Growth Cultures

The Global Bioeconomy and its Bioregions

Philip Cooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136781971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This groundbreaking book is the first comparative analysis of the relative strengths of global bioregions. Growth Cultures investigates the rapidly growing phenomena of biotechnology and sets this study within a knowledge economy context. Philip Cooke proposes a new knowledge-focused theoretical framework, 'the New Global Bioeconomy', against which to test empirical characteristics of biotechnology.

In this timely volume, Cooke unifies concepts from the sociology of science, economic sociology and evolutionary economic geography to focus on the problems and prospects for policy agencies worldwide trying to build 'biotechnology clusters'. He develops a superior policy approach of thinking in terms of platforms that integrate proximities and pipelines, which will be of significant interest for the scientific and technological communities as well as economic development policy communities.

Growth Cultures will make fascinating reading for students, policy makers and researchers across management and business studies, innovation and knowledge studies, sociology, science and technology policy, applied economics, development studies and regional science.

1 Growth cultures

Meaning and interpretation in the knowledge age

Introduction

We live in unstable times. I look out of my window as an ‘adjunct academic’ in building 13 at Aalborg University, at grass being cut by a dark green, unmanned, electronic Husqvarna robot mower. I recall first seeing something like it at EPCOT, Walt Disney's futurama in Florida, around 1995. Now it bumps gently against the wall under my window, reverses slightly and redirects itself to cut the difficult grass closest to the wall. No gardener can be seen, only the small trolley on which it arrived and to which it will return, parked on the pathway. For the university, with an attractive 1970s campus swathed with grass that flows into all the awkward corners produced by its design, modelled on North African village architecture, the robot mower makes economic sense. For the academic labour in the buildings, the Husqvarna is immeasurably quieter and cleaner than its petrol-driven predecessor that in any case does not function well in tricky corners. But for labour it signifies the challenge of growth without the necessity of direct labour application.

On the other hand, as the advertising material says:

‘the Auto-Mower will constantly and quietly keep the lawn trimmed – even recharging itself – while you find something a little more interesting to do with your weekend leisure time.

This green-thumbed robot is capable of maintaining a lawn area of between 1,200 and 1,500 square metres completely autonomously once the low-current perimeter wire is installed. The boundary wire is stapled or buried in the ground to stop the Auto-Mower from leaving the lawn and wandering into the neighbour's veggie patch.

Available in either a battery or solar powered version, the Auto-Mower parks itself on the charging unit when its power is low by following a ‘search wire’, or in the case of the solar model, stops moving to allow time for the sun to recharge its batteries.

Virtually silent and able to work in any weather conditions, the Auto-Mower is designed to continuously cut in a random pattern.This keeps the grass at a consistent height and clippings are fine enough to be left on the lawn as mulch, avoiding the need to use a catcher. Available from Husqvarna dealers, this escape route from what must be the most hated of Sunday afternoon chores costs €2,034 including the charging station but not installation.

(www.automower.com)

Clearly a small object of desire, allowing the owner to utilise the time saved by this release from physical exertion normally associated with lawn mowing, even of the electrically or petrol supported kind, to go to the gym, go for a swim or hike up a mountain. Yet more opportunity for consumption choices – keeping or getting healthy on our own terms. In spending the €2,000 on the mower, we release ourselves to spend a further few hundred or thousand on sufficient hiking gear and health club plus appropriate gymwear and swimwear to be inconspicuous yet noticeable and possibly ourselves further small objects of desire.

Growth cultures

In such ways is the modern economy a growth culture in which time expended performing selfless, unrewarded acts of community or household service may appear to GoreTex or Husqvarna to be consumption ‘downtime’. Similarly, other Sunday ‘chores’ like talking to partners, children or dogs while out on a walk in the park, wearing old jeans and jumpers from the 1960s is, from this perspective, unproductive. Such talk might be about the growing, picking, purchasing and preparing of a Sunday dinner with vegetables from the garden and meat delivered or picked up from the local butcher. If the former, it might come weekly from an organic farm, possibly accompanied by organic vegetables. Or their organic or non-organic equivalents might arrive, similarly delivered in a small white van, from the supermarket responding to our Internet order. Alternatively, the plan might not involve home-cooking but a meal out. This is something that some 24 million Britons had done at least once per year by 1996, and many much more according to Warde and Martens (1998) who noted a doubling since 1993. During approximately the same years the number of Britons actively dieting had risen to 12.8 million. The USA Department of Agriculture (1999) report based on food consumption surveys noted that food obtained by ‘eating out’ – restaurants, coffee houses, vending machines, cafeterias and fast food combined – had less fibre (25 per cent less), iron levels 29 per cent below recommended daily intakes, and calcium 20 per cent below recommended minimum levels compared with food obtained by ‘eating in’. The frequency of eating out has almost doubled in the last 20 years. About 30 per cent of meals were eaten out, a trend expected to continue, primarily due to low prices for such food, aided by dual-income families with little time and energy left to prepare food at home. Thus one rather pessimistic scenario that could be constructed from such data, is that far from utilising time saved from such ‘chores’ as mowing lawns by exercising, substantial numbers of the population would use it for eating relatively unhealthily. This is the essence of ‘growth culture’.

