However, as shown through the translators' case, professional status is not entirely dependent on formal professionalization. Understanding professionalism as symbolic capital brings to the fore the normativity of professionalism, the content of which is contingent on actors' negotiations. With this cultural lens, the focus shifts from the given traits of *a profession* to the *professionals* (Lively, 2001), the actors and their perception of being professional as opposed to non-professionals. Seen thus, formal professionalization is a canonical type of professional capital, but not the only one. Identity—namely, the kind of a person one identifes with emerges as a key resource of professionalism (Van Maanen, 2010). Analysis of translators' self-imaging discourse, reveals how they build their professionalism, however tacitly, on personal dispositions and ethics, by which they draw distinction and construct hierarchies. My contention is this: Translators' professional identity is not only independent of professionalization—its function as a higher form of capital lies precisely in the ethos of *counter-professionalization*. In light of this, I must emphasize two points about how to conceive of translators' professional identity:

(1) As much as translators rebut the status of a natural translator, rather than rejecting this image they embrace it as a higher symbolic resource; they transform its meaning from signaling an unqualifed workforce to implying a mystifed, embodied artistic-like sense of professionalism. Avoiding defnition of their expertise, they promote a vague notion of natural aptness, in contrast to which systematically acquired knowledge and skills appear as irrelevant, if not demeaning. With this imagery, they bring forward a sense of professionalism that lies entirely in the person. Avoiding rational standards, their reputation as worthy workers depends solely on individuals' display of personal virtues, such as giftedness, intuition, and devotion, like those of artists. In other words, translators build their professional distinction by blurring the very idea of measurable competencies. In this feld, obscuring workers' profciency, rather than standardizing them, is the name of the game.

(2) The wide impact of this mystique of professionalism across translation sectors means that, as amorphous and diversifed as this feld may be, it is nevertheless structured by a *market of symbolic goods*, to use Bourdieu's much-cited metaphor (1985). In this symbolic market, profession identity is the only capital by which workers gain occupational authority and autonomy (vis-à-vis other occupations, as well as clients). Professional identity also provides the logic of this occupation's inner boundaries and hierarchy (regardless of objective technical categories, such as written vs. oral or text translation vs. subtitling). This tacit logic is that of artization*.* In the feld of translation, the smallest sector of highbrow literary translators nurtures it as a weapon of exclusion. This limited circle extensively sanctions the rules of art, disallowing whatsoever rational bureaucratized formats (accreditation, standards, tariffs, etc.) members of other translation sectors may strive towards. They thereby draw a distinction between the elite sector and all other translators. As an identity discourse, however, masses of translators accept a counterprofessionalization logic across the board, even though they are denied access to highbrow cultural spheres. Given that many practicing translators converge between more than one job type, the artist-translator self-image appears to be the only

common ground uniting translators as an occupation, despite the diverse interests, methods, and constraints their different working spheres impose. Those who work at the intersection between the text production industry and the miscellaneous translating markets, serve, although with ambivalence, as especially effective transmitters of the artization ethos across this occupation.

Finally, as professional-identity researchers are currently discussing, a similar dynamic is common in every occupation, including the more established ones (e.g., Brown & Coupland, 2015; Kyratsis et al., 2017; Prat et al., 2006). There, this dynamic either serves as a channel for negotiating defned expertise and valuescales, or gives rise to alternative ones. As scholars have already pointed out with reference to other professional domains, workers are evaluated predominantly by their performed professional identities (Webb, 2016). However, in the domain of translation, as in other extremely under-professionalized occupations, this identity dynamic appears to be the major status generator, one that provides the actors with occupational credit without committing them to formal regulation and institutionalized settings (cf. Avnoon & Sela-Sheffy, 2021). In this feld, displaying natural abilities and personal self-refnement replaces professionalization, so that its members deem this process unworthy.

These fndings support attempts to rethink professionalism and question the pivotal role attributed to professionalization traits. By locating professionalism in identity rather than in formally defned and regulated expertise, one conceives the distinction between professionals and non-professionals not as dichotomous, but as vacillating along a scale that the actors themselves constantly re-negotiate. Understanding workers' perspective, one can thus dissect the logic of what otherwise seems unexplained—namely, the persistent under-professionalization of translation and other non-professionalized occupations, despite their crucial social function and high demand (and despite some attempts made towards professionalization). This is not a case of failed professionalization, but of *counterprofessionalism*, wielded as an alternative and forceful status strategy, structuring occupational felds.

#### **References**

**Prof. Rakefet Sela-Sheffy** is Chairperson of the Unit of Culture Research at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches culture and identity theories, as well as sociocultural discourse analysis. In her research, she deals with identity work and status claims in various social settings—with a special focus on the formation of professional felds and processes of professionalization and counterprofessionalization (cases: translators, childcare workers, teachers). She also studies intercultural translation, emotional discourses in immigration, and the formation of community environmental sentiments and action styles.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Part II Transformation of Professions**

## **Chapter 6 The Changing Fortunes of the Architectural Profession in Postwar Britain: Complexity, Technological Change, and the (Re)construction of Knowledge**

#### **Michael Siebert and Paul Windrum**

In this chapter, we examine the ways in which changes in technology and associated knowledge have impacted the architectural profession's role and power within the UK over the past half century, and look set to affect them once more in the near future.

One of the basic defnitions of architecture is the provision of shelter and comfort for the human body. The nineteenth century German architect Gottfried Semper described the built architectural space as a *surrogate skin*. House design comprises four core dimensions: the fnancial, the social, the environmental, and the aesthetic. These dimensions are not wholly independent; their relationship is complex.

Construction projects are, in themselves, complex systems that involve a large number of people, products, and processes interacting in a nonlinear fashion (Azim et al., 2010; Xia & Chan, 2012). Small differences in initial conditions such as geography, available skills, and materials can result in very different outcomes, and positive and negative feedback loops contribute to emergent behavior and unpredictability in complex systems. Holdups or problems in delivery in one component part can have a tremendous impact on others (Brockmann & Kalle, 2012; Schalcher, 2015). Holdups can have major impacts on cost and even force a redesign. Complex construction projects require *soft integration* by a key actor, often supported by tools and techniques for managing the people, products, and processes of the project environment (Xia & Chan, 2012).

M. Siebert (\*)

P. Windrum Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
115

Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
The *professionalization* of housebuilding is a relatively recent phenomenon, marking the end of a far longer period of vernacular building methods still responsible for over 90% of the world's housing provision (Kazimee, 2009). Having one's house, as opposed to any other building, designed for one by a professional is very much a construct of the modern world.

Research on professions dates back to Parsons (1951) and his delineation of *professionals* and *bureaucrats*. Professions, through their collegial organization and shared identity, represent an alternative approach to bureaucracy to achieve the same normative ends. Those offering current defnitions of professions emphasize two aspects. One is the profession as a mode of governing and regulating the exchange of *expert labor* in the provision of a service (Freidson, 1994). Another is the profession as an underpinning knowledge base that usually involves a period of tertiary education, vocational training, and experience (Crompton, 1990). Professions are the structural, occupational, and institutional arrangements for dealing with work associated with the uncertainties of modern work lives in risk societies. Professionals are extensively engaged in dealing with risk managing risk assessment, through the use of expert knowledge, and enabling customers and clients to deal with uncertainty. In section "Literature on professions", we provide a detailed discussion of each of these aspects of architectural professionalism in the UK.

In section "Rise and decline: the changing role of the architect in postwar Britain", we examine how the professional standing of UK architects has been eroded by providing a broad historical analysis of the changes that occurred in residential building construction during the postwar era and how these have affected the architectural profession's role and power. We distinguish between endogenous factors at play within the UK architectural profession and those exogenous factors that have played a role in knowledge, roles, and power shifting away from the architects and towards those within the construction industry who were formally under their control. With respect to the endogenous factors, we highlight historical divisions that have existed in the UK architectural profession. Notably, UK architects are represented by competing professional bodies—the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Architects' Registration Board (ARB), both effectively set up to ensure the quality of work and professionalism of working practices provided, whilst establishing and protecting the fee scales that for many years ensured an architect's income could not be eroded from either outside or inside the camp. But the existence of two bodies performing this role fractured power and weakened the UK profession's ability to resist and/or reshape to their advantage threats posed by exogenous factors. These factors include technological change (such as the transition from the drawing board to computer-aided design) and the increased marketization of UK construction during the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a neoliberal political agenda. We show how some of these external factors were reinforcing, whilst others had a major impact on UK architects' roles, knowledge structures, and power vis-à-vis building contractors and developers.

In section "New challenges: the re-emergence of the architect as system coordinator?", we consider the architectural profession's possible future role in the UK, and whether architects may once again take on an integrational role in the face of the increasing environmental, social, and political demands made of new residential housing. Here we consider parallels between the historical experiences of architects and those of other professional bodies who have similarly undergone a period of disruptive change due to digitization of their working practices.

#### **Literature on Professions**

There exists an extensive literature on tensions between professionals and organizations in health care and law. Architecture, by contrast, is relatively neglected within this literature (Cohen, Wilkinson, Arnold, & Finn, 2005). By examining the UK architectural profession's post-war experience, one gains an interesting insight into how a professional group's status, role, and power can change quickly in the face of exogenous changes in politics, technology, and industry structure. We shall show how certain endogenous factors within the UK profession itself made it vulnerable to these external changes.

Professionalism has been a dominant alternative to both the market and to public bureaucracy for the organization of work and the delivery of services (McClelland, 1990). To cite professionalism is to stress autonomy and the self-regulation of work by practitioners, with professionals best placed to act in the best interests of their clients. A core component of occupational professionalism is the creation of customized solutions to clients' problems (Larson, 1977; Empson, 2008). This is dependent on specialist knowledge and skills rooted in a theoretical foundation of a particular knowledge subfeld (Abel, 1988; Freidson, 1994; MacDonald, 1995). Professionals have extensive individual autonomy in decision-making, determining themselves how best to apply their specialist knowledge to the development and delivery of customized services (Derber, 1982; Freidson, 1994; Faulconbridge & Muzio, 2008).

Here it is useful to link with Harry Collins' work on expertise in science and medicine (Collins & Pinch, 1998, 2005; Collins & Evans, 2007). Collins and Evans (2007) demarcate specialist tacit knowledge held by active practitioners from ubiquitous tacit knowledge held by the general lay public. Specialist tacit knowledge comprises two categories: *interactional expertise* and *contributory expertise*. Importantly, Collins and Evans (ibid) categorize only these two as expertise.

Those with contributory expertise are actively contributing to the knowledge feld—e.g., through scientifc/medical research and publication. Achieving this level of profciency requires training (apprenticeship), access to specialist social networks containing other contributory experts (meeting at conferences, workshops etc.), and access to resources (grants etc.) to fund new research. People with interactional expertise have also received training (apprenticeship) and may also access specialist social networks containing contributory experts, but they do not engage in active research at the knowledge frontier.

The lay public hold varying degrees of knowledge below that of expertise. *Popular understanding* is acquired through specialist TV programs or magazines, with someone else *translating* current knowledge into layman's terms. Those holding *primary source knowledge* are able to read the original source material—scientifc/ medical journals, offcial reports etc.—and understand the general message and implications even if they do not understand the statistical methods or equations.

Another key theme in Collin's work is that of scientifc instrumentation particularly for the measurement of gravitation waves. Machines are not designed in a neutral manner, but are built based on a specifc set of precepts and assumptions their builders hold about what is and what is not to be measured, and why. This is a key source of power for those who have *contributory expertise* in a science and medicine. In section "Rise and decline: the changing role of the architect in postwar Britain", we show how the advent of new forms of IT—the parallel equivalent of scientifc machines—was one of the key factors that led to large contractors replacing architects as the key organizer in the UK.

