Strandburg, Frischmann and Madison2017). In this theoretical framework, commons refers to
a form of community management or governance. It applies to resources and involves a group or community of people, but it does not denote the resources, the community, a place, or a thing. Commons is the institutional arrangement of these elements.
Importantly, what distinguishes commons from other kinds of governance (such as individual private property rights) “is institutionalized sharing of resources among members of a community” (Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg Reference Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg2014: 2). The intellectual infrastructure that enables and regulates market is a kind of a resource. But the infrastructure, besides being a resource, is in the first place a kind of knowledge.
In general, we say that knowledge “refers to a broad set of intellectual and cultural resources” (Strandburg, Frischmann, and Madison Reference Strandburg, Frischmann and Madison2017: 10). Intellectual and legal infrastructures are a part of our knowledge. Mental models and shared classification schemes are knowledge too. Institutional aspects such as formal rules, informal norms, and instruments of interpretation; classification schemes, and enforcement mechanisms are forms of social infrastructures that all constitute knowledge as we understand it. That perspective is in line with the knowledge perspective developed in markets, in which the price system and firms both play a key role in the coordination of the expectations and hence the actions of different individuals (Coase Reference Coase1934; Hayek Reference Hayek1945). The meaning of prices and the way we interpret and understand price movements are important aspects of that shared knowledge (Velthuis Reference Velthuis2005).
Knowledge commons, then, is a
shorthand for the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in many cases, creation of … intellectual and cultural resources. Demand for governance institutions arises from a community’s need to overcome various social dilemmas associated with producing, preserving, sharing, and using [these resources].
While the demand side for governance institutions has received a good deal of attention in the new institutionalist literature, the supply side of many institutions in general and those governing knowledge commons in particular still seems to be somewhat of a mystery. The chapters in this book contribute to the GKC research program by asking how the intellectual and legal infrastructures, on which markets depend, are produced and reproduced; how they grant coherence to our actions and interactions in markets while at the same time permitting change.
Four Building Blocks
This volume presents a couple of basic ideas that run through the following chapters. First, markets are cultural; they rely on a form of knowledge that is governed as a knowledge commons. A corollary of this idea is that the growth of markets depends as much on relevant knowledge commons as it does on changes in technology or geography.
Second, the market-supporting forms of knowledge are produced and reproduced by contributions and sharing. They are thus neither privately nor publicly provided. Rather, the mode of governance for the production and maintenance of market-supporting forms of knowledge is the commons. While markets are not natural, they are in many instances self-supporting.
Third, knowledge commons include intellectual and legal infrastructures that serve as economic inputs to new production processes. The knowledge infrastructures we discuss in the book do not merely legitimate and structure economic exchange in markets, they also function as jointly produced resources on which market participants can draw for private initiatives. They are quite literally a pool of knowledge from which market participants can draw.
Fourth, our volume conceptualizes the social and cultural effects of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs draw on the knowledge infrastructures to make new combinations, to engage in slight evasions of existing rules, and to provide new justifications (or condemnations) of particular acts. In doing so they bring new products on the market, alter existing practices, or try to prevent existing ones. This has not merely economic effects, but also impacts the knowledge commons that sustain markets. As such entrepreneurial acts feed back into the cultural framework of markets. Let us situate each of these building blocks in the wider academic conversation on markets.
Markets Are Cultural and Rely on Knowledge Commons
Anthropologists and sociologists have long argued that markets are part of social systems (K. Polanyi Reference Polanyi1945; Appadurai Reference Appadurai1986; Granovetter and Swedberg Reference Granovetter and Swedberg1992; Gudeman Reference Gudeman2001). In economics there has been less attention to this fact. But, as one of us has demonstrated, in the crucial interwar period a large group of Central-European intellectuals rediscovered the importance of institutional frameworks that constitute the social infrastructure of market societies (Dekker Reference Dekker2016). In more stable times that framework is easily taken for granted, but during the major upheavals of the 1930s it became acutely visible how important these frameworks were. Neoliberal thinkers of various political and national backgrounds rediscovered the importance of the legal, social, and cultural preconditions for flourishing markets (Foucault Reference Foucault2008).
