"Silicon-age California promised..an end to alleged inefficiencies of that broadly based and increasingly multiracial middle class...for the black and brown youth who were said to be unworthy of UC Berkeley [because of Reagan era "color- blind racism"], the largest, most expensive prison building boom in history. Between 1984 and 2004...prison expenditures grew 126 percent. The bill was paid in effect from funds for universities, which declined by 12 percent in constant dollars during that period." 91
..capital formation has always depended in large part on rent as a mechanism for increasing the rate of profit over the rate that would obtain in a truly competitive markets." [eg. Microsoft's vs. Netscape] 132
..leading companies stayed ahead by limiting the choices of customers to whom they could then charge rents. Business was looking to knowledge management to turn a worker's ideas into a proprietary product that would return a rent sized profit. 132
The new knowledge economy sought not just "knowledge" but "proprietary knowledge" that produced big, rent profits. The new "knowledge management system" sought to differentiate the rare proprietary knowledge worker from the rest who were "interchangeable with someone less costly and troublesome...134
For the Knowledge Management system "Uniqueness did not mean unique genius or originality. uniqueness was not an intellectual quality at all. It was a property category: uniqueness meant sole ownership"..."proprietary knowledge". 132-133 See Thomas A. Stewart "Intellectual Capital" (1997).
"...in the KM system the vast armies of college graduates would not be funneled to the winning quadrant but would be dispersed through all four [three] quadrants [commodity skills (interchangeable); leveraged skills; proprietary skills--most (college educated) people are merely "cost" and interchangeable], and therefore be fungible, disposable, outsourced and vulnerable as a group...Humanities research was already seen as economically trivial. Humanities graduates were, to the contrary, a centerpiece of the system of corporate workforce preparation that rested on the college degree. Humanities majors were the generic college graduate. They were employable not because they could use and extend the great traditions of art and letters but because they had two other qualities": "communication skills" and "cross-cultural managers"--skills associated with a network economy and majoritarian capitalism, but "In tandem with other culture-war attacks on these qualities, knowledge management dismissed their economic value. Nontechnical college graduates, KM declared, simply did not offer the company proprietary knowledge...Business was still enormously large and expensive, but it was now focused on liquidating or cheapening the personnel not tied to its proprietary products." [in the form of interchangeability outsourcing] 134-5
"Knowledge management linked big returns to protected technoknowledge and linked culture to background support systems. It admitted the necessity of culture but cheerfully defined it as a handmaiden to economics." 135
The key to KM was to transform "human capital" into "structural capital" or capital owned by the firm or business... a "repackaging of a Marxist truth about capitalism: capitalism operates by converting the labor of workers into the capital of the firm." 136-7.
"The purpose of KM was to prevent humane management from eroding the boundary between highly competent employees and financial decisions." 138
"Finance worked in parallel with the culture wars, undermining the corporate cultural movements that had emerged from the crisis of the 1970's. KM did not reconnect finance to the labor process, but maintained its separate superiority in a superficial humanistic way." 138
The ironic logic of these cascading cutbacks ["market determinism"] was correct but incomplete. It was inevitable only when the "many factors" mentioned at the start are excluded--the culture wars tarnishing of the humanities fields, the failure of these fields to redefine and articulate their public utility, and their market fatalism in itself. The MLA [Modern Language Association] analysis simply argued that under existing market conditions there was an oversupply of humanistic publication [and PhD.s] 149
"In an attempt to be realistic about economic forces, LCS [Language and Culture Studies] learned one half of the lesson of business. It was the half the culture wars taught again and again: the market was to be adapted to, not to be criticized or changed. The market model blocked rather than answered the simple question: who or what decides the level of demand? The other half of the lesson of business, the half LCS ignored, was the requirement to respond to "market" environments by increasing one's own influence over the market's demand decisions. This meant learning how to manage markets--how to discover hidden demands, how to create demand for products one thinks are important, how to adapt the market to one's output, how to subordinate markets to the needs of one's "customers", not to mention the wider society." 149-150
No comments:
Post a Comment