In his contribution to The Laws of the Markets, Michel Gallon (1998) turns to the phenomenon of externalities, putting it in both negative and positive light.
In the negative case, market transactions simply exclude interests which may be affected by their operations but do not appear in the calculations; in the positive case such effects will be recognised, a characteristic for example of situations where business activities lead to the generation of information in a technological and thus a knowledge-based economy.
Introducing this exposition, Callon tells us that he wishes to extend a concept familiar from economics in order to enhance the sociological understanding of markets. He suggests that externality overlies the more fundamental concept of framing (ultimately from Goffman) and its complicating counterpart, overflowing. If I add an anthropological twist (of a British kind), it is to offer a comparison between two situations amenable to this re-visioning of how phenomena come to have internal and external aspects. I do so with an agenda of my own, which appears to have little to do with the subject under discussion but is nonetheless affected by how we describe the technological economy. I am interested in its location of ethical principles.My two examples take up possibilities on the positive side. Both echo situations on which Callon also draws. Thus he points to the way in which industrial patents inspire external competitors. He instances a pharmaceutical company which invests heavily in research and then, in the course of filing a patent, necessarily discloses information which becomes ‘freely’ available for others to use. This overflowing cannot be prevented. Because its competitors are likely to be working from similar knowledge bases, they are able to use the information in their own research, ‘invent around’ the patented invention as the phrase goes.1 This enhances their competitiveness - a commonplace, he says, for businesses who are involved in the production of information capable of wide application.
A little later he refers to a different order of externalities, whose visibility has become commonplace in a technoscience regime perceived to throw up problems ‘for society’. At one level, no common informational field is shared; at another, the object is to create one. The huge proliferation of bodies concerned with ethics - the social, legal and ethical implications of particular technologies - is an example. The scientist cannot remain in his laboratory but has to engage with other specialists
Externalities in comparative guise 67 and with non-specialists of all kinds, for ‘society as a whole must agree to take action’ (Callon 1998: 262). The effort to reduce the number of non-calculable decisions, and thus to contain a constantly overflowing situation, is part of the phenomenon of overflow itself. Now overflows are no longer a by-product of transactions and negotiations but have become the rule. The contrast with patents is clear. The patent is a device to make calculable likely future benefits resulting from an invention, protecting the patent holder’s claims by framing the information that led to it. The overflow of information into competitors’ hands cannot be helped. But, and giving us the second example, there are many situations - often the results of just such an invention being released into the world at large - where quite different kinds of information from beyond the domain of technoscience itself are needed to calculate the manifold effects of technological products or their application (Callon cites the ramifications of mad cow disease). It is here that information bursts its frames, and all kinds of externalities jostle one another.
I lay out two approaches to ethical resolutions, then, which use Callon’s reworking of ‘externality’ and draw on his illustrations. One overtly involves the market while the other does not. The obvious point is that in both cases there are external considerations that purportedly lie outside the immediate frame of negotiation.
In the first, which touches briefly on competitive patenting, these are initially drawn into the agents’ calculations in the way in which Callon speaks of internalisation (1998: 251, 259). However, in the second case, an overt debate about ethics, there is a quite unexpected exclusion of information which turns out to be ‘at the centre’ of negotiation (1998: 263). There all along, it only becomes salient at certain moments. This is not a matter of internalisation, and we might seek a fresh vocabulary to describe it. Here I adopt spatial terms derived from elsewhere altogether to talk about an internal externality.Information on the two cases is derived from secondary sources generated by public interest in the technological economy. Typical of present times, public interest takes the form of identifying ‘ethical issues’, actual or potential. One belongs primarily to the late 1990s∕early 2000s, although did not begin then, while the other comes from a decade ago, the late 1980s∕early 1990s, although the issues it raises continue to reverberate.