Other core components of professionalism are professional values, moral commitment, and self-regulation. Governance fows through collegial relationships and working arrangements. To speak of professional values is to emphasize a shared identity based on competencies (produced by education, training, and apprenticeship socialization) and legal responsibility (sometimes guaranteed by licensing). Professional relations are characterized as cooperative and mutually supportive, and relations of trust characterize practitioner-client and practitioner-employer interactions.

Abel (1988) distinguishes between two dimensions of self-regulation: the *production of producers* (e.g., architects) and *production by producers* (e.g., buildings). Both dimensions can be administered by the state or by professional associations, or by a combination of both. Regulation of training—the production of producers involves (i) a defning of the content of education and training requirements; (ii) exerting infuence over the organizations that educate and train professionals; (iii) evaluating candidates after initial training—for example, in the UK, a chartered architect currently undertakes a three-part training program over a minimum of 7 years, two of which are in practice. Part 1 is a 3-year full-time university undergraduate degree (a BA or BSc in Architecture), followed by 1 year in an architect's practice (Stage 1). Part 2 is a 2-year full-time university degree (B.Arch, Diploma, or M.Arch award), followed by a further year in practice (Stage 2). Part 3 is the Advanced Diploma in Professional Practice in Architecture, which RIBA administers at one of its validated course providers. Only after passing the Part 3 examination can someone register as an architect and for RIBA membership. By setting the fnal Part 4 exam, RIBA has signifcant regulatory control over the training of new architects, shaping the content of the university-delivered Parts 1 and 2.

The regulation of services produced by professionals—production by producers covers the production, distribution, and consumption of services. Those creating these regulations have sought to guarantee quality and preserve public interests, prevent malpractice and conficts of interest, and mediate between different interests within the profession (Quack & Schüβler, 2015). With respect to ethics and moral values, the clients' interests supposedly out-rank the proft motive in professional codes of conduct, for example, in medicine the Hippocratic Oath to "frst, do no harm" (primum non nocere).

Key instruments of service self-regulation include (i) setting professional and ethical standards; (ii) restricting organizational forms to individual practices or partnerships on the grounds that incorporation increases liability problems and invites confict of interests; and (iii) limiting competition between members of the profession by placing restrictions on, for example, geographical areas of practice, mandatory fee scales, and bans or limits on advertising (Morgan & Quack, 2005; Garoupa, 2011).

Utilizing the UK architects' case, we shall demonstrate that the boundary between professional and state regulation is not fxed; rather, actors from state and professional groups consistently negotiate and re-negotiate governance.

Professions, like other occupations, are subject to deskilling pressures (Suddaby & Muzio, 2015). In the next section we show how large contract builders displaced UK architects as the system coordinator within the residential new build sector during the 1980s. Large contract builders used a highly standardized *Design and Build* business model, with which they exploited new IT to set up and manage a network of contractual arrangements to control both costs and profts. They thus eroded the architectural profession's control over expert knowledge and commodifed design work, reducing architects to "just another contractor." With the displacement of architects there was a change in ethos, as architects had tended to prioritize aesthetics and social goals for housing over cost control (and profts).

Adherents of a particular strand of research within the professionalism literature posit the existence of *hybrid professionalism*, that is, a hybrid of organizational and occupational professionalism (e.g., Skelcher & Smith, 2015). Rather than simply accepting the existence of two, fxed, idealized typologies of professionalism, researchers have sought to identify the ways in which professionalism is acted upon, and itself changes and evolves over time (e.g., Evetts, 2011; Tonkens, Bröer, van Sambeek, & van Hassel, 2013; Witman, Smid, Meurs, & Willems, 2011). They identify professionals making use of managerial pressures and technologies to further their own interests. These professionals are also adept at adjusting their work and their working relationships to external factors, such as market growth in public systems, enterprise, and economic contracting.

Noordegraaf (2016) has sought to move beyond this hybrid model. He proposes that professionals are entering a new era of organizing professionalism, defned as one in which "organizing becomes a normal part of professional work, rather than an uneasy hybrid" (Noordegraaf, 2016, p. 187). This is due to a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) austerity, changing organizational structures, changes in the nature of the professional workforce, and new technology. Noordegraaf's work is vital because he goes beyond the dichotomies of professional/managerial, and professional/organizational logics to a broader analysis of the forces of change for professionals within organizations.

Developing the notion of organizing professionalism, we here consider whether the architectural profession should reestablish itself in the system coordinator role by, frstly, reshaping itself by absorbing and subsuming the rhetoric of the market customer, developing and using performance metrics to control costs—both previously the cornerstones of the large contractor's managerialism—and, secondly, taking on the pressing needs of environmental and social pressures that the large building contractor is less motivated to meet.

#### **Rise and Decline: The Changing Role of the Architect in Postwar Britain**

One can divide residential construction into three distinct submarkets: top-end bespoke housing, private household new build (speculative), and social housing. The architect was once the system coordinator across all UK residential construction. However, during the 1980s, commercial developer frms began to take over the coordinator role, most signifcantly within the speculative new build subsector.

The importance of this change can be understood with reference to Figure 6.1. From the 1970s onwards, the speculative market signifcantly grew as a percentage of all residential building in the UK. Today, the six largest construction frms— Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Berkeley, Bellway, and Redrow—account for over two thirds of residential construction. Yet although the speculative housing market makes up in the largest percentage in terms of volume, it employs the smallest number of architects. This is because commercial developer frms use a pattern book business model, from which they repeatedly apply a limited set of highly standardized house plans. By standardizing this fxed set of house designs and using

**Fig. 6.1** UK housebuilding rates since the Second World War. Reprinted from *A right to build* (p. 10), by A. Parvin, D. Saxby, C. Cerulli, and T. Schneider, 2011, Sheffeld: The University of Sheffeld, Architecture 00:/. Copyright 2011 by University of Sheffeld School of Architecture and Architecture 00:/. Reprinted with permission

common components across projects, commercial developers are able to create and proft from economies of scale.

UK architects have retained their position as system coordinator to a greater extent within social housing, but this subsector declined markedly after the 1970s. A number of political and economic factors fueled this decline in volume, and we will discuss them below. Today, the delivery of new social housing is largely tied to new speculative build developments over a certain size, although the precise requirement varies with local and central government policy. Social housing is thus dictated by the new builds and, in turn, is affected by economic cycles. Social housing tends to involve a more complex set of social and environmental requirements than speculative housing. In this subsector, small architectural businesses often work with, or for, housing associations. Small- and medium-sized architect practices, plus a number of individual sole traders, continue to control the top-end bespoke submarket.

We will now consider the exogenous and endogenous factors that led to this change in knowledge, power, and control of architects as a professional body (see Fig. 6.2).

One of the key endogenous factors is the lack of a single professional association for architects in the UK. There exist two membership associations: the more recognized but voluntary RIBA and the mandatory ARB. Each attempts to control architectural standards and prescriptions for practice through codes of conduct (Cohen et al., 2005). We will show how the balkanization of the professional representation adversely affected the ability of the architectural profession, as a whole, to resist external forces of globalization, deregulation, and the rise of large construction frms who were better able to use IT to develop managerialist approaches to cost control integration and coordination.

The end of the Second World War was, in many respects, a reset point for the UK (Artis, 1996). Structural realignments ranging from economic theory to the creation of the modern UK welfare state fourished. In house building, new possibilities opened up thanks to new materials and construction methods that had their origins in wartime production, and newly redundant armaments factories and a (de-mobbed) semi-skilled industrial workforce offered plenty of capacity. An aging Victorian housing stock, exacerbated by bombing in many major UK cities, created a need for new housing on a previously unknown scale. However, there were also signifcant fnancial restrictions, and very high levels of national debt accumulated through wartime fnancing. Any one of these factors, in isolation, would have represented a challenge for an established architectural profession, yet a new, inexperienced tranche of young architects and town planners confronted a completely transformative palette of factors to deal with, urged on by a nation with utopian aspirations.

It was perhaps this combination of necessity and the nation's desire for a bright future that allowed such a generational social experiment to unfold over the following decades. Some important antecedents facilitated this. With its 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, the government enabled councils to provide domestic dwellings. The new council homes provided electricity, running water, bathrooms, indoor toilets, and front/rear gardens. This was not the frst high-quality council housing,

**Fig. 6.2** The exogenous and endogenous threats to the architectural profession. Source: Design by authors

however. Liverpool led the way, under a Conservative-led council, in constructing the frst council housing in Europe in 1869.

The development of improved social housing in the UK coincided with the *new consumerism* of the 1950s. The postwar boom saw the growth of car ownership, changing the dynamics of urban and suburban living. The home, too, underwent massive changes. The 1951 Festival of Britain introduced the concept of open-plan living, with ftted kitchens containing new electrical appliances such as washing

machines, refrigerators and fridges, and electrical food appliances such as blenders and toasters. Here the suburban living of the 1950s US provided a lens for future UK consumerism throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

It was the architect who was expected to deliver this utopian vision for housing, and who was subsequently held accountable for a failure to deliver. The pace of rebuilding in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily through social housing (Fig. 6.1), allowed little time for debate, prototyping, or refection. It was nevertheless to prove something of a golden age for the UK architectural profession, in terms of its position and the quantity of work available for architects. Richard Crossman (Minister for Housing and Local Government under Harold Wilson) recorded a cabinet committee in June 1966 discussing 500,000 housing starts, split equally between the public and private sector (Derbyshire, 2014). It was an era which gave rise to movements in social architecture, like Team 10, CIAM, and the search for *a utopia of the present*. There was an excitement, at that time, amongst architects who were given freedom to experiment in an atmosphere of lax controls and an unshakeable belief in all things modern. Young UK architects included Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, who designed the Golden Lane Estate in 1952 (the tallest residential building in Britain at the time of its construction) and later the Barbican complex in London, and Alison and Peter Smithson, who designed the Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, London, in the late 1960s.

There was a postwar consensus on what needed to be improved—hygiene in the form of running water, sanitation, and clean air; comfort in the form of central heating; and more space, both inside and out. These were aspirations from the Edwardian age, transmitted to the middle class by newly built suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s. Now project developers were to fulfll these aspirations for the inner-city working class and lower middle class by replacing back-to-back terraced housing and tenement blocks (Mowat, 1955).

There was no established public consensus on modern architecture. Young architects had presumptions about what the public needed or wanted from new housing, and it was this—as much as a lack of fnancial and human resources as demand increased—that was at the root of the shortfalls which led to the demise of an entire era of domestic modern architecture in the UK. For instance, UK architects had a keen desire to replicate the work of Le Corbusier, exemplifed by his Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, and thereby ignored how the realities of life in Glasgow (to use an extreme example) and the very different climate of Scotland's western Lowlands differed from the South of France.

These architects also overlooked the social needs of communities, who were often dispersed, and even when kept together and rehoused in the same locality, isolated by the physical barriers of *vertical living* of tower blocks. Robin Hood Gardens was one group of architects' early reaction against Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation. Here was social housing in long concrete blocks linked by broad aerial walkways—"streets in the sky." They were responding to the loss of community felt by those with nowhere to informally meet with neighbors. Yet this merely exposed the limits to what could be recreated, even in theory, in this new highdensity, high-rise living.