Healthcare

This brings us, conveniently, to the subject of healthcare, since a major Western concern directly connected to the foregoing is the dramatic rise in the numbers of people who are negatively affected by eating disorders, notably those that result in obesity. To quote British statistics once more, during the last 25 years, the rate of obesity has quadrupled in the UK. In England alone, 22 per cent of men and 23 per cent of women were classified as clinically obese in 2002, while 43 per cent of men and 34 per cent of women were overweight. This meant that over half of all adults weigh more than their recommended weight. In the USA obesity rates increased from 15 per cent of the population in 1980 to 31 per cent in 2000. In Canada, almost 50 per cent of the population is either overweight or obese. Fifty-six per cent of adults and 27 per cent of children in Australia are either overweight or obese. Obesity can lead to a variety of health problems, including high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, osteoarthritis and diabetes. A UK National Audit Office study from 2002 estimated that obesity cost the National Health Service €750 million a year, and the cost to the country overall has been put at up to €10 billion per annum.

On a far larger scale than that implied in the Robot Mower illustration, these statistics bear out the defining aspects of growth culture whereby scale economies applied relentlessly over decades in the world food industry have resulted in systems of production, distribution and consumption that may be literally lethal to consumers. Just a few examples of the perversity of scale production in agro-food can illustrate the key issues here. One concerns rising perinatal mortality among Holstein cattle breeds, the world's greatest milk producers, inbred for decades to achieve massive milk yields per cow. Adamec et al. (2006) recorded rising stillbirth scores from producers on 120,434 US Holsteins 1985–1996. Stillbirth scores 3 to 5 were coded as difficult births leading to deaths within the first 48 hours after birth. The observed effects of inbreeding were consistently unfavourable. In other words, Holstein inbreeding to increase milk yields has given rise to barriers of a genetic and physical kind that substantially constrain natural birth processes. The limits have clearly been reached of scale-methodologies typically associated with generic, massified and cheap food production based on successive rounds of inbreeding. A different illustration concerns the long-observed problem of Danish pigmeat, produced under some of the most intensive, indoor production programmes in the world. This is the economy that pioneered mass food-production following the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and the opening of large-scale dairy farms in Jutland. Such is the crowding of animals in production that pigs are routinely injected with penicillin to counter disease. As immunity builds up, more and more massive doses have to be given. Consumers of Danish pigmeat absorb the injected penicillin in above-normal quantities and if unlucky to catch a disease, especially a foreign strain such as staphylococcus from China, they prove remarkably resistant to treatment due to the penicillin absorbed in eating pork products. Hence, massification in the second case directly affects the health balance not only of the animals but of consumers of intensively farmed food products.

However, in the face of such difficulties for animals and humans occasioned by mass food production, upon which the profits of agrobusiness and supermarkets largely depend, come a range of responses. In the food sector, one approach that is taking on the character of an embryonic new social movement is that which rejects mass food production and favours its small-scale, localised, seasonal, often organic opposite. Growth in the sale of organic produce has run at 10–15 per cent in Europe and 20 per cent in the US in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Europe this has been stimulated by the lethal nature of some food production causing deaths by ‘mad cow’ disease, E-coli bacteria, especially among the aged and young children, and more specific ‘food scares’ such as the US study showing that consumption of processed meats increased the risk of pancreatic cancer (Nothlings, 2005). According to the research findings, people who consumed the most processed meats (hot dogs and sausage) showed a 67 per cent increased risk of pancreatic cancer over those who consumed little or no such meat products.

A different approach concerns ‘functional foods’ which are biotechnolo-gically derived and promise, as nutraceuticals, to bring health gain to customers through their health-enhancing contents. Perhaps the best-known are the lactobacter and related ‘healthy bacteria’, dairy products like Yakult, Benencol, Activia and the lesser-known though pioneering Pro Viva. Activia by Danone, for example, is a low fat yogurt that contains Bifidus regularis, a natural probiotic culture that helps regulate the digestive system by helping reduce long intestinal transit time. Bifidus regularis is a live, ‘friendly’ bacteria claimed to be beneficial when eaten daily. ProViva, invented by Swedish company Probi, a progenitor of this kind of digestive support ingredient, failed to market its juice product as well as its competitors, possibly through entering the market too early and with insufficient preparation of consumer product consciousness. The firm was founded in 1991 and the health drink product was launched in partnership with Skane Dairy in 1994, Lactobacillus plantarum 299v being the active ingredient in this case. Yakult is the oldest dairy product and its Japanese founder Minoru Shirota's goal was to contribute to human health by acting upon Nobel laureate Elie Metchnikoff's idea of 1900 that a person's health could depend on the condition of the intestines. Metchnikoff, a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, developed a fermented milk drink as a carrier for the Lactobacillus casei, influenced by the remarkable life expectancy of Bulgarians and their common practice of drinking ‘fermented’ milk. Through Yakult, Shirota introduced one of the world's first probiotics. Benecol is a well-marketed Finnish variant on this general theme. Research published in 2004 showed that most of the claims of beneficiary health effects from these products were unfounded and that, at best, they do no known harm and at worst can induce negative reactions (Adams, 2004).

