LIBRI DI ANDREA BONACCORSI

The subject of this article is the analysis of the Italian business R&D expenditure over the 2001-2010 period. Two main features make the Italian case interesting in international comparisons: first, the country has not been able to catch up with the average level of business R&D expenditure in the European Union (with respect to GDP) in spite of a constant increase of the R&D spending over the observed period; second, the R&D performing business sector has confirmed over the years its structural heterogeneity with respect to size distribution, sectorial and technological specialisation, and firm organisational models. A number of descriptive dimensions of the R&D activities of firms are investigated in order to identify explanatory factors for the performance in terms of R&D expenditure level, intensity, and persistence. The distinction between occasional and persistent R&D is also discussed, suggesting that such divide refers to two distinct R&D strategies that, possibly, introduce an additional dualism in the Italian business sector. The goal of the article is descriptive. The discussion of the state of the art of the literature is carried out mainly with the aim of commenting the evidence, rather than testing models. Thus the analysis keeps an exploratory attitude, opening the way for future strategies of explicit modeling and empirical testing.

The evaluation of research in human and social sciences has been subject to intense criticism in recent years. Several authors argue that research in these fields is radically incommensurable and should not be subject to any kind of measurement. Based on Bourdieu and Foucault, these contributions suggest that research evaluation is a subtle device for controlling ideas and reducing the potential for dissent and radical critical work on society, under an apparently objective and neutral scientific methodology. The paper takes issue with these reconstructions and suggests an alternative theoretical path. First, commensuration is integral part of modernity. The effort to make social reality more measurable has historically been part of a process of emancipation, trying to reduce the power of traditional, implicit and opaque sources of knowledge. Second, scientific communities can reflexively find an agreement on what is quality of research and which are the criteria for its identification in practice. Third, while there is no question that research is incommensurable by nature, yet it is possible to transform purely qualitative judgments by experts into measures that can be subject to inter-subjective comparisons. Based on several streams of literature in sociology, the paper suggests that the tensions induced by evaluation are potentially beneficial to human and social sciences.

The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of Open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First, the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an environment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper shows that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.