This era of prolifc social housebuilding ended suddenly and dramatically. The symbolic turning point was the partial collapse of Ronan Point on May 16th, 1968, just two months after opening. This 22-storey tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, was, in hindsight, a poorly constructed, socially inadequate, and aesthetically redundant edifce. Four people were killed and seventeen were injured when an entire corner of the building collapsed due to a gas explosion that critically weakened a loadbearing wall. The dramatic nature of this failure sparked a loss of public confdence in high-rise residential buildings in the UK, and major changes in UK building regulations followed. Ronan Point was the last residential tower block to be built in an era of prolifc housebuilding that has yet to be matched in the UK. The general public, the government, and the construction industry as a whole all participated in a far-reaching reassessment of the architectural profession's ability to shape the already fading vision of a utopian, modernist future.

Other exogenous changes also impacted the architectural profession's changing fortunes. One such change was a realignment in UK politics and the rise of the corporatist state during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This altered the relationship between the state and the professions, including architects and surveyors in the construction industry. The corporatist state received impetus from Thatcherism but had begun under the previous (Labour) Callaghan government, precipitated by the 1976 Financial Crisis, during which the UK government was forced to borrow \$3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Under the terms of the IMF's loan agreement, the Callaghan Labour government had introduced the frst monetarist policy to end Keynesian fscal management (Artis, Cobahm, & Wickham-Jones, 1992). This directly affected housing construction, which successive Conservative and Labour governments had used as a critical tool in countercyclical macroeconomic management.

Turning to the academic literature on professions, and professional power and independence, the regulative bargain lies at the core of the relationship between the state and professions. In the neoliberal corporatist state, the relationship is reconfgured, with professions being used as a channel for state action, especially via controls (MacDonald, 1995, p. 115).

The corporatist UK state is suspicious of monopoly, promoting competition between practitioners as a means of increasing consumer awareness and power, and encouraging variety in services and practitioners. In terms of the architectural profession, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC, 1977b) report led to the end of fxed-fee scales and the removal of the ban on advertising by architects, with the RIBA amending its rules accordingly in 1982. This attacked an important ethos and practice of all professional groups: not undercutting one's fellow professional. Professional bodies would have disciplined, or even struck off, members for competing on fees. An earlier MMC report on surveyors (MMC, 1977a) had also recommended terminating fxed fees amongst surveyors. Since this change, the majority of commissions for professional services in the construction and property industries in the UK have been on a competitive fee tendered basis.

The loss of the architect's fee scale, along with the removal of advertising ban, can be viewed as the frst step towards the democratization of the profession by opening the door to free market competition. There were, however, some important

downsides to this. The abolition of fxed fees in the UK triggered a steady decline in fee levels. During the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, architects' fees fell to unprecedentedly low levels (Hoxley, 1998). The authors of the 1977 MMC architect's report had foreseen this: "We do not … exclude the possibility that fee-cutting in a recession might be deep and widespread" (MMC, 1977b, para. 231). With this came an inevitable drop in quality, with architects unable to deliver the same level of service at a much reduced fee.

The architectural profession's ability to resist this exogenous challenge from the state was hampered by the representational split between the RIBA and the ARB. This is highly unusual (Cohen et al., 2005; MacDonald, 1995). Professional associations conduct much of the collective work of professional groups, on behalf of their members. This work ranges from oversight of training and education (qualifcation of members), to defning and monitoring standards of practice, to resolving legal matters and governance over its membership. The RIBA fought the termination of fxed fees but was unable to pull together agreement from the entirety of the profession. The Thatcher government exploited the divisions and the RIBA capitulated, changing its rules in 1982.

The balkanization of professional representation also adversely affected UK architects' ability to control other exogenous forces—globalization, technological change, and the rise of large construction frms who made better use of IT to develop managerialist approaches to cost control integration and coordination.

In the early 1980s, the public began to question the architect's role as *social designer*. The Prince of Wales delivered his "Carbuncle" attack on modern architecture in 1984. Later, Wates and Knevitt's *Community Architecture*, published in Wates and Knevitt (1987) suggested that modern architecture was remote and austere, and that postwar housing estates were linked to the social breakdown, social unrest, and riots witnessed on UK streets during the early 1980s. Wates and Knevitt (1987) called for a new *community architecture*: one that was more participatory for those who were to live in urban cities, to ensure more stable and self-suffcient communities. The divided UK architectural professional associations seemed unable to respond to, let alone manage, this public debate on the future of architecture, and the role of architects within it (Till, 1998).

As it transpired, there was no realignment around new notions of the *social* and *community*. Rather, there was a fundamental shift away from the social to a new, fnancially driven model of construction during the 1980s. It was a shift that has shaped the evolution of the UK housing industry to the present day.

Those applying this new, fnancially driven model of managerial control, with its focus on profts and cost control, highlighted architects' inability to prioritize cost over their own aesthetic or social considerations. Architects had long held a reputation for being reluctant to prioritize the client's budget over their own aesthetic sensibilities, and the industry how had an alternative route to take.

New types of computer IT facilitated the move to managerialist control by large building contractors. The art of designing, itself, became a computerized process, as early computer-aided design (CAD) systems were brought over from manufacturing. This opened up the feld to those prepared to learn new IT tools and take advantage of the abilities that they offered. Design modifcations no longer needed to be shuttled back and forth to an architect. They could be made at any stage in the design process and even on site by someone trained to use the IT system.

New forms of computer IT also facilitated the development of large contractorled Design and Build programs during the 1980s. Decision-makers within this new, managerialist type of system focused proft, not aesthetic or social design. They achieved control and coordination through a web of contracts with a myriad of individual suppliers and contractors, specifying tasks and completion dates in detail to enable building work to be completed on time and at cost. Using the Design and Build system, the large building contractor took the position of system coordinator, with the architect becoming a subcontracted designer. In place of the architect's network of personal contacts and experience, forged through previous work with local contractors and suppliers, those using Design and Build utilized collateral warranties as protection against delivery failures on the more stringent contractual agreements demanded by a new breed of developer-client. They extended contracted relationships beyond the local to national and even international provision, providing opportunities for further cost cutting.

#### **New Challenges: The Re-emergence of the Architect as System Coordinator?**

In this section, we consider the architect's future in the UK residential housing sector. In particular, we discuss whether architects could re-emerge as the system coordinator, and the requirements for UK architects to act as a professional group in order to ensure this.

As noted, housing design comprises four core dimensions: the fnancial, the social, the environmental, and the aesthetic. The speculative housing model's success lies in having a limited set of highly standardized house designs, held within a *pattern book*, which can be replicated nationally. Project actors can make only minor change to these designs, if required to satisfy local planning authorities. Those utilizing Design and Build as a procurement route have been very successful in meeting the agenda of those developers wanting to gain control of the whole build process with in-house designers and tight fnancial controls. In this model however, aesthetics, social beneft, and environmental dimensions are demoted and made subservient to the fnancial dimension, with enforcement by planners and other legislative bodies often their main or only driver. Consequently, the housing industry as a whole has struggled to keep these issues on the agenda in a market where the selfregulating contractor is dominant.

Whilst the speculative housing model has been highly successful for those large contractors who have honed its development over the past 40 years, there is growing public and political dissatisfaction with quality and choice, and also with the affordability of the housing large contractors are willing to supply.

Politicians and the media have both recently highlighted the issue of quality. For example, in July 2019, the Welsh government's Minister for Housing Julie James complained about substandard developments and accused the private house-building industry of creating the "slums of the future" (Servini, 2019). In the same month, an hour-long Channel 4 TV documentary investigated complaints customers had raised against Persimmon, the UK's second largest builder, of sub-standard construction, poor customer care, and excessive profts (All 4, 2019).

With respect to supply, the UK now has a chronic housing shortage, resulting in house prices that have outstripped wages for all but a few; most stand in line for housing that at best can be described as adequate. Going forward, it is becoming increasingly diffcult for smaller private contractors to develop competitively priced, innovative house designs that will meet the necessary tougher environmental regulations. Because the fnancial returns are much lower on pre-existing *brown feld* sites, the smaller private contractors also struggle to deliver the large-scale renewal of inner-city housing in the UK, which is in urgent need of high-quality but affordable new housing.

Clearly, the UK needs a new model in which the four dimensions of housing design are brought into a more balanced alignment. What is less clear is whether the architect is the person best placed to be the system coordinator within that new model. Some subsectors within the housing market arguably offer a better ft for the architect's broader skillsets than others, with the bespoke housing market most allowing the fights of fancy for which the profession is recognized. Increasingly, however, architectural students are entering the profession driven more by a social or environmental calling than by viewing it as an opportunity for self-expression (Coutts, 2016). For this generation, the third sector inhabited by housing associations and council-funded housing programs possibly offers the best prospects for professional satisfaction. One can expect a better balance between the four requirements of the fnancial, social, environmental, and aesthetic in this sector, which therefore requires more oversight to marry these often conficting factors. If the profession is to stage a comeback within the UK, then its members must do so by taking on that coordinating role, and it is in this sector that the opportunities are greatest, despite its diminished role within the greater housing industry.

Turning to the academic literature on professions, the architectural profession could succeed in the UK if it were to move towards Noordegraaf's model of organizing professionalism, taking on and embodying within its practices fnancial cost control and balancing this with its strengths in the social, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions. This requires a change in the nature of the professional workforce, and the leveraging of new technological opportunities. Examples of the latter include IT systems that facilitate standardization of components (rather than of entire buildings), enabling fexibility in design and cost control. In other words, it is a shift that requires the profession's members to not just subsume the rhetoric of the market-costs customer, but to develop cost-performance metrics and other metrics that have, until now, remained the preserve of managerialism under the large contractor.

Applying Building Information Modelling (BIM) throws up an interesting possibility. We have discussed how large builders utilized new IT to take over the coordination role from architects during the 1980s. Researchers of professions have previously highlighted the link between the emergence of new computer technologies, the commodifcation of work, and deskilling as professions lose control over expert knowledge (e.g., Haug, 1972; Johnson, 1972; Jones & Moore, 1993). BIM thus offers an opportunity for another actor to become the system coordinator. Why is this? In one sense, BIM is the continuation of the process of digitization. It requires disparate actors—structural and mechanical engineers, town planners, and interior designers as well as large housing contractors—to coalesce through a common interface to enable a seamless fow of information to pass back and forth. In so doing, BIM would replace the myriad of incompatible IT platforms that currently exist. Researchers recognize the benefts to all parties, as well as the costs of not successfully coordinating the shift to a common IT platform. In their Farrell and Saloner (1988) paper on the coordination of a common standard, Farrell and Saloner highlight the need for an actor, or else a strong committee, to ensure that all actors switch to a common platform simultaneously.

Much is riding on BIM's successful adoption across the industry beyond its current low-level acceptance enforced through public works programs. Much of this is central to the next generation of architects' motivations: Without BIM, it is diffcult to coordinate the early decision-making needed to promote the benefts of modern methods of construction, not least of off-site manufacturing, thereby strengthening the hand of the status quo. The industry cannot calculate the principles of sustainability, and in particular Whole Life Costing and the EPDs (Environmental Product Declarations), that this depends upon to make the fnancial case that will change minds without the functionality of BIM. BIM, in essence, represents the missing piece in the jigsaw that is preventing the industry from seeing the benefts of the bigger picture.

"Master Coordinator" would be an appropriate name for the actor who oversees the entire design and construction process through BIM. To what extent can architects—rather than developers, contractors, or any other active participants—lay claim to this role? This is for the architectural profession to clearly articulate. There is evidence that architects themselves believe they are best positioned for this new coordination role. The 2012 survey by BuildingDesign (Morrell, 2012) found that 80% of respondents, who were predominantly architects and architect technicians, believed that architects should be responsible for BIM coordination on construction projects.

