THE LITERATURE THAT TREATS entrepreneurial universities and intellectual property focuses almost exclusively on faculty activity. Scholars look either at faculty research that leads to intellectual property, new product development, increases in institutional revenue generation, and concomitant economic development, or at faculty participation in distance education and courseware development that brings revenue to institutions. If administrators are considered, they are usually technology licensing officials (Feldman et al. 2002a). University presidents’ part in the development of an academic capitalist regime has not been extensively treated. Yet presidents are now often called university CEOs, indicating that they have management powers similar to corporate CEOs. Colleges and universities could not engage in academic capitalism without the involvement of university presidents, so we decided to explore how they contribute to market behaviors.
We analyze Internet2 as an instructive instance of administrative academic capitalism. The case has all the elements we need to explore administrative academic capitalism. The Internet2 organization includes presidents from most research universities in the United States, letting us see a large number of presidents involved in the academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime. The purpose of the organization is to span the boundary between nonprofit and for-profit sectors, creating commercial opportunity for both, allowing us to observe administrators’ pursuit of market opportunities. The federal government is also a partner in that the Next Generation Internet Act (1998) works in parallel with Internet2 and provides a good deal of the funding that allows university and corporate leaders to achieve their goals. The federal government participation provides an opportunity to see how the state shapes and subsidizes nonprofit and for-profit markets, engaging in a back-door form of economic planning. Faculty perform the necessary research as well as deploy and test the infrastructure, but they are not the drivers, indeed, are usually not even formal members of Internet2. Graduate students are involved because they participate in the research and development necessary to construct Internet2. Undergraduates are central because elements of their education serve as test beds for many Internet2 products and processes.
Several theories have informed our conceptualization of administrative academic capitalism. They are: knowledge economy theory (Bell 1973; Carnoy 1993; Castells 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000; Cohen 1993; Slaughter and Rhoades 1996) aided and abetted by military/industrial/academic theories (Foreman 1987; Greenberg 1967; Melman 1982; Noble 1976;) and theories that deal with the shifting boundary between private and public sectors (Bollier 2002a, 2002b; Coombe 1998; Heller and Eisenburg 1998; McSherry 2001). Each of these treat aspects of the academic capitalism knowledge/learning regime. Knowledge economy theory considers the larger economic shifts that bring universities to the foreground. Military/industrial/academic theories point to the importance of patterns of market, state, and higher education interaction, whereas theories about shifting boundaries between the private and public sectors analyze the social and political construction of boundaries we take as fixed.
These theories deal with knowledge and research but not as they are embodied in universities and colleges as institutions. Knowledge or information economy theory deals primarily with production processes and labor force changes in the wider economy and does not dwell on universities, even though these are sites central to implementing changes. Yet university laboratories are often where production processes are developed, as in the case of biotechnology, and college and university classrooms are where the labor force is trained. Military/industrial/academic complex theories focus largely on university research that serves the military. In 2001, the federal government’s research budget spent as much on civilian technology as military, which means that the military/industrial/academic complex theories leave half of all research unexplained, nor do these theories deal with education. Boundary theories often examine intellectual property patented by faculty but not the universities that own it. The theory of academic capitalism differs from these theories in that it foregrounds colleges and universities and tries to draw out and expand the implications of these theories for universities and colleges as institutions engaged in undergraduate education as well as graduate education and research.
Internet2: A Case of Administrative Academic Capitalism
Administrative academic capitalism takes a number of forms. The following types are meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. (1) Administrators contract with corporations that franchise (McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, Domino’s, Barnes and Noble) in order to make student services, such as unions and bookstores, “profit centers.” (2) Administrators contract with corporations to ensure universities’ exclusive use of their product—such as soft drinks or athletic gear worn by sports teams. (For example, our university is a Nike/Pepsi university). (3) Administrators develop distance-education initiatives that fall outside the purview of faculty regulation for the express purpose of generating revenue. (4) Administrators engage in planning, contracting, and building infrastructure for economic development of the state, region, nation, or global economy in ways that may secure revenue for the institutions as well as for their corporate partners. Examples of these sorts of activity are the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGEN) in Arizona, in which both the University of Arizona and Arizona State are involved, and Internet2. Faculty and students may have input into these activities, but administrators are the primary actors in creating and developing these forms of academic capitalism.
Although administrative academic capitalism is a phenomenon worth studying as a whole, if only because it is little understood and almost entirely untheorized, we concentrate on the fourth form—administrators’ part in planning, contracting, and building infrastructure for economic development. We see this form as particularly important because in many respects it determines the future of the university. Resource commitments strongly influence faculty hiring, resourcing of curricula, selection of types of students for recruitment and support, state and institutional intellectual property regimes, and perhaps most importantly the boundary between public and private sectors. Although this form of administrative academic capitalism has far-reaching consequences for institutions, usually faculty senate, student government, and alumni leaders are not involved in deliberations about institutional commitment to these endeavors, largely because they are perceived as ancillary by administrators and the university community as a whole.
The case we have selected to illustrate this form of administrative academic capitalism is Internet2. As its website says,
Internet2® is a not-for-profit consortium, led by over 200 US universities, developing and deploying advanced network applications and technology, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. With participation by over 60 leading companies, Internet2 recreates the partnership of academia, industry and government that helped foster today’s Internet in its infancy. . . Close collaboration with Internet2 corporate members will ensure that applications and technologies are rapidly deployed throughout the Internet. Just as email and the World Wide Web are legacies of earlier investments in academic and federal research networks, the legacy of Internet2 will be to expand the possibilities of the broader Internet ... A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector. (www.internet2.edu/html/faqs.html)
The “principals” are presidents of universities, many of which are research universities, and the corporate leaders, who are most often CEOs of telecommunications corporations. The explicit purpose of the consortium is to repeat the success of the earlier partnership among government (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA), universities, and industry that led to the development of a dispersed computer network that made possible e-mail and the World Wide Web, which then became an opportunity structure for a wide variety of forms of e-commerce, not least of which were real-time networks that allowed the development of global financial markets.
