, IP in the Australian tertiary sector
>currently involves a number of factors which are not reducible to
>maximising profit from the IP-as-commodity. The network of influence
>between governments, policies (both cacmpaign and otherwise),
>insitutions, and enterprise bargaining that shape what IP is
>"maximised" or "exploited" and what is not involves a range of
>institutional histories and histories of publically finded education
>and public debate. You cannot understand what is happening with IP
>through only Marx's model of the commodity, or of the exploitation
>of labour.
Nor should you expect to. The "spare, elegant" theory of exploitation of labor as a commodity that Yoshie extolls -- I suppose she means the theoey as laid out in Wages, Prices, and Profit in formalizable terms (formalized in several ways by a number of writers of Japanese persiona, Desia, and others) -- is an extremely asbstract model that operates at a very high level of abstraction. It no more admots of unmediated application to a concrete phenomenon than any other similarly abstract theory, e.g., neoclassical economics. Marx himself flshed out its application to particular phenomena, such as increasing automation or the development of the factory system or the struggle over the length of the working day, with rich, complex, anything-but-spare historical investigations referring precisely to particular institutional histories and political debates.
This is a general point about philosophy of science that is almost universally applicable. It's not just a point about social science. Even the most obvious counterexample -- the "direct" application of Newton's laws to celestial mechanics -- turn out to involve a tremendous number of intricacies, most notably the many-body problem (accounting for the multiple gravitational attractions of the planetsa nd the sun on each other). A closer analogy is provided by thr application of Darwin's theory of natural section to the development of particular traits, where almost all the explanatory work is done by reference to the evolutionary history, with the spare abstract theory operating as a sort of background constraint. You can't say why there are tenrecs on Madagascar simply by saying that they were selected for; you have to refer to the geography of the island, the fact of its early seperation from mainland Africa before the evolution of other critters tahtw ould fill the niches
the tenrecs filled, etc. jks
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030223/adbb9b48/attachment.htm>