Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World

Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century

Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne, Natasha Tusikov, Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne, Natasha Tusikov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030145392
• eBook ISBN: 9783030145408
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the interconnected ways in which the control of knowledge has become central to the exercise of political, economic, and social power. Building on the work of International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange, this multidisciplinary volume features experts from political science, anthropology, law, criminology, women's and gender studies, and Science and Technology Studies, who consider how the control of knowledge is shaping our everyday lives. From "weaponised copyright" as a censorship tool, to the battle over control of the internet's "guts," to the effects of state surveillance at the Mexico–U.S. border, this book offers a coherent way to understand the nature of power in the twenty-first century.

Part ISusan Strange and the Twenty-First Century Knowledge Structure

© The Author(s) 2019

Blayne Haggart, Kathryn Henne and Natasha Tusikov (eds.)Information, Technology and Control in a Changing WorldInternational Political Economy Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14540-8_2

Begin Abstract

Taking Knowledge Seriously: Towards an International Political Economy Theory of Knowledge Governance

Blayne Haggart¹

(1)

Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

Blayne Haggart

Email: [email protected]

This chapter is a modified and updated version of an article that originally appeared as “Incorporating the Study of Knowledge into the IPE Mainstream, or, When Does a Trade Agreement Stop Being a Trade Agreement?” Journal of Information Policy 7 (2017): 176–203.

End Abstract

International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship has traditionally focused its attention on issues of production, trade, and finance. The treatment of knowledge—particularly commodified knowledge—as a source and vector of power equal to or greater than that of finance or production is a key blind spot in our understanding of the global political economy. This chapter offers a framework, based on the work of Susan Strange, for considering the relationship between what she called the “knowledge structure” and the other key sources of political and economic power—security, production, and finance. Because Strange’s structural framework is explicitly concerned with the relationship among these four factors, it offers a useful way for scholars to treat knowledge governance—including intellectual property (IP), internet governance, and data governance—as a significant influence on economic prosperity and societal well-being.

This chapter also proposes an articulation of Strange’s knowledge structure that attempts to address her assertion that the effects of the knowledge structure were “unquantifiable” (1994, 119). It does so by disaggregating Strange’s framework into two interrelated but analytically separable aspects—its regulatory aspect (the rules governing the creation, dissemination, and use of knowledge) and its knowledge-legitimation aspect (the processes by which certain knowledge is deemed legitimate or not). A focus on the regulatory aspect of the knowledge structure both reveals what knowledge is considered to be legitimate and allows us to investigate directly the key question of who benefits from particular expressions of knowledge-regulation, subjects that motivate the research discussed throughout this book. It also highlights the extent to which we are seeing the emergence of a newly dominant form of economic conflict, one centred not around free trade versus protectionism, but between what I call knowledge feudalism and digital statism.

This chapter is structured as follows. The first section defines what this chapter means by knowledge governance, emphasising its distinction between information and knowledge. This point is illustrated primarily with respect to IP and data. The second section presents the chapter’s Strangean-derived theory of the knowledge structure. The third section uses an examination of the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP, now the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, CPTPP) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) concluded in September 2018, to underscore the utility of a knowledge structure-based analysis, particularly to highlight aspects of such agreements that are often missed when knowledge governance issues are not emphasised. It also defines the key dimension of the debate over knowledge governance, namely between knowledge feudalism and digital statism. The final section offers some thoughts about how scholars can use this approach to study the rising importance of knowledge governance in other areas of the global political economy.

1 Structural Power, Knowledge, and the Knowledge Structure

“Knowledge is power” is not a new saying. The control of knowledge has been central to human activity, whether it is religious knowledge in terms of how to get to heaven (Strange 1994, 123), scientific knowledge of how a steam engine works, or purloined knowledge used to compromise a rival country’s president. The first step in understanding the role that knowledge plays in human society involves recognising the difference between knowledge and information. In their foundational work, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), Berger and Luckmann define knowledge as “the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics” (1966, 14). Knowledge is an approximation of an underlying reality—of phenomena—that we can think of as information. Knowledge is created through social processes; it is socially constructed. Consequently, knowledge creation involves human agency and interpretation: it is always and necessarily a partial, intersubjective representation of information/phenomena. It need not be an accurate representation of information/“reality”—as in the case of “fake news”—but it can be. For example, data, while often thought of as pure information, is a form of knowledge. It is a partial representation of underlying phenomena whose collection (through the decision to make an observation) and definition are the product of human decisions. As the title of Gitelman’s 2013 volume put it succinctly, “Raw data is an oxymoron”: it is knowledge, not information.