In economic sociology these ideas became known as the embeddedness thesis associated with the work of Karl Polanyi (Dale Reference Dale2010). The debate made Friedrich Hayek realize the importance of the rules and institutions that have supported liberal civilization (Hayek Reference Hayek1960; Boettke Reference Boettke2018). It made Joseph Schumpeter argue that capitalism could not survive in an unrestrained democratic state (Schumpeter Reference Schumpeter1976; Allen Reference Allen1994). It made Norbert Elias inquire into the process by which the West became civilized, and how this process was reversed (Elias Reference Elias2000). It made the Ordoliberal thinkers in Germany inquire into the framework that allows for peaceful competition on markets (Eucken Reference Eucken1940; Röpke Reference Röpke1950; Peacock and Willgerodt Reference Peacock and Willgerodt1989). And it made Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper inquire, in different ways, into the ways in which free scientific inquiry is embedded and part of an open society, and a set of shared attitudes (Popper Reference Popper1945; M. Polanyi Reference Polanyi1958).
Many of these writers used the term ‘civilization’ to refer to this set of frameworks.Footnote 5 Sigmund Freud, who reflected on the same set of development suggested that the term civilization “describes the sum of achievements that serve two types of purposes: to protect men against nature, and to adjust their mutual relations” (Freud Reference Freud1930/1961: 36). What protects man against nature is primarily a set of technologies, but what interests us is the sum of achievements that allow humans to adjust their mutual relations. What this perspective allows us to realize is that this shared set of achievements, which differs between societies and over time, consists of shared knowledge. This consists of common sense knowledge, social conventions, classification schemes, and a wide variety of institutional forms that allow for peaceful human interaction. Markets are an integral part of these, and directly related to the wider set of knowledge. They therefore depend on these shared social infrastructure and feed back into them.
As the ordoliberal writers argued persuasively, society consists of different orders (Luhmann Reference Luhmann1995; Goldschmidt and Wohlgemuth Reference Goldschmidt and Wohlgemuth2008). These different orders, social, legal, political, and economic, overlap in complex ways; we have elsewhere compared these orders to plate tectonics, due to having stable internal structures, but also being partly incommensurable with other orders (Dekker and Kuchař Reference Dekker, Kuchař, Marciano and Ramello2017). Between these orders potentially serious friction may emerge, along with a great possibility for conflict (Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006; Stark Reference Stark2009). It is precisely at the borders of the orders that we expect opportunities for entrepreneurial action, consisting in part of arbitrage between different normative orders (whether legal, social or both), to emerge.
Knowledge Commons Are Produced and Reproduced by Contributions and Sharing
To conceptualize the production side of shared infrastructures we rely on the notion of contribution, and in particular on two types of goods that are discussed in this book: contribution goods and shared goods. Contribution goods are conceptualized by Kealey and Ricketts as “goods whose benefits are non-rival over contributors but that cannot be accessed by non-contributors” (Kealey and Ricketts Reference Kealey and Ricketts2014: 1015). For instance, in order to access scientific knowledge one has to become a scientist since important parts of the knowledge is simply inaccessible to outsiders, and other important parts are tacit. It is only through contributions to science that one gains meaningful access to science. The production of scientific knowledge depends on the contributions of many different scientists, who should feel sufficiently motivated to contribute to science. Such contributions are more worthwhile for the individual when other individuals are also making contributions. Science is a noncooperative coordination game (see also Kealey and Ricketts, Chapter 1).
