Competitiveness/innovation aren’t objective phenomenon, they rely on social Darwinist assumptions

(Scout, Informatics@DonaldBren, Gendered Narratives of Innovation Through Competition: Lessons From Science and Technology Studies J. of Education for Library and Information Science, Vol. 54, No. 1—(Winter) January 2013)

I will start by examining the concept of competition. We typically understand competition as a sport or game with two or more opposing forces, ways of keeping score, and a clear endpoint that determines when the best rival has won. Competition is goal driven and rule-bound. Certain kinds of play are ruled in or out, and the criteria for winning or losing are explicit. This kind of competition tests the skill of players in relationship to one another. Sometimes competitions are between teams, and sometimes between individuals, and sometimes teams and individuals also compete against their own personal best. The kind of competitiveness that the 2011 ALISE conference theme invoked shares some things in common with games of sport. Two or more actors attempt to solve a problem of some kind, and there are objective measurements of some sort that serve to score the outcomes, which means there are also end points or measuring points. Unlike games, which have relatively few clear and agreed-on measures (primarily score) and agreed-on end points, market competitiveness has a plethora of measures. The idealized measurement for market success is when the consumer chooses one product or service over another. Profit is the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest. In this idealization, the consumer is the judge of the best product or outcome, at the best price: an indexical measure of competitiveness and innovation. Our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling. Hence, there is no guarantee that consumers choose the best products, or that the best products make it to market in the first place. And “best” is itself such a problematic measure: best for whom, in what ways? As these questions highlight, this kind of measurement can obscure unsavory elements of competition; for example, the extremely low cost of food in the US is underwritten by squalid labor conditions for migrant workers in agriculture. Scoring market success is not really about having the objectively best product. A given company might find ways to be profitable even when its product is not typically selected. Furthermore, the competition can be won not only by creating what others haven’t, but also by stopping them from creating. In other words, competition is no guarantor of creating new innovations or knowledge. Like a game, market competitions have winners and losers; this kind of competition is figured as a zero-sum game. In addition to the market rationale embedded in the concept of competition, there is another register of the term, which is an evolutionary one, with individualistic and social Darwinist overtones. The term evolution is often used in an unscientific, teleological way. We might describe an individual as highly evolved, when we mean more intelligent, ethical, spiritual, or rational. But evolution is value neutral and non-teleological; there is no guarantee that culturally important qualities will be the outcome of evolutionary processes. Evolution fits organisms to their environments: if competition for resources and reproductive competition pressures require more stupid and less attractive organisms, then more stupid and less attractive organisms will be the winners of the game.