Theory and Method
Knowledge economy or new economy theory addresses the shift from an industrial economy in which workers in factories characterized by assembly line production (Fordism) made goods for national consumption to an economy where educated workers in flexible organizations produce goods and services for global consumption. Colleges and universities play a major part in this shift because they serve as milieus of innovation (Castells 1996), creating the research and discovery for the telecommunications infrastructure that undergirds the global knowledge economy and for the products and services that are traded in the global economy. They also serve as milieus of use where people are educated to use technoscience products and processes. Technoscience is at once science and product (Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994; Lyotard 1984; Touraine 1974). Universities, whether through R&D or education and training, are the font of technoscience for postindustrial economies. and play a major role in the construction, dissemination, and use of products and processes such as artificial intelligence, telecommunications, and biotechnology (Sassen 1991; Kevles and Hood 1992). In terms of our case, Internet2, knowledge economy theory points to the importance of universities as milieus of innovation and use for new technologies, specifically, telecommunications infrastructure.
Knowledge economy theorists usually see knowledge and related technology as the driving force in change. We see them as an important force but argue that the state and corporate sectors of society play an important role, particularly in the organization, dissemination, and distribution of new knowledge and technologies. The state, particularly the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) played a major role in creating the telecommunications infrastructure on which the global knowledge economy rests. Indeed, a number of theorists argue that without government, particularly military, investment in telecommunications and artificial intelligence, development of the knowledge economy would not have occurred or would have been much slower (Greenberg 1967; Melman 1982). However, military technology was not necessarily fitted for global civilian markets, and in the 1980s, a split developed among corporate elites over how to subsidize research. A number of business leaders argued that using the military to subsidize research was inefficient, made U.S. products unfit for competitive civilian markets, and was too costly (Slaughter 1990). Business pressure on government created a bipartisan competitiveness coalition in Congress that supported research funding for civilian technology and research (Slaughter and Rhoades 1996). The end of the cold war accelerated this move toward federal support for civilian technology policy. In 2000, for the first time in thirty years, research funding for civilian technology matched that for defense (Slaughter and Rhoades 2003). At the same time, the several states began funding civilian technology, sometimes quite heavily, in an effort to spur economic development (Isserman 1994). In terms of Internet2, military/industrial/academic theory indicates that the state, often leveraged by corporations and universities, is a major player when it comes to changing economic/knowledge regimes. The centrality of the state to economic development and innovations suggests that it is important to attend to the role the state plays with regard to civilian technology.
Elite theory allows us to deal with actors external to the state. At its most rudimentary level, elite theory suggests that persons who head institutions of great wealth and power (corporations, armed services, universities) in society are able to exercise disproportionate influence on politics and policy (Domhoff 1990, 1996; Domhoff and Dye 1987; Useem 1984). However, our understanding of how such power is exercised is contested, sometimes focusing on class as the vehicle through which elites exercise control, other times looking at power elites or an institutional class, and often at positional/managerial authority. Rather than enter those debates, we focus empirically on the network of positional elites who constitute the membership of Internet2, who form an intermediating network, and we try to understand how that network draws together representatives from universities, the corporate sector, and government to build Internet2. We are particularly interested in the dynamic role played by university presidents, who have historically participated in elite policy formation but usually not as the central actors.
Finally, we are interested in theories that deal with the shifting boundaries between the public and private sector: theories about civil society, a (perhaps mythical) space in which the citizenry were free to debate issues of public concern free from the pressures of state or economy; theories about the “commons” that draw on historical accounts of common law claims to community land/space that were essential for sustaining and replenishing society and that are currently applied to the idea of an “intellectual” or knowledge commons (Bollier 2002; Heller and Eisenberg 1998; Slaughter and Rhoades 1996); theories about privatization, deregulation, and commercialization of the public sector. All of these theories recognize that the boundaries between the private (commercial), public (state), and nonprofit sectors are flexible and are currently in a state of flux. These theories turn our attention to how the Internet2 community, which has interests in both free circulation of knowledge and the commercialization of knowledge, draws these boundaries.
The specific questions provoked by the theories we consider in relation to our case are:
1. Who are the leaders of Internet2, how do they work together, and how do they leverage the state for supportive policy and funds?
2. What role do the several branches of the state (including those public universities that are “arms of the state”) play in funding and shaping Internet2, and what consequences does this have for universities?
3. How does Internet2 draw the boundary between public and private sector, given that it has an express intent to commercialize? Specifically, how is public knowledge or “the academic commons” defined, and how is commercial knowledge defined?
4. How does Internet2 shape universities as milieus of knowledge innovation and use?
Our method is qualitative and primarily relies on document analysis. The major source of data is the extensive Internet2 website and the many hyperlinks Internet2 provides to related websites (www.internet2.edu). The Internet2 site itself contains several hundred pages of text; the related hyperlinks provide over a thousand. We answer our first question by looking at membership, minutes, money, and organizational processes. To answer the second question, we look at Internet2 funding and at the mechanisms by which various state agencies and corporations participate. Our third question is answered by analyzing all materials that deal with the intellectual commons, a term used by the Internet2 community, and following all the links that lead from this material. We contrast that with the Internet2 “intellectual property framework,” which establishes rules for commercialization, and follow all the links that lead from that, including examples of ownership and commercialization of specific technoscience products and process developed as a result of Internet2 funding and/or participation. To answer our fourth question, we look for specific research projects and technologies supported by Internet2 to understand the technoscience innovations at issue; we also look at test-bed projects in which the university community is treated as a milieu of use.
Internet2 Leadership
The presidents of thirty-four universities started Internet2 in 1996. They joined together to deal with the problem of congestion on the Internet, which had developed when NSFNET was commercialized in 1995. Commercialization had so clogged the Internet that scientists and engineers had difficulty doing research. The university presidents who came together were by and large the same group that had been involved in the early construction of the Internet (1960–1985) in collaboration with the DOD (ARPANET and the Advanced Projects Research Agency) and a small number of defense contractors. In the first phase of Internet construction (1960–1985), neither privatization, deregulation, nor commercialization had figured in the designers’ plans. The purpose of the early Internet was defense, education, and research (Frischmann 2001). In the second iteration of the Internet, the planners were very clear that one of their purposes was to rapidly diffuse to the commercial world the new technologies developed through Internet2, creating an economic boom like that associated with the dot.coms in the late 1990s. A year later, Internet2 needed a more formal structure and organization. A brief analysis of the initial thirty-four member group of university presidents reveals that they were roughly the same group that was initially involved with the construction of the early internet. In October 1997, the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) was established as a nonprofit corporate base for Internet2, with a membership of eighty-six universities (Van Houweling 2000).