Architects may be the best-placed party given that they have a greater overview of all four core dimensions within house design—fnancial, social, environmental, and aesthetic. The architect is doubtlessly best situated to see and understand the wider implications of decisions made throughout the design, if not also the construction, process.

As previously discussed, the profession's Achilles heel has been fnancial control within projects. Are there any signs of this improvement here? Most architects would admit to being driven primarily by either a social or environmental

conscience, with a desire to placate their own aesthetic sensibilities also high on their agendas. Few would profess to being "in it for the money." Does this relative lack of personal fnancial motivation suggest that the problem of architects "staying within budget" persists?

One move recently undertaken to redress this imbalance has been the introduction of apprenticeship schemes, whereby universities offer their courses as part-time placements for students in practice over a 4-year period. The aim is to incorporate a more fnancially minded approach to the educational process during those formative years when architectural students learn how to tackle design problems. Another equally infuential addition to the design process, this time aimed at the procurement end of the build program, has been the introduction of the *Value Toolkit* as a way of broadening the industry's defnition of value to include societal and environmental benefts alongside the more commonly used short-term fnancial benefts that currently defne the tendering process. Together, these two interventions strengthen the hand of those architects looking to reinstate an overseeing role that can help generate the more collaborative working environment being called for.

However, the other issue UK architects must address is the division in representation and loss of infuence that has arisen from having more than one professional body representing its key membership group. This does not happen in medicine or in law in the UK. As well as adversely affecting internal governance procedures, having two professional bodies diminishes the UK profession's negotiating power with developers, contractors, and, possibly most importantly, with government. But this is set to continue, with both bodies responding to these new challenges. ARB is currently consulting with its members over broadening routes into architecture and has doubled its fees to fund a transformation in education and training over the next 5 years. The RIBA has set its 2030 Climate Challenge to encourage the architectural profession to lead a collaborative shift towards sustainable design throughout the construction industry. These measures exemplify the long-term, informed, and balanced guidance that the construction industry, and housing in particular, requires and a reconstructed architectural profession still seems to offer the best hope of objectively delivering this guidance.

#### **Summary and Refections**

We have laid out the various endogenous and exogenous factors that led the UK architectural profession to lose its position as system coordinator and considered whether the profession could re-establish itself in the near future.

Refecting upon the literature on professions, we have used this particular example to highlight the importance of new technologies—particularly IT—in providing opportunities for other actors to contest a professional group's position as system coordinator. The advent of new IT replaced pre-existing methods of drawing and the control of the design process itself. Creators of new IT design software facilitated

the development of Design and Build, in which the large contractor is the key system coordinator. With greater automation, actors could for the frst time easily standardize their plans, and even non-architects could make minor amendments to these standardized plans.

It is interesting to contrast this experience with that of other occupational groups. Product designers have further developed their position as a system integrator (Windrum, Frenken, & Green, 2017). This occupational group has successfully established itself as the technology interpreter and practical translator (Lawson, 2005), and integrated design, engineering, and marketing functions within the new product development process (Moenaert & Souder, 1990; Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). Indeed, by moving towards *design thinking* (Brown, 2008) one places the designer at the center of all aspects of the business and makes them the key actor who drives innovation (Verganti, 2009), as a means of structuring strategic product development and design's role in articulating creativity and innovation.

It would be interesting in future research to consider, through comparative studies, how IT has affected knowledge and control in different occupational groups who have undergone similar periods of disruptive change. For example, professional photographers are another group of highly skilled service workers who have seen digital cameras and digital imaging software open up (democratize) the process of high-quality image making and image distribution to a wider public. Yet professional photographers' specialist knowledge of composition, lighting, and color, as well as their technical expertise, has enabled this group to maintain their independence and control within their feld.

An important connection here may exist between the digitization of working practices and the redesign of service creation and delivery—more commonly referred to as *process innovation*. For example, the introduction of customer selfservice, frst in grocery and subsequently in many other services, uses the manpower of customers to signifcantly reduce the number of paid employees required to deliver a service. It involves a purposeful reconfguring of the role(s) of the customer and taking advantage of new opportunities afforded by new IT (Windrum, 2023). It would be interesting to extend this line of research to consider examples such as Design and Build, and BIM, as one component within process innovations that involve purposive reconfguration of different providers' roles.

Finally, we utilize this case study to draw attention to the roles played by RIBA and ARB: the professional bodies representing architects in the UK. Whilst these professional bodies have maintained control over architects' training and education, we have shown that the division of professional membership between the two bodies constitutes a signifcant weakness in the face of technological change and the increased marketization of UK construction during the 1970s and 1980s. It remains to be seen whether this situation will change and, through a more unifed body, UK architects will be able to regain control over the agenda.

#### **References**

**Michael Siebert** is an experienced architect, director, and academic, and has recently completed a funded PhD researching the Barriers to Innovation in Volume House Building. He is now looking to use the knowledge gained from this and his career to date to help focus the construction industry on a more sustainable future. As both a technical and managing director, Michael has amassed a broad understanding of the industry and the considerable challenges that lie ahead.

**Paul Windrum** is Associate Professor in Strategy at Nottingham University Business School. His specialist area is the strategic management of services innovation. He is currently working in two felds: one being standards innovation and lock-ins and the other being the role of institutional logics and innovation. Paul has produced over 50 publications and written papers in leading innovation journals such as *Research Policy*, *Industrial and Corporate Change*, and *Technological Forecasting and Social Change*.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## **Chapter 7 Preserving the Epistemic Authority of Science in World Politics**

**Peter M. Haas**

World Politics rests on science and expertise for maintaining a functioning multilateral system of governance. The liberal world order rests on numerous foundations, including the recognition of the authority of expertise and science (Ezrahi, 1990; Stokes, 1997; Zürn, 2018). Without the regular provision of objective and impartial advice (or at least the confdence in the warrants behind technical advice) the governance of highly technical issues such as climate change, fnance, and public health, among others, would fail and the international system would lose legitimacy in the eyes of those who value the effective delivery of public goods and the enhancement of social welfare. Indeed, until recently the reliance on science as a source of technical advice had become an institutionalized social fact. Scientists and politicians speak of the need for scientifc governance for making sound policy decisions (Gore, 1996; Holdgate, 1982; Jasanoff, 2011; Leemans, 2008; OECD, 2015; Scientifc Advisory Board, 2016; Sebek, 1983; Stafford-Smith et al., 2017; Watson, 2005).

Because science is imparted to global environmental governance by international science panels, I consider here the various legitimacy criteria which states apply to international science panels. While science serves multiple purposes, including such indirect functional effects as generating publicity and concern by mass publics, here I focus on its direct legitimacy in the eyes of states, as states are the primary constituency which convenes and funds international science panels. It relies on

P. M. Haas (\*)

I am thankful to Johannes Glückler for his deft editorial hand in improving the quality of this chapter.

Department of Political Science, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, University of Massachussetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Fritz Scharpf's distinction between input, output and outcome criteria to identify scientifc practices which enhance the legitimacy of scientifc infuence (Scharpf, 2009). This chapter builds on an earlier conceptual piece I published on the legitimacy of science panels (Haas, 2017).

This chapter begins with a review of the history of reliance on science and expertise by the modern nation-state. It then discusses the nature of scientifc infuence, and how experts exert power in world politics. It the proceeds to look at the array of legitimacy criteria in the literature and concludes with some suggestions about how to restore the legitimacy of science in world politics. Like Marx's understanding of history—"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past" (Marx, 1852/1971, p. 243)—scientists' legitimacy is bounded to the interpretive frames of social circles in which they operate. Thus, scientists' ability to project their expertise and infuence rests on the social criteria of the system in which they must operate. My goal here is to explore how this boundedness can be bridged to improve global governance.

#### **Science Is an Institution**

Science is an institution which confers a source of governance in opposition to rule by force or theology or plutocracy derived from dynasties, monarchies, or organized religion (De Solla Price, 1975; Drori, Meyer, Ramirez, & Schofer, 2003; Ezrahi, 1990; Hirschman, 2013; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Lasswell, 1965; Sagan, 1996; Ziman, 2000). Scientists are accorded authority because of the benefts they are believed to provide. In practice scientists are recruited by states to serve as national advisors and to serve on international science panels.

In the environmental realm, 140 global environmental assessments have been conducted since 1977, (Jabbour & Flachsland, 2017; Kowarsch et al., 2016) and over 32 international science advisory panels operate (Haas & Stevens, 2011, 2017). It has become an almost a taken for granted assumption in diplomatic circles that regimes would be designed with formal science advisory components, or what is now called the science policy interface. National environmental ministries have become ubiquitous, as has offces of science advisors (Drori et al., 2003; Golden, 1991; Holdgate, 1982; Meyer, Frank, Hironaka, Schofer, & Brandon Tuma, 1997; Skolnikoff, 1994; Smith, 1990, 1992).

Science and expertise contributed to many of the major multilateral achievements of the post World War II global order, such as: reductions in infant mortality, improvements in life expectancy, macroeconomic coordination and sustained economic growth, nuclear nonproliferation, advances in public health, and environmental protection.

And yet the authority of science to meaningfully contribute to global governance/world politics is now contested to an unprecedented degree since the Dark Ages. This challenge is but one new feint in a war of interests in world politics, where science is being threatened by populists in conjunction with corporate interests who have been threatened by the policy implications of scientifc fndings, an argument which is elaborated in section "Assaults on scientifc legitimacy" (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). There is an affnity between populist questioning of elitist expertise and the fossil fuel industry's efforts to undermine the legitimacy of those providing policy advice counter to their interests, leading to climate gate in England and the harassment of climate scientists by Congress in the USA (Bradley, 2011; Mann, 2014). But the effects may be more pernicious than just undermining the technical foundations of effective global governance. As Hannah Arendt wrote:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world is being destroyed. (Arendt, 1967, p. 15)

Still, science enjoys authority in global governance because of science's social reputation for usable expertise. Its power rests on its ability to exercise infuence over states. But it does not enjoy uniform infuence. Its infuence—or power—depends upon the extent of legitimacy which scientifc institutions command in the eyes of the relevant audiences. While science operates within a political space, (Jasanoff, 2004; Jasanoff & Martello, 2004; Le Prestre, 2017) there are clearly identifable criteria by which political actors accord science and scientists with authority and legitimacy, and choose to defer to scientifc advice. Science's legitimacy can be defended through rigorous contestation based on the roots which have supported its authority over the years.

#### **The Nature of Scientifc Infuence: When Knowledge Is Power**

Knowledge is power (Foucault, 1972; Haas, 1990). Through persuasion and learning, it leads other actors to recognize, and often pursue, new goals and policies by updating understandings of how the world works and how actors are affected by conditions in the world (Haas, 2015). Concretely, science infuences governance by shaping frames and discourses, setting agendas, privileging policies, shaping the determination of who is entitled to representation in deliberations about technical and environmental issues, privileging reasoned discourse over emotional or purely interested discourses, and contributing to social learning. But it is a fragile power, which rests on the social foundations of Weberian deference. But because the reasons for deference to it rest on social beliefs, its infuence may be rehabilitated by reasserting those foundational beliefs.

