----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel G. Skinner" <dskinner at du.edu>
I need some help placing a text that I happened across on the 'new' book shelf at the uni library: - Daniel Andriessen, Making Sense of Intellectual Capital: Designing a Method for the Valuation of Intangibles (Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004). Has anyone run into this material before? I am struggling through it and could use some pointers. The reason I ask stems from several email discussions with Hardt following his presentation at the RM conference in November. My question for Michael- and all of you too, is this (almost verbatim):
What tools do we use to plot/describe (perhaps a poor choice of Lacanian phrasing) immaterial labor? What we (communists) use presently is derived from the former hegemonic notions of labor in real/formal subsumption. However, with immaterial labor, and the attendant notion of labor 'beyond measure', what can we now use to speak towards class as the previous tools are based on a value in/of measure?
Michaels reply:
'It's a good question about the new instruments. It makes me think of a footnote I read recently in a new book by Doug Henwood. He writes about a scholar of accounting who tries to extend accounting to the production of value that is not measurable. ... even though things have changed, we can often start from the old economic measures and proceed from there rather than remaining empty handed.'
Hence my confusion, and my grasping at any book that might address this problem.
Cheers, Dan
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Try Baruch Lev's "Intangibles: Management, Measurement and Reporting" [Brookings Institution Press] His homepage: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~blev/
Also give Geoffrey Hdogson's "Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is not the End of History" [Routledge] esp. chapters 8, 9 & 10.
The 'endogenous growth' theorists are tryingto squeeze knowledge/intangibles into production functions [hahaha], Peter Howitt is perhaps the most articulate of them.
Ian Steedman is his usual scathing self on their attempts at: http://growthconf.ec.unipi.it/papers/Steedman1.pdf
Ian