Shared goods, on the other hand, are defined by Arjo Klamer as coproduced non-divisible goods. Klamer emphasizes their non-rival nature and suggests that exclusion is nearly automatic for shared goods (Klamer Reference Klamer2016: 72–76). His favorite example is that of a friendship between two people from which non-friends, or non-contributors, are excluded. Ownership of such goods, including scientific knowledge, is not clearly defined, but that is not necessary for its production. Unlike Kealey and Ricketts, Klamer thinks of the production of such goods as requiring cooperation: the production of a good friendship is a cooperative game (see also Potts Reference Potts2019). What Klamer adds to his discussion of shared goods is that they are typically practices, which derive value from an active engagement (see also Won and Klamer, Chapter 11). In that sense one becomes a scientist by doing science, and a friend by practicing friendship.Footnote 6
Knowledge Commons Serve As Economic Inputs to New Production Processes
A major step toward understanding the function of social infrastructures has been the work of Brett Frischmann. Infrastructural resources run in the background of any kind of social and economic interaction. More specifically, we can say that these resources are “consumed non-rivalrously for some appreciable range of demand,” that a “demand for the [infrastructural] resource is driven primarily by downstream productive activity,” and finally, that the infrastructural resources tend to “be used as an input into a wide range of goods and services” (Frischmann Reference Frischmann2012: xiv). Typically, things like roads and highways, railways, bridges, lighthouses, water systems, power grids, optical fibers, etc., come to mind. Very often, we tend to think about these kinds of infrastructure as public goods in the sense that their consumption is non-rival and non-excludable. A standard textbook scenario demonstrates that private initiative will fall short of providing these kinds of infrastructures in a satisfactory quality and quantity and that, therefore, these goods should be provided by a political authority.
Frischmann extends the analysis of physical infrastructures to include intellectual infrastructures. We might think of language as a central example of intellectual infrastructure. But apart from language, intellectual infrastructures “include a broad set of resources that create benefits for society primarily through the facilitation of downstream productive activities, many of which generate spillovers” (Frischmann Reference Frischmann2012: 275). Intellectual infrastructures are simply non-rival inputs into a wide variety of outputs; think basic research, general purpose technologies, or infrastructural ideas.
The importance of infrastructures seems to be most conspicuous in the case of malfunction. That is especially true when we talk about “legal infrastructures,” as Gillian Hadfield does in her book titled Rules for a Flat World (Hadfield Reference Hadfield2016). We recognize the importance of uncongested highways or high-speed railways during our daily commutes, we are well aware of the enabling power of language and such realizations become much more vivid when the road becomes congested, when the railway workers go on a strike, or when we cannot simply “plug in,” as Hadfield puts it, into a framework of people who share our language or adhere to a common legal code. With legal infrastructure, which may be considered a subset of Frischmann’s intellectual infrastructure, things are different to the extent that the enabling function of legal and institutional rules is almost always hidden, it mostly runs in the background, and what we typically notice about law is that it tells us what not to do. Law, however, also has a constructive enabling role which facilitates interaction and coordination.
Hadfield (Reference Hadfield2016: 89) – as Buchanan (Reference Buchanan1975) had also similarly suggested – makes the case that legal infrastructure is a form of capital that is, because of its widespread availability, a shared good. Just like with other kinds of infrastructure, we do not typically have the legal infrastructure tailored and constructed just for our purposes. The legal infrastructure must be general enough to allow entrepreneurs with different kinds of plans to plug into it and make use of it. As such, the legal infrastructure seems to be a part of the environment, “it was there before you got here” (Hadfield Reference Hadfield2016: 87). But what can flourish in a given (legal) environment is a question of the complementarity between the environment and the activities employed by individuals and groups.
The importance of the complementarity between different types of capital goods has been emphasized in economics by Ludwig Lachmann (Reference Lachmann1978) who argued that in order for individual plans to succeed they must be compatible with each other (Endres and Harper Reference Endres and Harper2013). That is the same type of interdependence that is also stressed by game theorists on the micro level.Footnote 7 This interdependence can cause individuals’ plans to fail, since others don’t act as expected. But the interdependence can also give rise to positive reinforcing effects and lead to increasing returns of being part of the same community or culture. It is now well established that this is the case at least for knowledge of the R&D type (B. Hall, Mairesse, and Mohnen Reference Hall, Mairesse, Mohnen, Hall and Rosenberg2010; see also Kealey and Ricketts, Chapter 1).