Science exercises power because it leads to behavior which would not have occurred in its absence. Science has a demonstrable infuence on governance and exercises multiple forms of power in the sense of inducing actors to do things they would not otherwise have done. But this power is not exercised through direct infuence over the choices of other parties. Rather it occurs by shaping beliefs and expectations, and understandings about how the world works and how national interests are affecting by conditions in the world (Guzzini, 2017; Lukes, 1974). Science helps frame choices and collective understandings through path dependent lock-in social mechanisms as the resources commanded by the formal institution's scientists get deployed based on scientifc understanding. Science also tends to accumulate more authority through such institutions, as the institutions amplify the respect for the informal institutions of science. Barnett and Duvall call these infuences the institutional and productive forms of power (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). The social mechanisms by which such authority yields collective outcomes involve persuasion, learning, and institutionalized socialization of actors through new incentives and constraints deployed on behalf of the authoritative beliefs exercised by institutions which were themselves affected by the authority and legitimacy of the science. Steven Lukes was hesitant to call such infuence power (Lukes, 1974), as it seemingly rests on consensus and there is no public evidence of manipulation. Yet the effects are powerful, because they lead to outcomes which would not have occurred otherwise and may be counter to state's ex ante preferences.

While most of these social mechanisms are permissive or enabling, scientists' ideas can be causal in the necessary sense. For instance, without the ideas actors would not have a plausible understanding of what to do, or of the map of available options and policy destinations. Ideas, be they warranted or not, can cause outcomes. Consider stock market scares and runs on banks which are triggered by rumors, or various Cold War scenarios, where an idea generates behavioral effects. Or consider alarms about global warming—something which cannot be confrmed by individual observation—where once accepted the ideas give rise to actions.

Scientifc authority also has constitutive effects (Allan, 2017; Shackley & Wynne, 1996). By privileging the expertise of science at the expense of other possible claimants, and thus contributing to forms of social stratifcation, as well as privileging presumptive policies through the frames which experts help instill. Relying on science promotes reasoned and scientifc deliberation. Relying on scientifc institutions reinforces the legitimacy of the institutions of science, and vice versa. This latter constitutive effect appears to be well understood by the Conservative antiscience movement in the USA and UK, which have systematically launched attacks at science after the IPCC was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize to undermine the legitimacy and authority of the IPCC.

Because reliance on science is voluntary, adherence to its dictates operate in the absence of any explicit coercion, and the nature of scientifc power or infuence rests on its authority and legitimacy. Without any material capabilities to infuence decisions, or direct responsibility for making decisions, experts' infuence is indirect. It rests ultimately on their social authority and the willingness of states to voluntarily defer to the advice of experts and to be persuaded by it.

Thus scientifc power rests on scientists' authority, and the willingness of principals—be they states, IOs or frms—to willingly defer to their claims. Steven Bernstein writes that "legitimacy is the glue that links authority and power" (Bernstein, 2011, p. 20). Scientists enjoy privileged agency. Weberian *legal rational* authority comes with its own inherent logic (Weber, 1946/1958). It enjoins willing compliance with scientifc or bureaucratic dictates because of the perceived impartiality and reason of the source.

#### **Scientifc Legitimacy**

Legitimacy is thus a social construct that relates a group of presumptive experts to an audience willing to accede to their expertise. Ian Hurd writes that "legitimacy is the belief by an actor that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed" (Hurd, 2008). Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane speak of "the right to rule" (Buchanan & Keohane, 2006, p. 405). Michael Zürn uses the more nuanced language "believed to have the right to rule" (Zürn, 2005, p. 136).

This notion of legitimacy combines the traditional distinction between *normative* and *empirical* legitimacy. The distinction is a false dichotomy (Flathman, 1980; Zaum, 2013). Zaum writes:

It is problematic to neatly distinguish between … the normative dimension (the right to rule) and the sociological dimension of legitimacy (a widely held belief in the right to rule). However, one cannot just assert universal criteria against which legitimacy claims can be judged, as these criteria are depending on the particular audience making a normative judgement on an institution's legitimacy. They are the consequence of social processes of argumentation, persuasion and socialization, and subject … to social change. Similarly, judgements on an institution's sociological legitimacy, ascribed as the result of the congruence of the institutions' objectives and practices with the beliefs, values and expectations that provide a justifcation for its power, are made on the basis of certain normative suppositions. Thus, in practice both the normative and sociological dimensions of legitimacy are closely interlinked. (Zaum, 2013, p. 10)

Legitimacy in practice is the consequence of the normative expectations embraced by diverse audiences (Zürn, 2005). Their authority ultimately rests on a social relationship with the presumptive audience (Avant, Finnemore, & Sell, 2010; Zaum, 2013, 2016). The question, addressed in the following section, is what expectations of legitimacy are held in practice by states about science's role in global environmental governance specifcally, because states still make the decisions about delegating and deferring to science panels. The legitimacy criteria are generalizable to other areas of technical policy making.

The general concept of legitimacy is contested by scholars (Hurrell, 2005), but there is broad consensus on a variety of components that contribute to legitimacy. While it is unknown if these components are widely endorsed by audiences, and to what extent different audiences hold different criteria of legitimacy satisfying more criteria is better than fewer, legitimacy is a social fact, created by the actors who confer legitimacy on others (Bernstein, 2011). Indeed Steven Bernstein writes that "there are no universally shared criteria of legitimacy in global governance" (Bernstein, 2011, p. 22). There is very limited empirical work on the legitimacy of science, or general criteria of legitimacy at the global level (Börzel & Risse, 2005; Kanie, Andresen, & Haas, 2014; Rittberger & Schroeder, 2016; Zürn, Binder, & Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2012).

It is not just a matter of what is legitimate, but it is also a matter of who is legitimate to whom (McNamara, 2010). The granting of legitimacy depends on a social audience: "although legitimacy is mediated by the perceptions and behaviors of individuals (and one might add corporate entities) it is fundamentally a collective process" (Johnson, Dowd, & Ridgeway, 2006, p. 57). Such a question of audience is particularly important given the increasing number of multi actor networks involved in global governance where actors' legitimacy may not be the same in the eyes of every other actor (Avant et al., 2010; Kahler, 2009; Kanie et al., 2014).

Many criteria for legitimacy are invoked—many from democratic theory and normative theory. Legitimacy has been most widely studied in the EU and, more generally applied to global governance by David Held and Koenig-Archibugi's edited work on global governance more generally (Ebbin, 2012; Held & Koenig-Archibugi, 2005). The terms *authority* and *legitimacy* tend to be used interchangeably. Below I distinguish between input, process, output, and outcome criteria of legitimacy. This taxonomy is informed by Fritz Sharpf's the study of the legitimacy of the EU (Scharpf, 1999, 2009) and of climate change governance (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen & McGee, 2013). Alternative formulations weight input, output and substantive legitimacy (Nasiritousi, Hjerpe, & Bäckstrand, 2016). Some of the categories are a bit arbitrary, as fairness can be considered a process or an output. Despite slightly different taxonomies, the intents are similar.

These defnitions also span a variety of a number of different but overlapping sources of legitimacy criteria which are commonly identifed by different theoretical traditions. Essentialist or rationalist criteria involve inputs having to do with respect for expertise and generative norms, which Constructivists regard as social facts (Ruggie, 1983, 1993) and which more essentialists treat in terms of their functional utility. In terms of process, theoretical traditions interpret the same variable in different ways (McCarthy & Fluck, 2017). Rationalist analysis looks at transparency and accountability in terms of their functional contribution to solving public action problems, whereas Constructivists tend to treat them in terms of signaling and expressing the performative competence of experts (Adler & Pouliot, 2011) and their discursive practices. Regardless of the differences in social mechanisms associated with these factors, cross tradition consensus exists about the validity of the factors in the eyes of states.

Practitioners and high-profle science panel architects have refected about the legitimacy needs for scientifc institutions, refecting an awareness of many of the features of legitimacy expressed in the academic literature, and elaborated below (Bolin, 2007; Stafford-Smith et al., 2017; Kowarsch et al., 2016; Kullenberg, 1995; Leemans, 2008; Reid & Mooney, 2016; Tuinstra, Hordijk, & Kroeze, 2006; Watson, 2005). They stress the value of science in mitigating uncertainty and providing a range of policy options for states to choose between.

The institutional designers and members of the science policy community are acutely aware of the need to maintain and preserve the legitimacy of their institutions, and design them accordingly (Watson, 2005). Attention to legitimacy has informed the design of international science panels. They emphasize the need for recruiting scientists based on their professional reputations, as well as on geographic distribution.

For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has been consciously designed in order to enhance its legitimacy, including inviting multiple stakeholders through two legitimate institutions (International Council of Scientifc Unions (ICSU) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)) to contribute to IPBES deliberations (Esguerra, Beck, & Lidskog, 2017; Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 2016). At the Fourth Session of the IPBES the USA and Switzerland emphasized the needs for science to conform to IPBES' principles of usable knowledge, focusing on scientifc independence. credibility and timeliness (Earth Negotiations Bulletin, 2016).

#### *Assaults on Scientifc Legitimacy*

Targeted assaults on truth and reason in the USA and UK on the legitimacy of science have challenged the legitimacy and authority of scientifc institutions (Gauchat, 2012; Mooney, 2005; Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Organized anti-science campaigns targeted the IPCC after it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, as well as individual climate scientists and climate science more generally, and more recently the role of just about all experts in the US government and in particular those working on a wide array of environmental issues covering species protection, climate change, and air pollution.

Such threats arise from two sources. Deliberate attacks on its legitimacy come from the fossil fuel industry and from conservative republicans who wish to discredit the justifcations for environmental regulation. A populist epistemology across societies which values individual experience over professional expertise is a deeper force (Drezner, 2017; Mead, 2011; Nichols, 2017).

Such challenges run the risk of blurring the social domains of science and thus undermining its presumptive authority. Science critics try to supplant hybrid facts which are the domain of expertise and scientifc communities with social facts, which are subject to normative and interest based arguments by a wider array of actors. By moving political debate to the realm of social facts, critics seek to undermine science's privileged position.

#### **Legitimacy Criteria for Defending the Legitimacy of Science**

Since legitimacy is itself contested, and there are many plausible criteria for legitimacy, I here provide several of them which states are likely to apply to measure the legitimacy of scientifc institutions. In practice, institutions are likely to be regarded as legitimate if they conform to multiple criteria (Bernstein, 2011; Fung, 2006). Usable knowledge (Ebbin, 2012; Haas, 2004; Haas & Stevens, 2011; Mitchell, Clark, Cash, & Dickson, 2006; Cash et al., 2003)—knowledge which is credible, legitimate1 and salient—is an example of multiple legitimacy criteria. The greater

<sup>1</sup>Legitimacy in this context refers to input criteria.

the legitimacy the more infuence and the broader the deference by states to scientifc advice and likelihood of converting advice to policy and governance.

The World Values Survey in Figure 7.1 reveals signifcant heterogeneity between countries in terms of public confdence in expertise from 2010 to 2014. While the questionnaire did not ask directly about legitimacy or confdence in science, expertise provides a good proxy for scientifc legitimacy.

These fndings should be taken with a grain of salt. It is unclear what the survey is truly measuring. Faith in expertise could merely refect diminished faith in the state rather than a positive endorsement of the legitimacy of scientifc expertise.

The World Values Survey fndings are confrmed by the International Social Survey Program, which indicates that less than 50% of respondents worldwide believe the modern science will solve our environmental problems with little change to our way of life (Pammett, 2015) with fairly consistent responses occurring from 1993 to 2010, although 70–80% of respondents believe that science does more good than harm (Pammett, 2015). In the USA, highly differentiated responses to science and its claims to legitimacy are based on political orientation (Leiserowitz, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Feinberg, & Howe, 2013).

Citizens vary regarding their confdence in institutions, and in different scientifc institutions as well. According to Gallup polls, Americans express a great deal or quite a lot confdence in the military, well above that of the medical system, and other social institutions (Gallup, n.d.). Confdence in scientifc research as a foundation for public policy varies widely by country, although most countries believe that they are better off from the use of science and technology (National Science Board, 2016).

