Conclusion
“With the growth of capitalism came the bestowing of special monopolies, first to the chartered companies, and then to the owners of special patents granted for specific original inventions. This was proposed by Bacon in 1601 and happened first in England in 1624. From this time on, it was not the past heritage that was effectively monopolized but the new departure from it” (Lewis Mumford [MUM 46]).
A chief observation that emerges from this book is that there is a greater socialization of the general production of knowledge capital, particularly within companies. Sources of knowledge are distributed more globally than they were a few decades ago. They are also more easily accessible, in particular due to the advancement and enormous uptake of information and communication technologies. Companies – the largest ones in particular – have forged global networks for the production and dissemination of knowledge. However, this greater distribution of knowledge sources faces contradictory forces that are reflected in the appropriation strategies being deployed by the richest firms and nations in terms of knowledge sources and the value produced.
At the companies’ level, this contradiction, which is not new, but which is accentuated, can largely be explained by the constraints they face. These are of a short-term nature, for example, the saturation of markets in Western countries, repeated crises and so on, but are explained by more structural elements. The financial ...