An analysis of the 2002 UCAID board of trustees and council members reveals a slightly different picture. In 2002, UCAID was comprised of fourteen members who serve staggered three-year terms. The board is self-perpetuating, and three new members are selected each year. In 2002, most UCAID members were white male presidents of research I universities. (Two women were added in 2001.) Six are presidents of public universities (North Carolina, Indiana, Texas at El Paso, Illinois at Chicago, Texas at Austin, Wisconsin); four are presidents of private research universities (Northwestern, MIT, University of Southern California, and Princeton). Two UCAID members are not research university presidents. One is head of the Washington Advisory Group, a nonprofit policy organization, and was formerly head of the Council on Competitiveness. The other is president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was formerly a university president.
UCAID works with a series of self-perpetuating councils whose new members are chosen through election. They are the Applications Strategy Council, the Network Policy and Planning Advisory Council, the Network Research Liaison Council, and the Industry Strategy Council. Other than the Industry Strategy Council, which will be discussed below, the majority of the membership on these councils is from universities. In 2002, of the thirty-eight council members, sixteen are professors, almost all in science and engineering, very often in computer-related areas. The one woman on this council is a professor of art and design. Fourteen of the council members are directors of university information technology. Eleven of the directors are in the Network Policy and Planning Advisory Council, which includes three women. Many use the new title CIO (chief information officer) or special designations such as vice-president for scholarly technology, the name of the office at USC. The majority of the professors are on the Network Research Liaison Council, on which there are no women. There are eight nonuniversity members across these three councils, most of whom represent nonprofit organizations concerned with information technology as well as hybrids such as Educause, which, like Internet2 crosses the boundary between private and public sectors. Three members represent private firms, one of which is Cisco Systems. The several councils’ membership represents twenty-four public and five private universities.
The Industry Strategy Council is the group through which UCAID relates to its corporate partners. There are twelve members, three of whom are from public universities: a professor from the University of Michigan, a vice-provost for information at Penn State, and a vice-chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The corporate members are from Qwest, NASDAQ, WorldCom, Packet Design, Evans Telecommunications, Sun Microsystems, Diamondhead Ventures, Nortel, Palm, IBM, Lucent Technologies, and Microsoft Research. Among the corporate members are a director, a vice-chairman, and three vice-presidents, all in areas related to information technology; three presidents and CEOs; a managing director; two division presidents, both related to research; and a program director. Three members are women, two from the corporate world, one from the university. The top leadership in Internet2, as represented by UCAID and the Industry Strategy Council, clearly represent elite institutions.
There were eighty-six charter university members, fifty-nine public, twenty-seven private. In the initial years of Internet2, these universities had to put up about $500,000 each, in part to pay for the construction of Abilene, the GSI (Government Services, Inc.) very high-speed network overseen by UCAID. Almost all of these members were NSF High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) awardees as of September 1998. Their HPCC awards paid part of the costs, particularly for construction of and connection to Abilene. After the initial contributions, the universities pay about $110,000 annually, in part for access to Abilene. Corporate members, partners, sponsors, and affiliates also contributed but not as much. Corporate members have promised about $20 million over three years, while UCAID universities have paid about $50 million per year. These same corporations are often involved in constructing the infrastructure for Internet2/GSI. For example, Qwest, Cisco Systems, and Nortel (Internet2 corporate partners, each of whom committed to contribute $1 million dollars or more) secured contracts to develop and build the network (Dugan and Trump 1999).
In Internet2/UCAID, we see university presidents from both public and nonprofit sectors act as planners of an Internet that has both nonprofit and for-profit dimensions. The case is interesting in several regards. A number of university presidents can be considered state actors, in that they are heads of primarily state-funded organizations, if we consider their federal research funds, student aid monies, and state block grants. The other university presidents are not heads of state organizations, although they too have federal research funds and student aid monies, often from both state and federal government; they are considered heads of nonprofit organizations. In our current neoliberal political climate, the obvious explanation is that Internet2 is a case of market failure, in which government intervention is justified. “When an investment involves sufficiently high fixed costs, government intervention (subsidization) may be necessary because market actors will under-invest due to capital constraints, free-riding, and attenuated time horizons for investment recovery” (Frischmann 2001, p. 11). However, this is not an instance of government intervention into a market, but, as Frischmann points out, of “market intervention into government.” Her point is that the Internet was originally construed as serving public good functions (defense and education) of government, not as a commercial endeavor that needed government support due to underinvestment by business. For the market failure argument to work, the Internet would have had to have been initiated by commercial entities, like power companies, and then subsidized by government when the commercial endeavor failed and there were public good issues (e.g., energy, transportation) at stake. The case of Internet2 is not a case of market failure but of privatization.
Neo-Marxians offer alternative explanations. It is possible to see the university presidents in Internet2/UCAID as state or quasi-state actors, in an Althussarian sense, organizing the economy for the corporate sector. However, the presidents are not the usual suspects (politicians and state bureaucrats). Instead, the presidents are actors from a segment of the state not usually involved in forward economic planning. Perhaps universities have become so central to a knowledge economy that their presidents believe they must act as forward planners.
It is also possible to think of the presidents and universities in a Gramscian sense, as being part of a segmented state. Gramsci (1971) did not see the state as monolithic but as composed of different segments, often having separate in terests. The separate state interests could align with other segments of the state and various outside actors to shape policy. However, only the public university presidents can be thought of as heads of organizations that are “arms of the state;” the private universities are nonprofits and do not fit neatly into Gramscian theory.
Perhaps Internet2/UCAID is best conceptualized as an intermediating organization, linking together segments of state agencies, universities, and corporations to construct a network that spans the three types of organizations and performs functions that each would have difficulty doing by itself. Intermediating organizations such as Internet2/UCAID may be particularly important to the academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime because they provide ways to cross public/private, nonprofit/for-profit boundaries. Internet2/UCAID is different from many other intermediating organizations in that the presidents of universities are the leaders, rather than state officials or corporate executives.
UCAID uses a railroad metaphor to describe Abilene, the high-performance network it developed and paid for in partnership with Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Nortel Networks, Qwest Communications, and Indiana University: “The Abilene Project is named after a railhead established in Abilene, Kansas during the 1860’s. In its time the ambitious railhead of the 1800’s staked a claim on what was then the frontier of the United States; the Abilene Project establishes a foothold from which to explore and develop pioneering network technology. The links of last century’s railway changed the way people worked and lived. The Abilene Project is transforming the work of research and educators today” (www.internet2.edu/abilene/html/faq-general.html).