While knowledge has always been politically, socially, and economically central to society, its relative importance has arguably changed over the past several decades. The case of IP is instructive. IP is the legal framework regulating the creation, use, and dissemination of commodified knowledge, be it creative works (copyrights), industrial processes (patents), or identifying marks (trademarks).¹ It is a form of knowledge, not information, because it represents a commodified, partial apprehension of an underlying phenomenon. Copyright, for example, attributes the creation of a text to an individual author. In reality, of course, every text builds on and incorporates already-existing texts, as the citations in this chapter attest. As Jessica Litman notes, the notion of the individual author is merely a useful “conceit” that allows us to give some order to the creation of knowledge (1990, 42).

For most of the past several hundred years, IP has been a relatively obscure backwater, of interest primarily to those industries and practitioners directly affected by it, such as publishers and pharmaceutical manufacturers. This is no longer the case. That the 2015 National Security Strategy of the United States elevated the protection and enforcement of IP law to a national security concern (Halbert 2016; Haggart and Jablonski 2017) demonstrates the extent to which IP is no longer a niche issue. IP, as well as data and internet governance, now lie at the very heart of the global order.

More specifically, “intangible assets” such as IP, but also “brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows” have overtaken “so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations” (Bryan et al. 2017, 56), accounting for anywhere from 50 per cent to 84 per cent of the market value of the Standard and Poor’s 500 index (Monga 2016; Ocean Tomo 2015). This change signals the importance of the control of data and IP, and the means by which these are created and disseminated, which very much includes the internet, as well as the arrival of a transformative moment in the global political economy (Bryan et al. 2017, 57).

Understanding how knowledge operates in the global political economy requires unpacking the links between knowledge and society. The framework developed by Strange offers a compelling and coherent theory of how knowledge fits within the wider political economy. Strange argued that the exercise of relational power—the ability to get someone to do something they would not otherwise do—was much less consequential than the exercise of structural power. She defined structural power as

the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political economy within which other states, their political institutions, their economic enterprises and (not least) their scientists and other professional people have to operate. This structural power … means rather more than the power to set the agenda of discussion or to design … the international regimes of rules and customs that are supposed to govern international economic relations. … Structural power, in short, confers the power to decide how things shall be done, the power to shape frameworks within which states relate to each other, relate to people, or relate to corporate enterprises. (1994, 24–25)

Some forms of structural power are more important than others. Strange identifies four in particular, which she argues are most necessary to the survival of human communities. They are as follows:

• security—“the provision of security by one group for another. They may in the process acquire advantages in the production or consumption of wealth and special rights or privileges in that society” (May 1996, 178);
• production—“what is produced, by whom and for whom, and on what terms” (May 1996, 179);
• finance—the ability to control and deny access to credit, and thus to production and markets; and
• knowledge, which this chapter will discuss below.

In contrast to a Marxist approach, which prioritises production as the foundation of power, or realist International Relations, which emphasises physical security, Strange does not accord a priori importance to any single structure. Rather, each can be relatively more important in a given era or situation (May 1996, 178; see also Cox 1996). For example, Strange’s empirical work on global finance (e.g., Strange 1986, 1998) argues that finance has been the key structure in the global economy since the 1980s (May 1996, 180–181). By not prioritising one structure over another, her structural-power framewo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Part I. Susan Strange and the Twenty-First Century Knowledge Structure
• Part II. Internet Governance and Regulation
• Part III. Questions of Truth and Censorship
• Part IV. Surveillance and Knowledge and/as Control
• Back Matter