Reading :: Fundable Knowledge

Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology

By A.D. Van Nostrand

This book came out in 1997, when I was in graduate school, and I remember my officemate (the remarkable Mark Zachry) recommending it to me. Mark’s advice is always good, but I was deep into reading other things at that point, so I put it off. Now, over 25 years later, I finally got to it.

The book is part of the Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Society series edited by Charles Bazerman. It’s the second in the series, right after Dorothy Winsor’s Writing Like an Engineer (Dorothy was our professor at Iowa State). Small world, right? Unfortunately I never met Van Nostrand, who seems like he was a very smart guy who knew his way around the defense industry. But maybe it’s best that I waited a while before reading this book — I think I appreciate it more from where I am now, after having studied lots of industries and especially technology commercialization.

Van Nostrand brings a genre perspective to the defense procurement industry, discussing how the industry works, how it documents and argues, and what makes knowledge fundable. “Fundable knowledge is generated by a large social system that functions by impersonal directives,” he explains (pp.1-2). It is a commodity, specifically a futures commodity, since it is sold before it is produced (p.2). The acquisitions system is composed of several overlapping domains (p.10).

To better understand fundable knowledge, Van Nostrand draws on Steven Kline’s summary of four uses of the term technology:

• “artifacts: aspirins, bombs, telephones, airplanes”
• a “system of producing artifacts, some combination of resources and methods, such as an assembly line or a set of laboratory procedures”
• “the skills or techniques implicit in the production system; a certain manufacturer, for example, is said to have the technology to produce a given artifact”
• “a whole social system, or collection of systems, for using an artifact. If the artifact is an airplane, for example, the technology of its use includes laws and regulations, airports and schedules, insurance, contracts, fuel supply, training, even frequent flyer bonuses” (pp.30-31)

This is a very useful taxonomy, and crisply rearticulates what people in studies of science and technology (SST) are trying to say when, for instance, discussing infrastructure (Star and Ruhleder) or the unclear bounds of a technology (de Laet and Mol). 

He defines knowledge this way: “Knowledge is information to which a certain value has been added in order to serve some given purpose, some need to know” (p.33). And “producing knowledge is essentially a process of interpreting information, thereby adding value to it” (p.34). Later in the book, he goes farther, stating that “buying and selling knowledge produces knowledge” (p.58). And “knowledge exchange is a communicative act wherein a sender’s stock of knowledge actually increases through the act of communicating it” (p.62). I am not enthusiastic about characterizing knowledge as “stocks,” but I appreciate the idea that knowledge is constructed in practice. (Peter Smagorinsky has a good relevant article on the idea that we understand a text by recomposing it.) 

In the second chapter, Van Nostrand turns to the question of markets. He notes that “The price of goods is also the consequence of a peculiar culture within the defense acquisition system. This culture tends to favor initially low cost estimates followed by cost overruns after production is underway. Moreover, price is always subject to a federal cost-accounting procedure that distributes fixed costs evenly over short production runs, which accounts for those infamous $200 screwdrivers and $800 coffee pots” (p.66). Van Nostrand also summarizes the differences between the terms “action” and “activity” in the defense program: an action is “a certain type of transaction, one that results in a contract or a grant, or in the modification of either instrument,” while an activity “is an organization” (p.70). We find other specific quirks in defense procurement language, but as he reminds us, “language belongs to the people who use it” (p.70).

Skipping forward, in Chapter 9 he lightly analyzes Defense Science and Technology (DST) as an activity system (p.141), and he brings in Swalesian genre theory to map 8 transactional genres (p.148) and document cycles (p.150). Based on this work, he analyzes the cyclical flows of knowledge in the procurement industry, based on the cyclical stabilization and destabilization of knowledge (pp.190-191). 

Finally, he concludes, “to market a product is to provide an organizational context for selling it” (p.214).

Overall, I found this book to be really useful. I must confess that it is not that engaging a read. But Van Nostrand opens the door to understanding technology commercialization in general and defense procurement in particular, and he lucidly builds the blocks of his argument. I’m sure I’ll return to it as I continue to think through both technology commercialization and knowledge. If you’re interested in these topics from a rhetoric and writing angle, definitely pick up this book.