Entrepreneurship Has Social and Cultural Effects
A recent volume has argued for a regime of permissionless innovation (Thierer Reference Thierer2016). We suggest that even if governments would remove all barriers to innovation and new technologies, entrepreneurial action would still be anything but completely free. Entrepreneurs must draw on the existing knowledge resources for their innovations, and the extent to which novel innovations might be accepted is in large part determined by their compatibility with existing social norms.
Entrepreneurs do more than buy low and sell high. In fact, entrepreneurs are important agents of change who tend to change social norms and classification schemes in general (Elert and Henrekson Reference Elert and Henrekson2017). Besides direct efforts to shape and mold our existing knowledge, entrepreneurs contribute to the joint production of new product categories (Navis and Glynn Reference Navis and Glynn2010), new ways of valuing goods (De Marchi Reference De Marchi, Hutter and Throsby2008), and new legitimations for exchanges previously believed to be illegitimate or repugnant (Kuchař Reference Kuchař2016). More broadly they change the existing set of conventions (Choi, Chapter 5). Entrepreneurship thus has effects beyond the economic realm. It also jointly impacts social and cultural norms and beliefs.
Wadwhani and Lubinski (Reference Wadhwani and Lubinski2017) have suggested the term ‘New Entrepreneurial History’ for a field of study that explicitly recognizes the importance of legitimizing novelty. The focus on legitimation of economic actions has long been left by economists to sociologists and organizational scholars (Swedberg Reference Swedberg, Knudsen and Tsoukas2005). We believe that in order to understand the importance of knowledge commons in enabling market exchange, the study of legitimation of existing practices as well as the justification for new practices will prove to be crucial (Jensen Reference Jensen2010). Legitimation might not always be direct and can initially take the form of evasive entrepreneurship (Elert and Henrekson Reference Elert and Henrekson2016) in which attempts are made to sidestep existing rules. The rise of the new sharing economy with firms like AirBnB and Uber are good examples (Munger Reference Munger2018). At other times new practices are explored in gray zones or through active boundary work (Liu Reference Liu2015; Fernandez and Figueiredo Reference Fernandez and Figueiredo2018). In one of the chapters in this volume, the boundary work between single malt scotch and other types of whisky is explored (Vachris and Vachris, Chapter 8). At other times entrepreneurs might build on social changes elsewhere in society. The struggle to legitimize the Queer Museum in Brazil (Dalla Chiesa, Chapter 10) might pave the way for entrepreneurial actions in related markets, which could potentially build on the newly recognized identities and social groups.
Entrepreneurship is therefore important for two reasons. First, disputes over novelty and the active justification process that entrepreneurs engage in highlight the interdependence between markets and the related knowledge commons. Secondly, entrepreneurial action, through active contributions, feeds back into the knowledge commons and therefore completes the circle of our framework. Markets depend for their existence on the social infrastructure of the knowledge commons. Interaction in markets leads to new contributions to these knowledge commons, and therefore to broader social and cultural processes in society. Markets are in important ways self-sustaining social processes.
Organization of the Book
The chapters in this volume can be divided in two groups. There are five primarily conceptual chapters, followed by six primarily applied chapters. The conceptual chapters develop aspects of the theoretical framework while focusing on certain elements of the market-supporting knowledge commons. The applied chapters utilize the framework to analyze specific cases of market governance.