**Fig. 7.1** Confdence in expertise by country. Source: Design by Author. Adapted from World Values Survey: Round Six, by Inglehart et al. (Eds.) (2014, pp. 279–280). Madrid: JD Systems Institute. Retrieved from https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp. Copyright 2014 by the JD Systems Institute. Reprinted with permission

The Pew Research Center suggests that 76% of Americans express a great deal (21%) or a fair amount (55%) of confdence in scientists. Medical scientists claimed slightly more confdence (24% a great deal, 60% a fair amount) (Pew Research Center, 2016). Scientists—medical and nonmedical—were second in social institutions trusted by Americans, with the military at the top and elected offcials at the bottom.

On what is the legitimacy of science based? Scharpf provides the standard taxonomy for legitimacy criteria, distinguishing between input, process and output/ outcome criteria of legitimacy (Scharpf, 2009).

#### *Inputs*

Input legitimacy relates to the background beliefs which other actors apply to the role of science in modern governance and societal relations. Input criteria are typically expressed as functional roles, as broader sociological social facts, and through their affnity with broader generative norms and principles. Inputs include such factors as the social belief in the value of science for governance, the social prestige enjoyed by scientists, the general norm of meritocracy in modern democracies, and the consensual foundation of scientifc advice. Processes include a sense of fairness in the universal application of scientifc inputs, the transparency of expert selection, the transparency of how scientifc advice is provided to deliberative bodies, and the discursive practices of the experts which rest on the narratives of world politics. Outputs and outcomes involve whether the result of the application of expert scientifc advice provides public goods and valued outcomes.

#### **Functional Inputs**

Historically science has enjoyed a social reputation for providing useful information to the state and decision makers. Science performs many functional roles in modern governance. Sociologists of science argue that science helps ameliorate risk and uncertainty, while also establishing categories to be governed and consolidating the social authority of scientists (Barnes, Bloor, & Henry, 1996; Gieryn, 1999; Nowotny, 2016). Economic historians attribute its legitimacy to the instrumental value that science provides for promoting capitalist power and wealth accumulation (Mokyr, 2017; Mowery & Rosenberg, 1989; North, 2005). Sociologists of knowledge attribute it to the power science grants to the state for controlling its society (Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1986). Moreover, scientists *cum* scientists have been socially recognized as possessing valuable skills in public administration and governance which politicians in the modern regulatory state regard as essential (Drori et al., 2003; Ezrahi, 1990; Lentsch & Weingart, 2011; Lindblom & Cohen, 1979; Shanahan & Khagram, 2006). Science, along with other bodies of expertise that are overtly nonpolitical allow politicians to resolve debates without "overt expressions of interests and threats of violence" (Kennedy, 2016, p. 48).

#### **Reputation**

Science's legitimacy is a social fact, in so far as the social prestige and authority of science enjoys a taken for granted aspect. Its reputation for expertise underlies its legitimacy (Dunlop, 2000; National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017), just as scientists role as experts rest on their legitimacy. Yet, just as they are experts because they enjoy perceived legitimacy, they are also legitimate because they are seen to be experts in a given domain (Sending, 2015).

Scientists' legitimacy rests on their social credibility, which in rests on the presumptive competence and expertise of actors. Dan Bodansky argues that scientifc expertise enjoys legitimacy in international deliberations because it confers trust in the warranted foundations of collective decisions. Scientists professional pedigrees and reputation for mastery of technical material confers legitimacy (Bodansky, 1999).

The usable knowledge literature focused attention on the credibility of scientists' expertise, based on their reputation, accuracy, track record, and presumptive impartiality (Clark, 1990; Haas, 2004). Reputation, as well as confdence derives from publications in highly regarded peer reviewed journals, positions at prestigious institutions, and advanced degrees and experience in relevant disciplines. Individuals need not be prominent in their felds, though (Anderegg, Prall, Harold, & Schneider, 2010) impartiality is measured by independence from state sponsors.

However, expertise alone appears to be insuffcient for commanding authority. Intuitively, experts must command specialized knowledge in the domain in which they are providing policy advice, as reputation is highly issue specifc. Consider the numerous letters to the editor by Nobel Laureates on a broad array of issues of global politics, with little impact. Or the failed campaign by Linus Pauling claiming the benefts of vitamin C, which was well beyond the scope of his professional recognition. When scientists claim authority their claims must refect competence, which is related to their areas of expertise and experience.

#### **Social Norms, Values and Principles**

Science's affnity with broader social norms, values and principles are likely to enhance its legitimacy to the extent that it explicitly articulates universal goals, or helps member states achieve those goals (Aggarwal, 1998; Reus-Smit, 1997). A number of broad principles have been identifed in the IR literature, including multilateralism (Cox, 1992; Keohane, 1990; Ruggie, 1993); embedded liberalism (Bernstein, 2001; Ruggie, 1982); state sovereignty (Biersteker & Weber, 1996); liberal multilateralism (Deudney & Ikenberry, 1999; Ikenberry, 2011) and possibly as an emergent norm, sustainable development.

Mike Hulme, borrowing from the STS literature, argues that science is inherently political and normative—because of its distributional consequences and the ways that it is used in practice by decision makers to advance their prior goals – so that the best science is that which is explicitly linked to shared norms (Hulme, 2012). The legitimacy of science thus hinges on its application to socially shared ends (Turnhout, Dewulf, & Hulme, 2016). In a complementary manner scientifc institutions must resonate with domestic norms and goals as well (Cortell & Davis, 1996).

#### **Consensus**

One of the major foundations for scientifc legitimacy is its ability to project consensus about understanding technical problems. A common front underscore the authority of scientifc knowledge and expertise, as well as providing a rhetorical frewall against challenges.

#### *Process*

A number of arguments have been presented about social processes which confer legitimacy on institutions and actors.

#### **Fairness—Respecting Alternative Viewpoints**

Robert Keohane (Buchanan & Keohane, 2006; Keohane, 2001), Thomas Franck (Franck, 1990), and Oran Young (Young, 1991) speak of the need for fairness as a criterion of the legitimacy of international institutions in the eyes of states, and also presumably civil society. Fairness often has two senses. One is the common usage applied to outcomes, that everyone gets something.

For science, the focus must be applied to the deliberative process by which confdent formulations are generated. The process itself must be regarded as legitimate, often by providing for voicing alternative viewpoints, as well as not being biased towards privileged actors. For science panels to enjoy legitimacy they must express consensus while also providing for the expression of a variety of viewpoints.

#### **Transparency of Expert Selection and Expert Consensus**

A transparent process by which observers may understand how decisions were reached, and how experts were selected will enhance the legitimacy of a scientifc institution. Inclusiveness and participation are particularly valued legitimizing criteria for groups with little ability to promote input based legitimacy, and with limited ability to appraise political processes, such as developing countries, and not state

actors including NGOs and the private sector (Kahler, 2005; Scholte, 2005). Geographic distribution of experts is a widely invoked form of procedural legitimacy.

#### **Transparency of the Deliberative Process**

The transparency of deliberation and contestation are valued processes for science in international affairs (Stevenson & Dryzek, 2014). Such public revelations confrm the ways in which expertise is performed and conclusive fndings are warranted. Beyond immediate transparency, such arrangements also contribute to refexivity, and thus more effective policy and politically relevant knowledge as second order objectives, which states value (Dryzek & Pickering, 2017; Stevenson, 2016).

#### **Discursive Practices**

Agreement on discursive practices may also serve as a key source of legitimacy for scientifc expertise (Adler & Bernstein, 2005; Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Börzel & Risse, 2005; Green, Ward, & McConnachie, 2007; Helgadóttir, 2016; Risse, 2003; Steffek, 2003). Discursive practice delimit the parameters of permissible deliberations and the legitimate forms of communication by establishing competent performance. The vocabulary which is used confers legitimacy, such as legality democracy, social justice, progress (Stephen, 2015) and even sustainability. Thus, in UN venues scientifc experts must speak the arcane language of UN precedents as well as that of science.

#### *Outputs and Outcomes*

Institutions may enjoy legitimacy if they provide valuable outcomes for their constituencies, particularly the provision of global public goods (Hurd, 1999). While one could consider the variety of indirect second order and possibly sinister outcomes which states may desire, such as delaying decisions, creating or breaking up coalition, and simply moving the goalposts of policy deliberations, such choices are beyond the simpler frst order outputs and outcomes valued by states. Under such circumstances, such as with central banks, illegitimate processes may be overlooked if the effects of the institutions are believed to work (Vibert, 2007). Functional bodies such as science panels are likely to be valued for their direct contributions more than their indirect political functions (Steffek, 2015).

#### *Tensions Between Legitimacy Criteria*

Not all criteria may be obtained simultaneously. For instance, there are tensions and even contradictions between satisfying input criteria for disciplinary expertise and inclusive process criteria favoring multiple stakeholders, when some civil society stakeholders enjoy less legitimacy than scientists in the eyes of most states. Similarly, equity concerns with inclusive geographic distribution may run up against notions of competence and expertise unless great care is taken in the selection process. Deliberative transparency may contradict expert authority. By being honest about the degree of consensus and contestation within the scientifc community, they may run the risk of undermining their reputation for authoritative understanding. Scientifc independence may be at odds with states' desires for maintaining sovereignty and a range of political control over domestic policy.

#### **Restoring Scientifc Legitimacy**

Strikingly, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of science have relied on a relatively small number of critiques of climate scientists: questioning the consensus within the scientifc community, the accuracy of their predictions, and their impartiality. Given the wider array of social legitimacy criteria, defenders of scientifc legitimacy can organize more compelling responses by invoking multiple justifcations for scientifc legitimacy. Ten criteria for legitimacy were cited in the legitimacy literature in IR, associated with input, process and output/outcome measures. The following Table 7.1 summarizes these legitimacy criteria.

Defenders of science can offer a discourse which stresses multiple benefts from structured scientifc environmental advice, including the record of its association with more effective environmental treaties, the high degree of consensus amongst

**Table 7.1** Legitimacy criteria for organized science in world politics

*Note.* Source: Design by author

peer reviewed published climate change research, the excruciating detail and process of IPCC reviews, the growing geographic equity of scientists involved in science panels, and the underlying norms of modern public policy resting on expertise.

Scientists should focus on two audiences for such campaigns: government elites, and mass publics. For dealing with government elites, scientists should provide clarity on the process of developing consensus and advice, explaining clearly why they believe what they do in nontechnical terms. For dealing with mass publics that are experiential in their epistemology, scientists should tell stories and offer clear examples (Weiler, Keller, & Olex, 2012).

#### **Conclusion**

In a post truth era where expertise is under siege, what are the prospects for the future of science diplomacy and of deference to international science panels? Science's role in world politics is challenged, but not irreversibly. Critics have principally focused on the input criteria of accuracy and reputation. The extent to which these challenges may fully undermine science and science panels' legitimacy may be exaggerated, given the much wider number of legitimacy criteria which science panels continue to refect than the narrow ones on which they are attacked.

#### **References**

**Peter M. Haas** is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published extensively in the felds of international relations theory, global governance, international environmental politics, and the politics of science.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## **Chapter 8 Mobilizing Intangibles under the Acceluction Regime**

**Ahmed Bounfour**

Intangibles, including hard intangibles such as intellectual property rights (IPRs), are important sources of growth and innovation in any context (Bounfour, 2003; Bounfour & Miyagawa, 2005; OECD, 2013; The World Bank, 2006). Intangibles represent the main components of performance for frms and ecosystems: R & D, innovation, competences, data, processes, brands, reputation, trust, brands, patents, copyrights, among others. They are important ingredients in transactions and socioeconomizing, for example, in the way production and innovation systems are organized. In the business sphere, the epistemic view has been—and is still—built on an organizational setting that is relatively stable in space and time (the frm). But new challenges and new production systems are emerging; in these new systems, society is no longer a target, but is more a resource and a key player for innovation. In the specifc case of IPRs, we need to understand their role, contribution, and evolution under emerging production regimes.