Hence, we return once more to the growth culture tendency to operate along lines reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in which, it will be recalled, a gangster mob threatens the peace of the city of Chicago and then offers to police the resulting social disorder, an offer readily accepted by Mayor Dogsborough, thus ushering in the rise of the gangster to power in the city. Modern market systems induce perverse over-consumption effects on the way up, as it were, earning profits in so doing. Among such negative effects can be important incidents in which consumer health is threatened in the ways outlined. Then they make possibly even greater profits by concocting apparent remedies to the pathologies they have induced in the identical consumers. This may be even better expressed by reference to the contribution of the Nobel laureate in economics, George Akerlof, who introduced the important concept and subsequent theory of asymmetric information. Akerlof's metaphor, embodied in the title of his prize-winning contribution, was that of the used-car dealer, knowledgeable, as few customers could ever be, of the likelihood that the car in question was a dud. ‘The market for “lemons”’ was the memorable title of his first scholarly article, which was turned down for publication by the first four leading journals he tried, on grounds of ‘triviality’. But it gave rise to numerous fields of economics, including studies of market failure, adverse selection, the nature of contracts, and principal-agent relations, some of which have also exercised the minds of economic sociologists (Edling and Stern, 2003; Shapiro, 2005).

In the ‘knowledge economy’ the opportunities for such chicanery have expanded exponentially given that there is vastly more knowledge and its codified form – information – available in society. However, it is by no means ubiquitously available and, in the variety of forms knowledge may take, may appear as an array of impenetrable knowledge monopolies. One important field, which is defined by such concerns, forms the focus of this book, which is the modern pharmaceuticals industry. For in a massified world of production of generic drug solutions to healthcare problems associated with the health deficits noted above, pharmaceuticals companies have become modern behemoths. But in the face of new knowledge deriving from the research and innovation associated with biotechnology, they can also look dinosaur-like in their inability to adapt to the biotechnology paradigm. Hence, pharmaceutical biotechnology is instructive from both the perspective of the sociology of consumer knowledge and, less commonly, the knowledge revolution associated with the rise of microbiology and more recently genomics within business. In this respect, biotechnology has produced remarkable and even pioneering shifts in established power structures. These have limited potential to moderate some of the knowledge asymmetries noted above. This is mainly because the force propelling new biotechnology knowledge is coming from the public financing of public research. The market sits atop this knowledge driver facilitating but not originating commercialisation of new knowledge in the form of innovative therapeutic treatments. And of course, as Owen-Smith and Powell (2004) underline, for all the caveats about confidentiality regarding pipeline agreements expressed in tightly worded contracts between public researchers and private innovators, public science is open science or what, in sociological terms, is normally referred to as following Mertonian scientific norms. This makes it likely that there will be leakage of such supposedly privately appropriated knowledge in normal discourse between public scientists.

Biotechnology is in the front line of the debate about private appropri-ability of publicly funded knowledge. Academic entrepreneurship has risen in profile and even when exaggerated claims are made regarding, for example, the number of new firms arising annually from it, there is nevertheless a seemingly desperate urge by university administrations and governments to expand it. Statistics show that in most advanced economies over half of academic entrepreneurship is accounted for by biotechnology (Shane, 2004). In the US, scientists are routinely required to make disclosures to their university knowledge transfer office if they make a discovery that might have the chance to become a commercial innovation capable of earning returns for both university and academic. Accordingly, the decision as to whether or not and how much patent variety should be contemplated may be taken increasingly away from the scientist. The implications for patenting, especially broad patenting, which can cover a sizeable knowledge sub-field in an innovative area, may also be subject less to scientific and more to economic calculation, as we shall see later in this introduction. Licensing of patented knowledge to pharmaceuticals firms who innovate new treatments as expensive as the affluent US healthcare market will bear then creates difficulties for poorer countries who may need but cannot afford such treatments. This has led to disaffection, critique and deligitimisation of the patenting concept accordingly.

Merton and biotechnology

Before reviewing and introducing the intellectual property miasma that biotechnology has given rise to, particularly since genome decryption and encryption became its leading edge scientific impulses, a reminder of the norms of Mertonian science is in order. They are the five that follow, mnemonised from the capital letter of each heading as CUDOS:

Communalism – The findings of academic science are public knowledge rather than private knowledge.

• secrecy is prohibited in the sense that it cannot carry weight or be given credit in scientific discourse;
• dishonesty is not tolerated and mutual, personal trust is the norm;
• findings are accepted as primary literature in the public record only as a result of peer review;
• the ethic of communalism helps to explain the importance of empiricism and intersubjectivity in scientific epistemology; epistemic strategies include quantification, measurement, standardisation (and calibration), instrumentation, ...