Skilled workers of the early nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of
professional independence because workplace knowledge and technical
skill were their "property," or at least their attribute. In most
sectors of today's economy, however, it is a foundational and
widely accepted truth that businesses retain legal ownership of
employee-generated intellectual property.
In
Working Knowledge, Catherine Fisk chronicles the legal
and social transformations that led to the transfer of ownership of
employee innovation from labor to management. This deeply contested
development was won at the expense of workers' entrepreneurial
independence and ultimately, Fisk argues, economic democracy.
By reviewing judicial decisions and legal scholarship on all
aspects of employee-generated intellectual property and combing the
archives of major nineteenth-century intellectual
property-producing companies--including DuPont, Rand McNally, and
the American Tobacco Company--Fisk makes a highly technical area of
law accessible to general readers while also addressing scholarly
deficiencies in the histories of labor, intellectual property, and
the business of technology.