The Biopolitical Public Domain: the Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain — a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally-situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege

Econometric approaches to the measurement of research productivity

The measurement of research productivity is receiving more and more attention. Besides scholars that are interested in understanding how research works and evolves over time, there are supranational, national and local governments, and national evaluation agencies, as well as various stakeholders, including managers of academic and research institutions, scholars and more generally the wider public, who are interested in the accountability and transparency of the scholarly production process. The main objective of this chapter is to analyze econometric approaches to research productivity and efficiency, highlighting what econometric approaches to research assessment can offer and what their benefit is, compared to traditional bibliometric or informetric approaches. We describe the nature of, and the ambiguities connected to, the measurement of research productivity, as well as the potential of econometric approaches for research measurement and assessment. Finally, we propose a checklist when developing econometric models of research assessment as a starting point for further research