Several arguments underline this point. Analyses of value creation are fundamentally based on traditional spaces, consisting of frms operating in transactional markets (the transaction regime). But, since at least the mid-1980s, frms, especially larger ones, have been the subject of a deep transformation, and new modalities and value creation spaces have appeared. Outsourcing (since the 1989 Kodak contract),

A. Bounfour (\*)

European Chair on Intangibles & RITM, Univeristé Paris-Saclay, Faculté Jean Monnet, Sceaux, France e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
This chapter draws upon content from my book *Digital Futures, Digital Transformation, from Lean Production to Acceluction*, published by Springer (notably Chapters 4 and 5). It also builds on my discussions with participants at the Knowledge and Space International Symposium on Professions and Profciency, organized by Professor Johannes Glückler, Heidelberg University, Klaus Tschira Foundation, Villa Bosch, Heidelberg on July 26–28, 2019. I am very grateful to Professor Glückler for his invitation, and the opportunity to engage in a stimulating dialogue with leading experts, at such a wonderful venue.

networking, and now open innovation have become hard facts within such a transformation. In parallel, and thanks to the digital revolution, new value production methods have appeared and, in many cases, the transaction is related to a multitude of links. Therefore, it could be argued that the new production system is fundamentally a production of links, as a complement to the production of transactions.

Digital transformation is deeply challenging how value is created. Close attention must be paid to value spaces, in particular, their organizational topography and dynamics. From this, emerges the need for a deep understanding of its singular nature. We need to examine its fundaments, especially its generative nature and the way it continuously explores and accelerates the links between existing and new value spaces. These observations led to the development of the concept of *acceluction*—the accelerated production of links. This notion was an outcome of the CIGREF Foundation's long-term (1970–2020) Information Systems Dynamics (ISD) program and it aims to characterize the fundamental nature of new production systems digitality. As these links are the new drivers for value creation in digital spaces, we need to delineate their nature (transactional, organic, and semi-organic) (Bounfour, 2005). Such a deep change in the way of producing value has key implications for business models, job creation, and the global power of frms, nations, and organizations.

The empirical and analytical work carried out under the wide-ranging ISD program resulted in several publications.1 The various projects that were supported by the program have revealed, directly or indirectly, that value production has been widely adopted by businesses. No longer limited to the traditional boundaries of the enterprise, it now encompasses many other domains: competitors, complementary resources (such as those of suppliers or relatively unconnected sectors), customers, mobility (as a new production space), data, social spaces and the private time of employees. This expansion suggests a new mode of production in which digitality is a key component, and where the boundaries and guiding principles are yet to be determined. The question of mobilizing intangibles under the accelucted regime is, frst and foremost, a question of governing different and emerging value spaces. This leads me to the key research question of the chapter: What are the characteristics of the emerging regime of digitality and the role of intangibles in such a regime? By a regime, I understand the set of organizational disposals that a techno-system calls for frms and ecosystems to adopt. The acceluction regime, which will be characterized later, calls for frms and organizations to accelerate the production of links among numerous value spaces. Such an acceleration is the key organizational disposal that is needed to adopt in order to succeed and beneft from the potential of such a regime.

<sup>1</sup>Bounfour, A. (2011). *Acceluction in Action*, CIGREF Foundation; Bounfour, A. (2013). *ISD international research program: An overview of wave B projects*; Bounfour, A. (2014). *An overview of wave C projects*, https://www.cigref.fr/archives/fondation-cigref/

#### **The Space-Time Dimension as a Starting Point**

Let us consider the question of space-time as a starting point. As Krugman (1998) underlined, space is the fnal frontier of economic analysis, and digital has very frmly put it back in the limelight. More specifcally, the articulation between space and time is becoming a core element in the emerging mode of production, mainly due to the digital revolution. The analysis of propositions that were put forward under the ISD program indicates that one of the underlying dimensions of the emerging enterprise is the acceleration of links between different spaces and, thus, a space-time contraction.

Acceleration was the subject of Hartmut Rosa's post-doctoral thesis (Rosa, 2005/2010). I echo some of his arguments here, extending them to the digital domain. Rosa distinguishes between three periods of production: premodern (before the industrial revolution), modern (corresponding roughly to twentieth century industrialization), and postmodern (late twentieth, early twenty-frst century). These three periods of human development (at least in the West) are characterized by rules that govern social relations, including the management of productive time. In this respect, the modern period is characterized by a clear differentiation between work time and free time, with particular attention paid to productive time. The postmodern period is characterized by the emergence of a fusion of times (productive and personal) and, in the process, the diminishing relevance of time controls. This is only made possible by digital acceleration: Its ubiquitous and instantaneous nature induce a considerable expansion of the production space, making attempts to control it, a very hard exercise.

#### *Time and Space in Digital Worlds*

Territoriality has been defned in terms of control (Sack, 1986). Digitality fundamentally challenges such a concept, or at least invites us to consider its main components, and the way they are articulated, jointly or sequentially. For organizations (frms), these issues have become part of daily life, but changes can also be observed at the more macroscopic level. Territoriality and space are a question of time, for example of relationships between spaces. The ubiquity of digitality has an important impact on the space–time relationship in the new production mode. As Le Goff (1977) demonstrated, in the medieval age, merchants organized time and space around clock time; productive space-time was aligned with their priorities, and not those of the church. In the context of value creation—and therefore capital circulation—time was organized by technological instruments, clocks (Harvey, 1989, pp. 170–171). In later work, Harvey (2005) builds on Lefebvre's work on space (Lefebvre, 2000), distinguished between absolute space (walls, bridges, etc.), relative space (e.g., circulation, time-space compression), and relational space (vision, emotions). These three distinctions are being challenged by the emergence of

digitality. In a similar vein, Hassan (2003) develops the concept of the chronoscopic society, which sees the conjunction of neoliberal globalization and information technology as a way to impact the way knowledge is disseminated in advanced societies. This nexus leads to an information ecology that affects individuals, culture, and society. Hassan goes on to argue that we are rapidly moving from a chronological temporality of clock time, to a digitality-compressed real time, which he, after Paul Virilio, names chronoscopic time (Hassan, 2003, p. 5).

Time is a central notion in our working and personal life. Clock time constitutes the central point of reference in daily life. Work time is the point of reference for individuals, organizations, and societies. Mumford (1934/1967, quoted in Hassan, 2003) argued that, in many respects, the clock was the central arm of the industrial revolution; but, more than the railway or the steam engine, the ICT revolution compresses both space and time. Taylor's application of the principles of scientifc management illustrates the importance of clock time in modern societies: Workers actions are controlled by clocks, and they may even need to beat the clock to survive. Most people suffer from a chronic lack of time. As Hassan (2003, p. 133) notes, "Being increasingly suspended in the real time of chronoscopic temporality means a lack of time to read, to study, to refect, to consider, to concentrate, to debate and discuss, to care, to empathize, to analyze, to interpret, to scrutinize and to sympathize—and more". In post-modern societies, time has become a scarce resource, a point that is underlined by Eriksen (2001), who refers to the "tyranny of the moment". The acceleration of everything has led to a scarcity of resources, including the attention of others. This, naturally, has an impact on the status of knowledge.

#### *The Acceleration of Everything*

The notion of space is also altered by digital. Individual space is impacted by the ubiquity of digital artefacts. The contractual space is also challenged by digitality, since contracts are traditionally defned by reference to geographical space (Simone, 2012, p. 25). Following Rosa (2005/2010), among others, we can posit the hypothesis that the space-time of collective action is contracting, which poses a serious problem for organizations that, until now, have been governed by vertical hierarchies and control (bureaucratic organizations, or authoritarian governments). Adopting a broad-brush anthropological perspective, we may be witnessing the emergence of a new kind of behavior (and a new kind of human being), linked to the ubiquity of digital and the accompanying acceleration.

Digital objects and systems appear less like elements of infrastructure, and more like boundary objects in the transformation of business and society, and associated modes of innovation and control. Many studies highlight the experience dimension. Experience, the dictionary tells us, is all to do with *perception* and *sensation*, and is the etymological cousin of *experiment*. In the modern world, it is a very important dimension of the emerging production mode. Digital is a continuous space of experience both for individuals (or customers), and businesses and their strategies. The latter are conceived less and less in linear terms—to gain competitive advantage—and more and more in terms of engagement and experiment, this continuous process of trial and error ending with the implementation of ideas that work.2 We can see similarities with the shrinkage of space-time: the ever shorter space-time of collective action, with unstable roles and blurred organizational boundaries. In this context, acceleration emerges as an essential transformational phenomenon, with impacts and implications that are not yet fully understood. The acceleration of spatiotemporal links, in particular, calls for a fundamental refection on its nature, its future, and the associated risks.

The historian, Jacques Le Goff (1977) argues that as early as the Middle Ages in Europe, industrial mode of production isolated productive time. This had become controllable following the invention of ad hoc measurement instruments: clocks, timing machines, and the associated concept of *hours worked*. Modernity is, above all, about controlling predefned spaces (the enterprise). It is now clearly established that, in the current phase of late modernity, the boundaries between these spaces are being eroded; not only is this a source of tension, but it also represents a fundamental change in the way things are produced. This does not, of course, in any way herald the disappearance of factories, or the modes of production that are traditionally associated with them. But it does herald the ubiquity of productive time, correlated with the ubiquity of digital. This question and, in particular, the issue of the equivalence of norms, can also be considered in the long term, from a sociological angle.

#### *The Postmodern Condition and Digitality*

Lyotard (1979) provides an elegant analysis of the emergence of the postmodern condition and the role of knowledge. The postmodern condition is contrasted with the modern condition, for example the existence of a metadiscours: "I will use the term *modern* to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative we decided to call modern 'the science that refers to it to legitimize itself'" (Lyotard, 1979, p. 7). From this angle, digital technologies can be seen as a source of a grand narrative of societies. It could even be said that they are "the coup de grâce unless we interpret 'digiworld' itself as the latest great narrative?" (Malecki & Moriset, 2008, p. 222). Digitality can, then, be considered as both a source, and the matrix, for a hyper postmodern society.

The postmodern condition and digitality can also be related to the issue of learning modalities and, therefore, intelligence. What approaches do postmodern

<sup>2</sup>Cf. McGrath, R. G. (2013). The end of competitive advantage: How to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

societies take to learning modalities? Simone (2012, pp. 32–37) argues that we are in the "third phase" of the history of knowledge, that is, how ideas and information are created. The frst phase coincided with the invention of writing, which made it possible to present information on a stable support. The second began with the invention of printing, which allowed the large-scale production of knowledge via an *ad hoc* instrument: the book. These two phases are similar in the sense that they are both mental operations targeting texts. The third phase is mainly driven by videos and computers.

The invention of writing has had a huge impact on human beings, "it led to an immense increase in the importance of vision compared to hearing", and the emergence of a specifc mode of perception: *alphabetic vision* (Simone, 2012, p. 55). This has had an impact on the development of cognitive capabilities in modern humans. With the advent of digital technology, we are moving from alphabetic vision (based on sequences) to nonalphabetic nonvision (based on simultaneity). Hence simultaneous learning and, therefore, *simultaneous intelligence* has risen in importance (compared to sequential equivalents). This form of intelligence may be associated with a new type of human, the *Homo Videns* described by Sartori (1998, quoted in Simone, 2012), in his analysis of the transformation of societies through the media artifact of television. People (especially children) lose their ability for abstraction and, therefore, their ability to position themselves in space and time.