In this metaphor, UCAID does not mention the federal government, which supplied the railroad with public lands that subsidized the costs of building a national transportation infrastructure, in much the same way that the DOD granted universities funds to do research which subsidized a Keynesian welfare/warfare state. Instead, UCAID likens itself to a private agent, the railroads, equating itself with the commercial rather than the government aspect of the venture. In other words, UCAID claims properties associated with private, forprofit activity in networking the nation. The railroad metaphor is an interesting choice. Railroads were made possible by generous grants of federal lands to railroad companies for develop of transportation in the West. Once railroads were established, cut-throat, free market-competition was so intense and counterproductive that many railroads failed, and the federal government had to intervene in the form of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate rates and administer profit (Kolko 1963). The UCAID identification of Abilene with pioneering capitalist activity stresses the movement of university presidents from selected engagement in the economy, usually in roles that focused on their research and technology knowledge, to a broad engagement as members of an intermediating network, who play a part in organizing and producing the information economy.
As members of the knowledge barons’ network, university presidents use their institutional funds (which are no longer “purely” public in that many universities now have commercial streams of income from royalties and licenses, equity holdings, and other profit-making activities in which administrators and faculty engage) to invest in Internet2. For example, Abilene is paid for by the universities and corporate partners, not by the federal government. (Of course, the universities would not be able to make such investments were they not able to use “discretionary” federal and state funds, as well as their tax-free status, to “accumulate” “surplus” monies for such investments, again pointing to the difficulty with categories like private and public.) As noted above, UCAID pays roughly two-thirds of the costs, corporations one-third. Yet UCAID is also able to “leverage” federal funds, primarily through the NSF and the Next Generation Internet.
Role of the State
Our general argument with regard to the state is that the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are to the knowledge economy what the Department of Defense was to the defense economy. The DOD was integral to creating and managing the Keynesian welfare-warfare state initiated after World War II (Melman 1982). We see the NSF and the NIH as creating and managing the privatized/commercialized state that is developing in the twenty-first century. The NSF is central to the telecommunications and information technology industries and the NIH to biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. In this chapter, we concentrate on the NSF and telecommunications and information technology.
The DOD initiated the Internet when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) created ARPANET, which connected four sites: the Stanford Research Institute, two University of California campuses (UCLA and UCSB), and the University of Utah (www.wpi.edu/Admin/IT/Internet2/history.html). But the DOD “recognized a potential conflict between its primary mission of military defense and the network externalities of a broader network base” (Frischmann 2001). The DOD split ARPANET in two. One network, known as MILNET, was used to link military sites in the United States, and the other, named ARPANET, continued to be used for research (Kahn 1995).
The NSF gradually took over from ARPA, began to manage and coordinate among academic and government networks, “and became the central funding and decision-making agency for interconnecting networks” (Frischmann 2001). The turning point came in the early 1990s, when the NSF moved toward two new and related policies concerning “commercialization and privatization. Under commercialization, the mission of the Internet was broadened from its initial focus on supporting research, education, and defense to include commercial ...activity. At the same time, privatization shifted responsibility for the design, implantation, operation, and funding of the Internet from the Federal government to the private sector” (Chinoy and Salo 2002).
Because the Internet was congested with traffic in the early 1990s, the NSF built NSFNET in a cooperative agreement with a nonprofit organization, Merit. Merit became the interconnection backbone for the early Internet, which was still primarily focused on promoting collaboration among researchers. The cooperative agreement with Merit opened a window to new arrangements. The NSF had previously worked under government procurement; under cooperative agreements, it had the ability to enter flexible, contractual relationships with corporations and maintain an active role in organizing the rapidly evolving Internet. When the cooperative partners became private corporations, the NSF was also able to leverage (some) private funds, which perhaps seemed enough, compared to no private funds. MCI built the next backbone as a cooperative partner with NSF, and many of the technologies that were part of the Internet came from industrial partners, “such as IBM mainframes and workstations and MCI’s digital cross-connect system” (Frischmann 2001). Because the Internet was still governed by an acceptable use policy that allowed information flows only for education and research, the NSF organized a joint venture between commercial backbone operators through Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) that was financed by corporate partners and became a commercial version of the Internet. Pursuing privatization, the NSF then managed the transfer of its backbone, including finance and management, to industry. The transfer was completed in 1995.
However, the commercial network quickly became so congested that academic researchers, accustomed to a network that served only education and research purposes, found it inadequate. Enter Internet2 and UCAID, which deliberately leveraged the federal government through various NSF computing programs and the Next Generation Internet (NGI). These initiatives overlapped and fed on each other.
After privatizing its backbone, the National Science Foundation continued to play an organizational and management role in Internet2 and the NGI. The NSF’s vBNS (very high speed backbone network) served as Internet2’s national interconnect. The NSF also has a variety of programs through its Advanced Networking Program that allows Internet2 member organizations to connect to the vBNS (www.educause.edu/pub/er/review/reviewArticles/33316.html). Although the NSF is one of many agencies involved in the National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development, it has taken the lead with regard to civilian technology and, particularly, commercialization. For example, the NSF Supercomputer Centers have “extensive industry involvement” in “partnership and affiliate relationships, cooperative efforts in technology development” (National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development 2002).
The NSF is deeply involved with the Next Generation Internet (NGI). The NGI Research Act of 1998 authorized “the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (the supporting agencies) to support the Next Generation Internet (Program).” Included among the program objectives were “(1) increasing Internet capabilities and improving Internet performance; (2) developing an advanced test bed network connecting research sites; and (3) developing advanced Internet applications that meet national goals and agency mission needs” (Next Generation Internet Initiative 1998). The NSF had the position of lead agency among the non-defense research mission agencies.
The Next Generation Internet Research Act of 1998 does the following:
(1) authorize(s) research programs related to high-end computing and computation, human-centered systems, high confidence systems, and education, training, and human resources; and (2) provide(s) for the development and coordination of a comprehensive and integrated U.S. research program which will focus on a computer network infrastructure that promotes interoperability among advanced Federal computer networks, high-speed data access that is economical and that does not impose a geographic penalty, and flexible and extensible networking technology. Amends the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 to include among its purposes: (1) promoting the more rapid development and wider distribution of networking management and development tools; and (2) promoting the rapid adoption of open network standards. (Next Generation Internet Initiative 1998)
In other words, the NGI does for the federal government what UCAID proposes to do for colleges, universities, and the commercial Internet.
