Margaret B. W. Graham

R&D for industry : a century of technical innovation at Alcoa

Examines both the internal dynamic of the evolution of Alcoa and the impact of such external factors as the nations changing R & D climate. The companys history reveals the special nature of process R & D as well as the problems it poses for research management.

Sustainability and the Scholarly Enterprise: A History of Gutenberg-e

This article analyses the origins, development, and impact of Gutenberg-e, a digital publishing program in historical scholarship sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA), with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Intended as an experiment in developing and legitimizing new modes of historical scholarship, Gutenberg-e quickly evolved, under pressure to become economically sustainable, into a traditional publishing enterprise bent on making books cheaper and paying for itself in the process. Digital technology, which had the power to transform the whole scholarly enterprise, instead became a means to shore up the existing system of scholarly publishing, with all its flaws intact.Though Gutenberg-e has much to teach us about the costs and consequences of that system, especially for the scholars it is meant to serve, it also offers a glimpse of an alternative future. Almost in spite of itself, Gutenberg-e produced a handful of innovative works of digital scholarship, experimented with new forms of scholarly collaboration and community, and highlighted the opportunities of an expanded audience for specialized academic work. These modest achievements suggest the potential of digital technology to create things which scholars value and thereby sustain the scholarly enterprise over the long term.

Intellectual property and the professionals

Intellectual property is a constant in the history of capitalism. It is an institution that exemplifies what William Sewell has called capitalism’s temporality, shape-shifting and interacting with other abstract processes of capitalism even as it remains firmly established at its core. Sewell’s characterization of fashion (as one instantiation of his temporality thesis) applies as well to intellectual property: ‘an important instance of an abstractly constant but ever-expanding and concretely metamorphosing capitalist process, ... part of the assemblage of such processes that, by the early nineteenth century, had locked an abstract capitalist dynamic firmly in place.’ Catherine Fisk’s account of the evolution of intellectual property law offers a partial explanation for how such an important abstraction took concrete form and yet continued to change almost continuously both in rhetoric and reality until it no longer resembled the original concept at all. This commentary takes Catherine Fisk’s account of the shifting relationship between employers and employees around control of intellectual property as a point of departure to examine the role of professionals and intellectual property inside and outside the corporation. Fisk argues that the effect of intellectual property law’s transformation during the course of the nineteenth century was to force inventors into the corporation and to turn them from potential entrepreneurs into employees. For Fisk employees inevitably lacked the upward mobility and the status that independent inventors enjoyed when they controlled their own knowledge work, but as Louis Galambos and others have pointed out in their writings on the ‘organizational synthesis,’ in the twentieth century a regime of large bureaucratic organizations – public and private – organized all spheres of life. Many craftsmen and an increasing number of inventors sought employment inside the corporation even though they had the option to remain outside its walls. They were joined by members of many professions – including accountants, home economists, and technical consultants, and of course the most important for any discussion of intellectual property – engineers, research scientists, and lawyers. In the twentieth century we see the increasing power of these professionals inside and outside the corporation, crisscrossing and interlocking the giant bureaucracies The large bureaucratic hierarchy might be an impersonal place, with less and less value placed on individual achievement as Fisk maintains, but it served certain groups very well. The professionals tried and often proved able to shape and even control the intellectual property regime in their own interests, even as they moved in and out of the giant corporate and governmental bureaucracies, from managerial hierarchy to free market and back again. At first these interests were similar – the corporation needed many kinds of expertise to provide the means for corporations to generate, protect, and exploit their intellectual property. As events – the merger movement, war, recession, depression – unfolded, however, the interests of these different

Sustainability and the Scholarly Enterprise

This article analyses the origins, development, and impact of Gutenberg-e, a digital publishing program in historical scholarship sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA), with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Intended as an experiment in developing and legitimizing new modes of historical scholarship, Gutenberg-e quickly evolved, under pressure to become economically sustainable, into a traditional publishing enterprise bent on making books cheaper and paying for itself in the process. Digital technology, which had the power to transform the whole scholarly enterprise, instead became a means to shore up the existing system of scholarly publishing, with all its flaws intact. Though Gutenberg-e has much to teach us about the costs and consequences of that system, especially for the scholars it is meant to serve, it also offers a glimpse of an alternative future. Almost in spite of itself, Gutenberg-e produced a handful of innovative works of digital scholarship, experimented wi...