Developing Indicators for Biocapital in an Era of Bioeconomy

This paper aims to explore the frontier of developing indicators of biocapital, an emerging health-related notion with the rise of bio-technoscience. Different from other forms of capital, biocapital corresponds to a bioeconomy, in which biotechnology contributes to a large portion of economy. According to policy agenda proposed by OECD, elements of the bioeconomy include biotechnological knowledge, renewable biomass, and integration across applications, which are regarded as basic dimensions of the biocapital. As a concept tout neuf, biocapital is still too ambiguous to spread wide in the sociological community. However, it has been a trend for many countries to include the bioeconomy in their policy agenda, blueprints or visions for the coming decades. Like other forms of capitals, such as social, cultural, human, and symbolic capital, biocapital is useful for sociologists to observe resource distribution in a society. To cope with potential problems associated with its even distribution, it is necessary to make the biocapital measurable. Several obstacles prevent it being measured. First, it is a multi-leveled concept ranging from individual, organizational, societal to national level. Second, it contains networks of heterogeneous actors to realize bio-technoscience in the society. Third, it is a concept beyond borders, crossing state borders, market borders and disciplinary boundaries. The paper suggests several possible approaches for overcoming the obstacles. First, experiences of developing intellectual capital are inspiring, as the biocapital consists of the bio-technoscience. Second, also known as external control of organizations, a resource-dependant perspective of organizational study is heuristic for developing indicators associated with hetero-network such as firm size, number, networking configuration, etc. Third, the perspective of innovation system is useful for understanding holistic situation of biocapital. There are some other potential approaches such as that of cultural capital utilized by Bourdieu, as well as those utilized for indexing social capital.