In UCAID’s words, “the university-led Internet2 and the federally-led NGI are parallel and complementary initiatives based in the United States.” UCAID points out that Internet2 and NGI work together in many areas. For example, “through participation in a NSF NGI program, over 150 Internet2 universities have received competitively awarded grants to support connections to advanced backbone networks.” The aim of joint work is to “ensure a cohesive and interoperable advanced networking infrastructure for research and education, and the continued interoperability of the global Internet” (Internet2.2002).
Internet2/UCAID is able to leverage the NSF and NGI programs because its aims coincide with theirs. Like the NSF, Internet2/UCAID is concerned with privatization and commercialization. In most cases, Internet2/UCAID university presidents have long-established ties with the NSF, which facilitates cooperation. So too, NGI, whether under Clinton or the elder or younger Bush, has pursued many of the same goals as the NSF and Internet2/UCAID. All three groups are intent on building the information infrastructure, management tools, and quality of service standards that will promote global markets, which they present as having both commercial and educational dimensions.
The NSF has shifted from procurement to cooperative arrangements with telecommunications corporations in an effort to defray the costs of building Internet infrastructure. Although exact figures on what corporations contribute are difficult to find, none of the figures we have located thus far suggest that corporations pay more than about one-quarter of the costs. These figures raise a number of interesting accounting problems. Is a cooperative one-quarter (or less) of costs better than a procurement relationship? Is some contribution from corporations better than none? How much leverage do corporations buy through their cooperative arrangement? As we have seen, the hardware, software, and design interests of cooperative partners were incorporated in the design of the vBNS and Super Computers.
Internet2 has adapted many of the same practices as the NSF, leveraging the state and the private sector. Internet2 depends on the NSF for connectivity, backbone, and research grants and treats the NGI as a “parallel and complementary” initiative that provides funds, personnel, research opportunities, and some design leadership. Internet2, the NSF, and the NGI share a constant flow of leaders and especially researchers, who weave together the several organizations’ efforts to build a global information superhighway, dominated by the United States. Internet2’s niche in this initiative seems to be in research and design for the short term (three to six years out) and milieus of use, particularly as test beds. There is some irony in Internt2 holding this niche, in that this was the niche university presidents in the late 1980s described as appropriate for corporations (Office of the Vice President for Research 1996).
Although UCAID has been able to leverage state and corporate monies, Internet2 nonetheless represents a large commitment of institutional funds to building telecommunications infrastructure. Internet2 built Abilene as its own backbone. Even though corporations and the NSF contributed, the institutions spent considerable sums. Regardless of the exact figures and the complicated ratios of state/corporation/institutional contributions, universities committed these funds as an investment in the future, which means other investments cannot be made. UCAID committed universities to building and testing the global information superhighway in partnerships with corporations and a variety of state agencies that direct universities toward a high-tech, privatized, commercialized future appropriate for an academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime.
The Intellectual Property Framework
“Internet2’s goal is to maximize the no or low cost availability of deliverables to the Internet2 membership while permitting project participants to retain ownership and control of the intellectual property they develop in the course of an Internet2 project” (Internet2 2002a).
As noted above, an explicit purpose of Internet2 is commercialization. Internet2’s founders seek to repeat the success of the earlier alliance between the DOD, universities, and corporations, particularly the dot.coms that flourished in the mid- to late-1990s after the NSF privatized its backbone. However, the founders, and later UCAID, want to reach this goal more rapidly than did the earlier DOD-sponsored Internet, and to more deliberately steer the project toward commercial outcomes, as their cooperative arrangements with corporate partners suggests.
The three major initiatives undertaken by Internet2 were middleware, quality of service, and bandwidth. These were essential to commercial users. The middleware initiative focused heavily on security, without which e-commerce and financial markets could not operate. Improving quality of service focused on upgrading the quality and interoperability of video conferencing, teleimmersion, digital sound, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and personal computers (PCs), all of which were necessary for expanding cyberspace commercial products and processes, patented and copyrighted. Increasing bandwidth meant increasing the amount and kinds of data that can be handled on the Internet, which is very important for commercial ventures that make software programs with ever-expanding capacity. These three initiatives were planned to result in “deliverables” that ranged from academic papers to intellectual property.
While these initiatives—middleware, quality of service, increased bandwidth—also benefited universities, they were not necessarily crucial to education and research, the telecommunications aspects of which could have been conducted as extra-net activities confined to universities and colleges on a much smaller scale than Internet2. As it stands, the majority of the Internet2 university community does not have access to Abilene or Internet2 projects; these are still reserved for a very small number of researchers. The products and processes resulting from Internet2 may well be commercially available to most students before they are available on campuses, unless a particular campus serves as a test bed.
Internet2 has an elaborate intellectual property framework that deals with ownership of the fruits of collaboration among the cooperative partners. It runs for fourteen pages and presents principles, processes, sample agreements, answers to frequently asked questions, methods, and examples. The principles cover intellectual property developed by Internet2 projects and initiatives. The principles are as follows:
1. Maintain and contribute to the accessible, standards-based character of the Internet, and promote appropriate, flexible, and easily administered open source arrangements.
2. Where open source or royalty-free arrangements are unworkable, encourage members to make intellectual property developed as part of an Internet2 effort available to UCAID and members of the Internet2 community. Terms and conditions should promote further innovation and reflect the contributions of the community and its members to the development of that intellectual property.
3. Encourage the broadest possible distribution of the technology.
4. Encourage rapid deployment of the technology. (Internet2 2002e)
Nowhere do the principles suggest that there should be an intellectual commons rather than intellectual property. An “accessible, standards-based” Internet is ownable and more valuable because it is accessible. Open source arrangements mean that members are able to modify and innovate with software, not that the software cannot be owned. In the principles and elsewhere, Internet2 says open source and royalty-free arrangements (which do not mean that intellectual property is not owned, only that Internet2 members are not charged for it) are preferred. However, like the rest of the document, the principles mostly address what members should do when open source or royalty-free arrangements are “unworkable,” rather than suggesting ways in which such arrangements can be expanded. Instead, they suggest that ownership should promote innovation (ironically, something that ownership often impedes) and reflect the contributions of the community, which means that member universities as well as their corporate partners should derive revenue from intellectual property. Rapid distribution and rapid deployment mean rapid returns to monetary and human capital investments.
