The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [49]
In order to proceed within the terms of our wider argument, we will need to ask not just how scientific community emerges and endures, but specifically what happens to it when scientific knowledge circulates as a gift, and what happens when knowledge is treated as a commodity, for sale at a profit. The man who has done the most work on the organization of science in the United States is a sociologist from the University of Michigan, Warren Hagstrom. Hagstrom’s point of departure is similar to mine. He begins his discussion of the commerce of ideas in science by pointing out that “manuscripts submitted to scientific periodicals are often called ‘contributions,’ and they are, in fact, gifts.” It is unusual for the periodicals that print the work of scientists to pay their contributors; indeed, the authors’ institutions are often called upon to help defray the cost of publication. “On the other hand,” Hagstrom says, “manuscripts for which the scientific authors do receive financial payments, such as textbooks and popularizations, are, if not despised, certainly held in much lower esteem than articles containing original research results.” (The same is true in the literary community. It is the exception, not the rule, to be paid for writing of literary merit, and the fees are rarely in accord with the amount of labor. There is cash in “popular” work—gothic novels, thrillers, and so forth, but their authors do not become bona fide members of the literary community.)
Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return (a topic to which I shall return below). But there is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in Hagstrom’s study puts it, if someone “has written nothing at all but texts, they will have a null value or even a negative value.” Because such work brings no group reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of remuneration, cash. “Unlike recognition, cash can be used outside the community of pure science,” Hagstrom points out. Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community. By the same token, as Hagstrom comments elsewhere, “one reason why the publication of texts tends to be a despised form of scientific communication [is that] the textbook author appropriates community property for his personal profit.” As with the Cubans who say, “literary property cannot be private,” when and if we are able to feel the presence of a community, royalties (like usury) seem extractive.
Scientists claim and receive credit for the ideas they have contributed to science, but to the degree that they are members of the scientific community, such credit does not get expressed through fees. To put it conversely, anyone who is not a part of the group does “work for hire”; he is paid a “fee for service,” a cash reward that compensates him for his time while simultaneously alienating him from his contribution. A researcher paid by the hour is a technician, a servant, not a member of the scientific community. Similarly, an academic scientist who ventures outside of the community to consult for industry expects to be paid a fee. If the recipients of his ideas are not going to treat them as gifts, he will not give