Pavel Kuchar

Knowledge commons facilitate voluntary private interactions in markets and societies. These shared pools of knowledge consist of intellectual and legal infrastructures that both enable and constrain private initiatives. This volume brings together theoretical and empirical approaches that develop and apply the Governing Knowledge Commons framework to the evolution of various kinds of shared knowledge structures that underpin exchanges of goods, services, and ideas. Chapters offer vivid and illuminating case studies that illustrate this conceptual framework. How did pooling scientific knowledge enable the Industrial Revolution? How do social networks underpin the credit system enabling the Agra footwear market? How did the market category Scotch whisky emerge and who has access to it? What is the potential of blockchain-ledgers as shared knowledge repositories? This volume demonstrates the importance of shared knowledge in modern society.

Entrepreneurs do more than just buy low and sell high; they sometimes also change our institutions, including our categories of thought. New institutional economics has been examining incentives that drive individuals to bring about market-supporting institutional arrangements. There is, however, an aspect of entrepreneurship conducive to institutional changes that has been neglected by contemporary institutionalist theories and that remains underdeveloped in entrepreneurship research. When and how does entrepreneurship bring about institutional change? I suggest that entrepreneurs are agents of institutional change when cultural categorization is ambiguous with regard to the proper and permissible applications of novel artifacts. Motherhood, for example, used to be a simple category, but surrogacy changed that radically. Examining newspaper evidence, social surveys, statutory law, and judicial cases, I show how entrepreneurs, by provoking a change in interpretation and judgment, challenged the existing institutional legal ordering of procreation turning a technically feasible method of surrogacy into current practice.

It is well-established that market governance can be provided by both public (state) and private organizations. However, the concept of private governance has been used, this article contends, to refer to two distinct forms of non-state governance: private governance and community governance. We distinguish between these two forms, arguing that private governance should be understood as the provision of market governance by (external) private parties, while community governance refers to a process where a group, a community, or society has the autonomy to govern its own affairs without interference from external authorities. The former internalizes the externalities associated with governance, while the latter comes about mainly as an unintended externality of social interaction in markets. To further illuminate the differences, and the relative strengths of these types of non-state governance, we distinguish among three elements of market governance: (1) the formation and interpretation of rules, (2) the administration of rules of ownership and exchange, and (3) the enforcement of rules. We argue that community governance is of great relevance for the formation and interpretation of the rules of ownership and exchange, which is consequently very hard to outsource to external parties, private or public. Community governance also plays a frequently overlooked role in administration and enforcement through the process of co-production. Rule formation and interpretation are theorized as the epistemic components of market governance, which can be analyzed within the Governing Knowledge Commons framework.