The process section of the intellectual property framework stresses the importance of up-front agreement on intellectual property and of disclosure. Internet2 suggests that “project participants should agree on the intellectual property approach to be taken before commencing work” (Internet2 2002e). Internet2 asks participants, often universities partnering with corporations, to disclose in writing any knowledge of intellectual property claims that may be infringed by the groups’ work, and stresses that the obligation to disclose is ongoing. This request seems aimed at faculty to ensure that universities capture intellectual property. In these partnerships, faculty are usually the experts and innovators, developing new technoscience and software. Should they chose to withhold potentially alienable discoveries, either to put them in the public domain or to later patent and form their own companies, neither institution nor corporation would benefit, impairing cooperative arrangements and causing the loss of revenues and/or profits. (Chapters 3 and 5 explain the importance of disclosure to institutional intellectual property holding. Several universities have vigorously prosecuted students and faculty who did not disclose and instead attempted to exploit their discoveries on their own.)
Internet2’s methods of handling intellectual property are: open source, freeware/shareware, discounted commercial licenses, and public domain. In open source, the property remains that of the creator, but is “licensed to anyone who wants to use it for free, and the source code is included.” In freeware/shareware, “one or more of the participating organizations retains ownership of the deliverable, and distributes it for free (freeware) or for a fee after use (shareware) to all, with or without the source code.” A discounted commercial license lets the participating “organizations retain rights to the deliverable, and makes it available to Internet2 Regular Members under very favorable terms, but without source code” or “the rights to modify and use it” (Internet2. Intellectual Property Framework 2002). In each of these instances, faculty cede intellectual property to universities and/or corporations through Internet2. Inclusion of source code allows continued innovation within the Internet2 community, building on the synergy derived from collaborative research. Discounted commercial licenses allow the Internet2 community to use at a low cost products and processes that are very likely ready for the commercial market. However, given that universities probably contributed to the development of the property, it is not clear how much “business” sense this makes.
As Internet2 notes: “Outside the Internet2 Regular Membership, the owner is free to market the deliverable without restriction” (Internet2. Intellectual Property Framework 2002). This includes university and corporate owners, who partner in developing products and processes, and is the heart of the Internet2 intellectual property framework. Within the Internet2 community, partners, whether universities and/or corporations, receive shares in intellectual property according to their contributions. (Unfortunately, the details of these arrangements are not clarified by the examples offered on the website). Presumably universities and corporations will sign up-front agreements defining what percentage of the property is owned by whom. The property is shared within the community to facilitate innovation, but it is also sold to those outside Internet2, presumably generating profits and revenue streams for the corporate and university partners.
Internet2 recommends that creators of the “deliverable” do not place it in the public domain so that they do not lose control over who uses it and how it is used. This is a curious recommendation, in that were the creators to place a discovery in the public domain, they would expect it to be freely used in a variety of ways. LINUX provides an example of public domain Internet deliverables. Perhaps what Internet2 means is that public domain precludes ownership, the position from which control and use is exercised.
Generally, the intellectual property framework seems to close the space in which knowledge can move freely, as exemplified by rejecting public domain as a concept for handling intellectual property. The framework then fences off an area—the Internet2 community—in which knowledge can move freely among paying members, some of which are corporations. Within this administratively created space, university and corporate leaders seek to capture the innovative energy, intellectual ability, and managerial panache of the faculty. If faculty are allowed to operate freely in this space, then perhaps they will create (ownable) things such as LINUX, the alternative operating system to Microsoft, that continues to be modified, managed, and updated by faculty and other computer devotees, and is still distributed free of charge. Unlike LINUX and the many programs created by the free and open software movement in which many computer scientists participated in the early days of the ARPA-defense industry-university partnership, knowledge circulates freely only within the Internet2 community. Although this community may be a deliberate attempt by CIOs and CEOs to recreate the milieus of innovation that stimulated the rapid development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, Internet2 closely bounds the free space, and intends to privatize and commercialize when a deliverable emerges.
The corporate partners who participate in the intellectual property framework gain a great deal. They share in the innovative space created by university administrators. They are able to make better calculations about the future of technoscience and software; to build their equipment and standards into projects, ensuring future markets; to use universities as test beds for jointly developed projects; and to own and commercialize intellectual property that emerges from specified projects. Informally, they are also able to recruit highly talented employees from faculty and graduate students with whom they work on projects. They are also able to develop projects with faculty independently of Internet2, as long as they do not use Abilene or other Internet2 resources. Although the partners in the intellectual property framework are supposed to receive rewards in relation to their contributions, it is not clear how contributions are measured. If corporations are able to leverage their hold on intellectual property in the same way that they have leveraged their monetary contributions to Internet2, they receive a good deal.
Universities too gain a great deal from the intellectual property framework. They are able to build on the synergy created by the Internet2 community to build the university of the future, each reducing their costs through partnerships with others. By sharing the community with paying corporate partners, they are able to access funds that would otherwise not be available to them. Corporations often donate and share equipment, again contributing to the community. (Whether these funds “reduce costs” is a debatable point when the investments and maintenance costs for hardware and software are considered.) At this point, we cannot be sure about who benefits most from the intellectual property agreements, universities or corporations, because it is too early to know. University leaders are seeking to recoup the costs of building the information infrastructure of the future through Internet2. However, as the intellectual property framework makes clear, they seek to go beyond recovering costs—through ownership of innovative deliverables, universities privatize and commercialize research and educational work and become market actors.
The Intellectual Commons as Test-bed
When we planned the methods for this chapter, we thought we would contrast the intellectual property framework with the Internet2 Commons project. The language of the “commons” (Heller and Eisenberg 1998; Bollier 2002a) suggested a contrast to the marketplace. According to Bollier, the idea of the intellectual commons captures “the social ‘gift economy’ that has been such a productive engine of academic knowledge. The gift economy is a system by which members of a distinct community, joined through shared values and commitments create valuable artifacts and services for each other without using money, legal contracts, or other market mechanisms” (2002a). Although the academic gift economy that characterized nonmilitary U.S. research culture is being eroded by the academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime, we thought that the Internet2 Commons would be an effort to preserve a free space within the more broadly privatized and commercialized Internet2 community. Instead, we discovered that the Internet2 Commons was a test bed, in which many universities tested telecommunications companies’ infrastructure technologies.