The first chapter lays out an ambitious argument for the importance of the knowledge commons. Terence Kealey and Martin Ricketts show how institutional changes within the British organization of science before the Industrial Revolution relied on contribution goods. The resulting rapidly expanding knowledge commons, to which the entrepreneurs of the age had access and made active contributions, was the basis for the Industrial Revolution. The theoretical addition of their chapter is the model of the contribution good they develop. When the scientific enterprise attracts a sufficient number of contributors, the argument goes, it gives rise to a knowledge commons to which access is almost naturally restricted, because only active contributors have sufficient tacit knowledge to draw on the knowledge commons.
In the second chapter Renée Prendergast argues that while knowledge in general tends to be built cumulatively over time, present knowledge is an input into future knowledge. Highlighting the cumulative nature of knowledge production, Prendergast develops a historical account going back to the ideas of Francis Bacon, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Ferguson, Charles Babbage, and Karl Marx suggesting that the state of present knowledge results from a wide collective process of learning derived to a large extent from everyday involvement in the ordinary business of life. People act without awareness of the full consequences of their actions. This way, actors jointly produce outputs that result from their actions but which these actors didn’t, and often even couldn’t, possibly anticipate. Prendergast relates her discussion to modern innovation theory and the concept of industrial commons.
In Chapter 3, Ed López, picks up on the cumulative character of knowledge arguing that knowledge commons are, on the one hand, coproduced in provision and, on the other hand, shared in consumption. His chapter drives home an important distinction – also highlighted in Chapter 4 by Brett Frischmann – that knowledge commons is a mode of governance that involves knowledge goods that are characterized by their non-subtractable nature. López suggests, along the lines of Prendergast, that agents often contribute to the production of knowledge commons as a result of their ordinary economic activity. Entrepreneurship within the rules of the game and rule-altering entrepreneurship are thus not distinct actions. By way of economic exchanges, people also exchange knowledge, and in exchanging knowledge they contribute to the collective processes of forming the very knowledge commons on which market exchange relies.
Brett Frischmann, in Chapter 4, examines what it means to think of knowledge as a commons through the study of common sense. He analyzes common sense as a social infrastructure for everyday market transactions and social interactions consisting of classifications, common understandings, and beliefs. Frischmann highlights that common sense understanding of the world forms part of a knowledge commons understood here as a mode of knowledge governance of, by, and for the community. Using the GKC framework, Frischmann explains that the governance of knowledge commons is nested. From the mundane knowledge commons of common sense, to the more specialized knowledge commons that support particular markets.
The market-supporting shared cognitive infrastructures are further discussed in the fifth chapter by Young Back Choi who argues that conventions are a necessary consequence of the human predicament of decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Following Frischmann, this chapter examines the role of everyday knowledge in resolving uncertainty so that actors get to “know what to do” in unfamiliar situations. The role of imagination, resemblance, and classification is brought forward in Choi’s discussion of entrepreneurship, a disruptive force that feeds into a perpetual tension between stability and change in knowledge systems, and consequently the foundation of market interactions. Entrepreneurship in relation to knowledge commons entails the alteration of existing understandings and expectations and can thus play a vital role in the emergence, flourishing, or limitation of particular markets.
In the first applied chapter, Darcy Allen, Chris Berg, Jason Potts, and Sinclair Davidson analyze the new blockchain technology as one possible way of governing the knowledge commons. They suggest that one of the most fundamental knowledge commons that facilitates market is the shared knowledge about who owns what, along with the relevant rules of exchanging property. By analyzing blockchain in the context of the GKC framework, the team of authors suggest that knowledge about property rights is a shared resource that needs to be produced, and that there is a risk of this knowledge being underproduced. The chapter contends that Blockchains are a technology for the distribution, maintenance, and verification of social facts such as “who owns what?” and “who can trade?” that may, without a central authority, contribute to a more robust governance of market-supporting knowledge commons.