Digitality is, at a minimum, a factor that is accelerating the emergence of a postmodern mankind—and, therefore, a postmodern enterprise, in which space and time are greatly compressed. As a result, relationships between people, and aspects of organizations, are becoming more fuid. The questions that arise are: If we follow the norms argument, to what extent does this instability call for a new form of governance and institutions? And, what new equilibria are needed between different organizational design principles and frameworks?

#### **Five Key Dimensions of Digitality**

A thematic analysis of the propositions formulated by the ISD program points to fve key dimensions in the digital transformation of the enterprise: (1) The expansion and plurality of spaces; (2) The articulation between transactional and organic links; (3) The spatiotemporal structure; (4) Organizational plasticity; and, fnally, the central element of the analysis (5) The acceleration of links (see Fig. 8.1).

**Fig. 8.1** The acceleration of links, at the core of digital transformation. Reprinted from *Digital futures, digital transformation: From lean production to acceluction* (p. 70), by A. Bounfour, 2016, Cham: Springer. Copyright 2016 by Springer. Reprinted with permission

#### *The Expansion and Plurality of Value Creation Spaces and the Transformation of Modes of Value Production*

Value creation spaces have mushroomed with the advent of digital. The borders of the enterprise have become fuzzy, and products and services are being developed in multiple spaces. Along with customers, suppliers, and internal resources—the traditional points of reference for business decisions—we must now consider complementors, mobility (customers and employees), the private time of company personnel, and the immense data space.

Meanwhile, value production modes are changing fundamentally. Traditionally, value is perceived (including in economic theory) as a process of consumption and, therefore, literally the destruction—of an output (of tangible goods in particular). In the digital economy, as in the digital society, value is created and deployed by multiple channels, including experiential (notably that of the customer experience). Value is created by an individual and collective experience. This experiential process reinforces the indirectly transactional character of value creation modes. In digital spaces, the transaction is not directly linked to the underlying processes. The Google user, for example, is a resource rather than an object of the transaction, but this attention resource is mobilized for a transactional purpose, namely advertising. The Nike+ shoes that were analyzed by one of the ISD projects (El Sawy & Pereira, 2013) were designed as part of an experiential system, in which the end purpose is transactional. However, here the customer relationship is more complex. The product-service transaction takes place in the context of a global production system in which the experience of the information fow (behavior, benchmarking of individual users, belonging and contributing to a community of users) is a key part of the transaction. The plurality of spaces has been compounded by the complexity of production systems.

#### *The Articulation of Transactional and Organic Links*

From Ronald Coase onward, economists have theorized about the existence of the frm as a resource that is more-or-less organic, rather than by recourse to the market. Williamson developed the arguments that are essential to understanding the dynamics of resource organization, between the market and the hierarchy. The theory of organizations, which builds on the work of Chandler, justifes the singularity of the frm and develops a historical perspective for analyzing its modes of confguration over time. Digitality, associated with the long-term deployment of new managerial practices (outsourcing, networking of activities, etc.) leads us to revisit the question of the relation between transactionality and organicity.

Transactions, in other words, market relations are deployed on a massive scale within the enterprise, making it an organized market. However, this deployment is limited by cost and ineffciency, notably with respect to empowering innovation. Innovation requires a minimum level of organic relations between individuals in order to spread fully throughout the company's internal space. Symmetrically, the market—and therefore the transaction process—once again becomes a key lever for organizing digital, including one of the most complex activities: innovation. Nowadays, people with varying degrees of expertise can collaborate on an innovation, without any prior contact. In other words, digital, and its associated platforms, enables innovation to be organized around purely transactional links. If we extend the spectrum to all forms of social interaction, we fnd that organicity does not necessarily predominate; there is often a degree of hybridization between the two modes or regimes. Generally, in the work sphere, interactions now combine transactional modes of governance with more-or-less organic modes (dominated by recognition-based relations).

#### *The Management of Space–Time*

Control over space-time is a vital dimension of business management. It is often seriously undermined by digital, which can clash with traditional mechanisms. Several ISD projects examined how companies have revisited their way of doing things, especially in areas that touch on product design, in geographically distributed contexts, with broad functional implications. The KBO 2020 project, for example, illustrates the need for R&D-intensive enterprises to develop instruments to control spatial and temporal *alignment tensions* when developing products with tight time constraints. The Desvaldo project showed how a global software development frm was obliged to invest heavily in developing the skills of its Chinese partner, drawing on agile methods, in order to cope with geographical constraints (one of the two sites was located in the United Kingdom, the other was in China).

#### *Organizational Liquidity*

Here, *liquidity* refers to the plastic (malleable) character of the enterprise, its boundaries, and its activities. Liquidity is greatly facilitated by virtuality: "the virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence" (Lévy, 1998, p. 16). Plasticity is signifcantly facilitated and amplifed by digitality, not to mention the generative nature of digital technology. The development of cloud applications, crowdsourcing, and open innovation solutions are just a few illustrations of the huge move towards organizational liquidity, which will have a determining effect on the future enterprise.

#### *The Acceleration of Links*

The preceding elements prefgure an open production system that is dominated by accelerated links between a plethora of value creation spaces that are internal and external to the enterprise. Internally, this is illustrated by the wholesale deployment of mechanisms that shrink functional, disciplinary and geographical distances. Externally, the massive use of market mechanisms to develop ideas and innovation programs also attests to the importance of links between the different value creation spaces.

#### **Acceluction: The Mode of Production of Emerging Digital Uses**

Given the above considerations, is it time to recognize the emergence of a new, digitally-driven, mode of production and, thus, of business organization? If so, what are its key characteristics, and what are the implications for companies? The answer to the former question seems to be yes, for reasons that are developed below. The characterization of the emergent mode of production is a key step in the design of the 2020 enterprise. Drawing on work conducted by ISD partners and, more generally, the literature on the transformation of socioeconomic systems and their modes of governance, in the following we characterize—in both structural and conceptual terms—the emergent mode of production. First, however, we present a brief review of some of the concepts related to dominant modes of production, putting them in historical perspective. At the conceptual level, the dominant modes of production in the automotive industry were, until recently, dominant. Here, indeed, the concept of *lean production* has dominated over the past 30 years, along with its managerial variants (*lean management*, etc.).

#### *The Lean Production as a Starting Point*

Let us pause for a moment and look specifcally at the space–time dimension of lean production. The concept grew out of a major MIT program in 1985 on the future of the automobile industry, and was mooted by John Krafcik (Krafcik, 1988). Lean refers to a system put in place by Toyota in the late 1950s, following organizational innovations introduced by Taiichi Ohno. In the early 1960s, a centralized system for the streamlined production of a material good (in this case, cars) was introduced by optimizing end-to-end fows: from supply chain, to production, to customer relations (Womack, Jones, & Ross, 1991). Lean focuses on controlling material fows between industrial operators (suppliers and large manufacturers). The production space is relatively circumscribed and is limited to enterprises in the sector (including the distribution network), although customer needs can also be integrated (lean being a substitute for mass production). Lean production followed observations of the dominant production system—the Toyota system. Worldwide, carmakers, especially American producers in the 1980s, sought to understand the system and replicate it. Lean is more advanced than mass production, in so far as it optimizes material and information fows, including those that relate to demand. It does so in a relatively confned and controlled system (see Fig. 8.2), consisting of suppliers, the enterprise itself, and its customers (distributors).

The fow space is pre-identifed and, in some ways, relatively controlled. Even in a so-called "extended" enterprise, the core enterprise controls and manages the production system, albeit with an important adjustment relative to mass production: the need to integrate downstream information fows (from customers). Despite the

**Fig. 8.2** The lean production space. Adapted from by A. Bounfour (2016, p. 76). Copyright 2016 by Springer. Adapted with permission

extension of the productive space, the system remains relatively closed and, above all, stable. Toyota pioneered the introduction of standards in the 1950s and it was only much later, in the 1980s, that the practice spread to Europe, notably with the establishment of electronic data interchange and the emergence of standardization bodies (Galia in France, and its European counterpart Odette). As Table 8.1 shows, lean production is very much a production system governed by fow optimization.

The concept of lean production is defned in Womack et al. (1991) (see Table 8.1). Their book contrasts the mass producer (e.g., the Western producer) with the lean producer (e.g., the Toyota producer). They say, "The mass-producer uses narrowly skilled professionals to design products made by unskilled or semiskilled workers tending expensive, single-purpose machines" (Womack et al., 1991, p. 13), whereas "the lean producer, by contrast, combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter. Towards this end, lean producers employ teams of multiskilled workers at all levels of the organization and use highly fexible, increasingly automated machines to produce volumes of products in enormous variety" (Womack et al., 1991, p. 13).

So, lean production is distinguished from mass production not only by the skills' profles of workers and resource use, but also, and more importantly, by the continuous search for optimization. As the authors stress: "Perhaps the most striking difference between mass production and lean production lies in their ultimate objectives. Mass producers set a limited goal for themselves—'good enough'. This translates into an acceptable number of defects, a maximum acceptable level of inventory, a narrow range of standardized products. To do better, they argue, would cost too much or exceed human capabilities" (Womack et al., 1991, p. 13); "Lean producers, on the other hand, set their sights explicitly on perfection: continually declining cost, zero defects, zero inventories, and endless product variety" (Womack et al., 1991, pp. 13–14). If we adopt the ISD program language, lean production is fundamentally a system of optimization of (mostly) physical fux within production spaces in the

**Table 8.1** Lean production: Key characteristics

automotive industry (suppliers, original equipment manufacturers and, to a lesser extent, customers). Such a system naturally focuses on specifc business functions: factories, design, suppliers, and dealerships.

However, digitality, bolstered by the internet, has radically transformed the economic, managerial, and social dimensions of the production space. As we noted earlier, it has become both broad and unstable. There is a degree of indeterminacy in its boundaries and in the identity of its participants. This phenomenon is amplifed, at the sociological level, by the advent of postmodernity. One of the characteristics of the latter is a lesser willingness to heed rational, structured discourse and, consequently, a tendency to pay less attention to the forms of organizational order linked to mass production. Although there is no causality between postmodernity and digitality (the former preceded the latter chronologically), digitality has clearly amplifed certain behavioral traits consistent with late modernity, such as individualism, volatility, and skepticism (notably about the existence of stable structures). At the symbolic level, value creation has moved toward immaterial objects and signifers, of which, one digital variant relates to exposure in digital spaces.

#### *The End of Materialism, the Beginning of Immateriality3*

Another way to conceive of the structure of the world, and of human existence, is to consider the question from the viewpoint of the transition of technological systems along two axes: a materials-energy axis, which dominated the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a man-biosphere relationship-structure of time axis, dating from the beginning of the twenty-frst century. The frst axis is what Thierry Gaudin (Gaudin, 2013) has called the *axis of materialism* and the second, the *axis of immaterialism*. Following Simondon, among others, Gaudin points to the decline of materialistic values such as domination, conquest, and performance, and the emergence of immaterial values such as individuation, empathy, and resilience.

In this context, the questions—both theoretical and practical—that we must answer are twofold: (1) What are the arguments that justify the design of a new mode of production? And, subsequently, (2) What are its main constituents? These two points are addressed in the following, which is restricted, for the most part, to ISD's feld of expertise: socioeconomic aspects of the enterprise.