We did not understand immediately that the Internet2 Commons was a test bed because the “commons” language connotes nonmarket activity. The Internet2 Commons was presented in such a way that its commercial component was not immediately obvious. It was portrayed as “a large-Scale, Distributed Collaborative Environment for the Research and Education Community.” Videoconferencing technologies were foregrounded—H.323, VRVS, AG, MPEG2, and others—along with other collaborative technologies such as data sharing, instant messaging, voice/IP, electronic notebooks, peer to peer, and collaboratories (Internet2 2002f). ViDe, Accord, and RADvision were named, but their status as corporations traded on public stock exchanges was not mentioned, nor were the immediately recognizable Cisco and Microsoft named, although they were also partners. Initially, the website told us that Internet2 and ViDe had formed a partnership to provide the “best effort of service.” Pages later, when we discovered the goal was to begin at a “best effort” level of service and move to a “production” level of service, we began to realize that the Internet2 Commons was a test bed.
The corporate partners were first introduced through the Internet Commons Network Infrastructure hyperlink. A graphic appeared that showed Abilene, the Internet2 backbone, in the form of a cloud, floating above the Commons infrastructure. The infrastructure was provided by Cisco (router and switch), RAD vision (MCUs, gateways), Accord (MGC), Starbek (Torrent CES), and APC (master switch and power switch). The infrastructure providers were not labeled as private, although all but Starbek (including ViDe, aka Video Display Corporation) were publicly traded corporations, almost all in the telecommunications industry. The financial arrangements between the infrastructure and the Internet2 Commons project were never clearly described. We did not find the word test bed used until we pressed the ViDe hyperlink, at which point we were given the background to the project. “ViDeNet was formed by ViDe, the Video Development Initiative, to be a test bed and model network, in which to develop and promote ViDe’s goals for multi-organizational, multi-location highly scalable and robust networked video technologies.” ViDe was short for Video Display Corporation, which manufactures and distributes cathode-ray tubes and related parts for the replacement market. Its components go into televisions, computer monitors, data display screens, medical equipment, and military displays, and it is a very acquisitive corporation (Hoover 2002).
The Internet2 Commons White Paper most clearly outlined the scope of the project.
The Internet2 Digital Video group (I2DV) recognizes the importance of video conferencing over Internet2 and is undertaking the task of promoting discourse and information-sharing targeted towards the realization of an international scale IP-based digital video conferencing capability. . . As an Internet 2 working group, the I2DV shares a goal of “bringing together member technical issues to enable advanced applications for higher education’s research and education missions”. Implicit in this goal is the need to consider how to develop and improve new IP-based technologies (developing the capability) but also the need to foster and support new applications for these technologies (delivering a service). The former requires research, innovation, test-beds, and vendor/developer partnerships. The latter requires delivering new functionality in such a way that it is reliable enough for the intended end-users to envision themselves using it, and to be successful in that use. For the national and international environment that is being discussed here, several key technical issues will need to be addressed at both the R&D and service levels. These include:
• a global dialing plan
• a global directory service
• a scheduling mechanism for the use of shared resources
• improvements and coordination in “back room” equipment functionality and con trol, and
• interoperability with other significant communication services (gateways). (Internet2 2002b, italics ours)
The Internet2 Commons project was not about a gift economy; it was about a market economy. The universities that participated were serving as a test bed for the telecommunications infrastructure of their corporate partners: Video Display Corporation, RADvision, Microsoft, Cisco, Starbek, and others.
Universities as test beds serve as milieus of innovation and of use. As milieus of innovation, they provide research, contributing to hardware and software innovation. They directly and indirectly leverage federal funds for the project through the NSF and other mission agencies by using expertise and knowledge faculty have developed on other federally funded research projects. The university researchers are also expected to provide peer support for the technology, which means that they use their expertise to work out the glitches without turning to their corporate sponsors for support. When universities serve as milieus of use, researchers and site coordinators (who can also be researchers) deploy the telecommunications on their campus to ensure that “intended endusers” will be instructed and supported until they are able to work happily with the telecommunications technology. The universities’ faculty and students, not necessarily involved in or aware of the Internet2 Commons, are guinea pigs for the technology. The campus environment provides a test bed unlike any other in that scientist and engineers contribute their innovative expertise to deploy and support these technologies; faculty and students serve as intelligent users and are also the ideal future consumers for such products, processes, and services.
The global and interoperable scope of the project is breathtaking. Currently, it includes fifty-two universities (most of them in the United States and all necessarily members of Internet2, unless sponsored by an Internet2 university), eight organizations the status of which is unclear (i.e., MOREnet, Advanced Network & Services), and Ford Motor Company. The financial arrangements are not detailed, so at this point we are not sure whether the universities are paying all or part of the costs of deploying the infrastructure or whether the infrastructure is donated by corporations in return for using the universities as test beds. Although Internet2 urges that intellectual property rights be settled at the beginning of all projects, the way the framework works for the Internet2 Commons project is not included on the website.
Regardless of how the funds go, the Internet2 commons is a prime example of administrative academic capitalism. The UCAID leadership has designed a global project that seeks to make use of all the creative properties of the academic commons, drawing on the innovative skills of academic researchers; their willingness to exchange information freely and improve the products, processes, and services they work on without expecting recompense; and their commitment to peer support. However, the intermediating network has “enclosed” this commons because the infrastructure is private. The corporations that participate will greatly improve their technologies by deploying them in universities, which serve as milieus of innovation and use, and they will not have to pay for these improvements or tests. The technologies and related services will be sold commercially, and the corporations will reap profits, while it is not clear what universities receive in return—perhaps royalties. Although the Internet2 Commons site speaks to the architecture of the technology involved, it does not address how this is simultaneously an architecture of control, committing universities to particular types of technology, enlisting faculty to participate in them, training graduate students to work with them, and undergraduate students to use them.
Conclusion
Given the way knowledge production is structured in the United States, universities were poised to play a major role in the knowledge economy because of their generation of (federally funded) research. Indeed, the knowledge economy was in large part the product of the historic relation among the DOD, universities, and defense contractors. In an effort to protect DOD command central from attack and destruction by invaders, the DOD hit upon the notion of dispersing information to numerous sites, thereby laying the foundation for the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the knowledge economy.
