A Critical Guide to Knowledge Society Newspeak: Or,How Not to Take the Great Leap Backward

Abstract

The advent of the `knowledge society' appears so fascinating to social theorists because the theorists themselves have been finally incorporated into the capitalist mode of production. In postmodern societies, knowledge itself becomes a commodity subject to market forces, rather than an overarching principle of rationalization and legitimation. The article critically surveys the clearest indications of this transition: the requirement of credentials for employment, the development of computerized expert systems and the expansion of intellectual property legislation. Together these trends point to the rise of `knowledge management', which treats knowledge as raw material that needs to be cultivated and pruned, an idea that runs counter to most academic thinking on the nature of knowledge from philosophy to economics. A sign of these changing times is the designation of universities by knowledge managers as `dumb organizations' that mindlessly produce knowledge without any clear organizational goals. This leads the author to revisit the three ways of defining the value of goods in classical political economy - rent, labour, profit - as a foundation for recovering knowledge-producing institutions from the knowledge managers and knowledge society theorists.