While the chapter on blockchain demonstrates how new technologies are useful in the governance of markets, Yugank Goyal analyzes a market in which crucial knowledge for the functioning of the market is part of dense local social networks. Goyal analyzes the shoe market in Agra, India and suggests that the knowledge of creditworthiness is one of the key elements of the market-supporting knowledge commons and a key resource that determines the individual costs of production for any shoemaker in the market. Illustrating what it means to say that exchanges are speech acts in this specific setting, Goyal illustrates the role of rumors in determining the rates at which credit can be obtained in the market. The local nature of the knowledge commons, “being in the market,” facilitates an incredible richness in the shared knowledge infrastructure but also acts as a high barrier of entry for outsiders. Goyal demonstrates this through the analysis of specific barriers such as the role of caste in stratifying the division of tasks within the production process. This chapter also illustrates Prendergast’s point about the cumulative nature of knowledge production by suggesting that incremental elements of knowledge will be worthless for someone who is not already “in the market.”
The next group of chapters illustrates the importance of speech and language in both enabling and limiting the actions and interactions within markets and nonmarket settings. These chapters also highlight the role of entrepreneurs in managing the tension between stability and change. In this sense, they pick up on some of the themes brought up in the conceptual chapters by Frischmann, Choi, Prendergast, and López.
In their chapter Michelle Albert Vachris and Kyle Vachris present an analysis of the ways and means through which producers of whisky avoid the dilution of the category of Scotch. The very category of Scotch involves a knowledge of the do’s and don’ts in production and consumption of whisky. The chapter suggests that the category of Scotch is a jointly produced resource that is maintained by the community of stakeholders who invest in upholding the quality of the knowledge commons that separates Scotch whisky from other whisky-like products. They suggest, however, that the protection of Scotch has become the dominant force and has led to stagnation. New producers, particularly outside of Scotland, were denied access and have in turn developed alternatives that not only compete for the term, but have also led to the development of new product categories and quality conventions that threaten to end the dominance of single malt Scotch.
Raphaël Raux and Julien Gradoz examine the theme of repugnance in speech in their chapter on online transgression spaces. Their chapter looks at the role of internet trolls in creating pockets of free speech on a French online forum. Their analysis demonstrates that through a combination of a rapidly evolving shared language and hermeticism, access to the commons is restricted, and the transgressive space as knowledge commons is maintained. Language in this case is the very resource that is modified and transformed by transgressions on the margin by internet trolls who find ways to express themselves freely but also safely. In this case study the transgressive space is financed through related commercial activities by the platform provider. Markets thus emerge as almost a corollary of shared communities, perhaps not too differently from the way gatherings around music has led to a thriving festival market.
The chapter by Carolina Dalla Chiesa is similar in that it deals with issues of identity in particular of the LGBTQ-community. But rather than seeking to develop a relatively closed space, this community seeks acceptance and recognition in Brazilian society. Her case study of the Queer Museum, which encountered extensive social and political opposition, demonstrates the importance of alternative institutional frameworks. When denied by major funders and official venues, the entrepreneurs behind the museum drew on crowdfunding and alternative space to continue their practice. Dalla Chiesa, drawing on Ostrom’s notion of polycentricity, argues that museums manage an important knowledge commons of social and national identities. She investigates how these can be managed as a commons. Unique about the case examined in this chapter is that the shared framework of the crowdfunding platform, a knowledge commons, ends up supporting the Queer Museums, another initiative managed as a commons.
Rosa Won and Arjo Klamer contribute to the discussion of shared goods by suggesting that to acquire a shared good, one must contribute to its production and maintenance. Willingness to contribute is thus a key to consuming shared goods in online forums, in communities of Scotch aficionados, or in the context of a queer museum. Their own case is that of independent creative producers in urban contexts. They demonstrate, through the analysis of social media data, the qualities present in the knowledge commons on which these creatives draw. They argue that taking account of the qualitative nature of the knowledge commons in different cities is crucial to understand why some cities are able to attract ‘the creative class’ and others are not. Their chapter addresses the challenges of urban planning and suggests that much of its success is dependent on how well specific types of knowledge commons are fostered through urban policies.
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