Faculty and administrators exuberantly created computers and telecommunications, far exceeding the bounds of DOD requirements. As the possibilities of the Internet appeared, universities not hooked to ARPANET were able to connect themselves, expanding the potential of telecommunications much more rapidly than bureaucracies or policies intended. Hackers and geeks experimented wildly and freely shared their products and software with anyone who wanted them.
However, as noted in chapter 2, federal policy powerfully structured the U.S. knowledge economy. In the 1980s and 1990s, a bipartisan congressional coalition legislated the privatization and commercialization of federal research. Although the coalition was bipartisan, it was political. The coalition drew together Democrats and Republicans who worked with the business class (Useem 1984) to develop neoliberal policies that fostered privatization, deregulation, and commercialization under state auspices and with state support. The business class in the United States had decided that civilian technology was as important as defense and acted to establish funding and opportunity for corporate activity in a global economy. This necessitated (but perhaps unintentionally) a knowledge economy because a global economy could not operate without a telecommunications infrastructure that made possible real-time trading and vastly increased numbers of traders. As technological discoveries, often university based, interacted with the creation of a global economy, the knowledge economy emerged, sharpening corporate leaders’ interest in restructuring intellectual property so that increasing amounts and types of knowledge were alienable, privatizable, and commercializable. Universities’ interest in privatization and commercialization was cemented with the Bayh-Dole Act (1980). By the time the DMCA was legislated, universities were committed to a neoliberal intellectual property regime that featured privatization and commercialization.
As has historically been the case in the United States, the bureaucratic arms of the federal and several states (quasi) independently played an important role in creating the knowledge economy. The NIH began to expand rapidly in the 1970s, contributing to the growth of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. The NSF greatly expanded its role when the cold war ended, providing that agency with unprecedented opportunity. During the cold war, the NSF was often spoken about as the balance wheel among the federal research agencies, ensuring that national needs were met. In practice, the NSF received much less funding and had much less research scope than the constellation of defense-related mission agencies (DOD/DOE/NASA). When the Berlin Wall was precipitously torn down, the NSF had room to expand. It had already begun developing initiatives that involved privatization, commercialization, and deregulation, particularly in engineering.
The NSF and NIH became to the knowledge economy what the DOD was to the cold war economy. The NSF was not forced to move away from a “basic” science mission to an entrepreneurial mission. Rather, its leaders helped to create neoliberal ideas that emphasized the importance of civilian technology and saw privatization and commercialization as vehicles for rapid dispersion of these ideas. For example, Erich Bloch, former head of the NSF, became head of the Council on Competitiveness, a private policy group that advocated neoliberal competitiveness policies, and is now head of another think tank, the Washington Advisory Group, which is an Internet2 member. As we have recounted, the NSF created the backbone for the commercial Internet, privatized it, and is now in the process of organizing its next iteration, which is explicitly geared to commercialization. The NSF uses its resources for building the infrastructure for the knowledge economy, grants resources to universities, and mobilizes other agencies, currently through the NGI, to put their resources into telecommunications infrastructure. Privatization and commercialization are made possible by continued state subsidy.
The emergence of the knowledge economy made university presidents, who headed institutions that created knowledge, more important actors than they previously had been. Historically, some presidents, particularly physicists after the cold war, connected universities, the defense state, and defense contractors to the economy. However, the defense economy was directed primarily toward military security. Economic development was a by-product, not an end. Research related to defense was often classified and performed in special laboratories. With notable exceptions, such as the first successful experiment with the atomic bomb at the University of Chicago, the technology was not used on campuses and not used by the majority of faculty and students. In contrast, the knowledge economy eventually involved most members of the university community.
The rapid development of technology, combined with neoliberal policies of privatization and commercialization, heavily subsidized by the state and federal governments, created an opportunity for presidents of research universities to become administrative academic capitalists. The niche they occupied was forward planning in research, innovation, deployment, and testing of infrastructure, products, processes, and services for the knowledge economy. However, they chose not to do this as a public service, as universities historically had, as illustrated by land-grant universities and agricultural experiment stations. Instead, the presidents in Internet2 shared neoliberal ideology with their counterparts in government and business, and chose to develop the knowledge economy as a privatized and commercialized enterprise in which they participated and in whose revenue streams their institutions shared. There is scant evidence that they considered alternatives, although alternatives were available, given LINUX and the free software movement. Although all of the groups discussed—corporate leaders, political leaders, state agency leaders—contributed to the development of the knowledge economy, university presidents occupied a quasi-independent niche as administrative academic capitalists who created, managed, tested, and deployed the new technologies.
Administrative academic capitalists are part of different networks than are the faculty academic capitalists and the offices that directly support them. (However, support offices such as technology transfer and intellectual property also have lives of their own, independent from the faculty they support, and they contribute heavily to the development of academic capitalism through their national networks.) Administrative academic capitalists often operate through intermediating networks—for example, Educause, Internet2, and the League for Innovation. State and regional examples abound, as manifested in networks of economic development officers. These networks are separate from but related to faculty entrepreneurial networks. The distinction between the two types of networks is more than academic. Administrative academic capitalists speak for the institution as a whole and are able, partly by virtue of their external functions and invocation of connections to the economy, to make policies that affect everyone in the university communities.
Generally, we think our Internet2 case—and particularly the account of the intellectual property framework and the Internet2 Commons—suggests that the boundary between the public and the private sectors is no longer well defined. The categories of public and private no longer work well in a number of cases, particularly those that involve public/private partnerships (a phrase that in and of itself suggests erosion of the categories). Yet most theories of the state, whether pluralist or Marxian, depend upon a clear boundary between public and private. Nor do market theories replace state theories because the markets we have discussed depend on continued and substantial state subsidy.
We suggest a somewhat different interpretation. The labels public and private (which were always socially constructed categories) no longer serve to distinguish between the commercial (private) economy and the public (noncommercial) sector. Historically, the private sector has always benefited heavily from state subsidy. Indeed, many high technology oligopolistic corporations (nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, electronics) achieved their economic positions through various forms of federal subsidy. However, putatively public institutions taking on commercial functions is new. If important segments of the private sector were historically subsidized by the state, and if segments of the state that have important connections to the economy now engage in commercial activity, then the categories lose their edge, and we need to think of new theories and categories to address these developments.