Haunting the knowledge economy

This highly original book provides an engaging and critical introduction to the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is a potent force pervading global and national policy circles. Yet few people outside the field of economics understand its central ideas and practices. This book makes these accessible. But it does much more. It provokes 'conversations' between the knowledge economy and those marginalized economies that haunt it: the risk, gift, libidinal and survival economies. These illuminate the knowledge economy's shortcomings and point to alternative possible systems of exchange and sets of values. This multi-disciplinary study takes the knowledge economy out of the hands of the economists and brings it into creative tension with the ideas of key thinkers from sociology, anthropology, philosophy and ecology. Illustrating the benefits of conversing with the ghosts of alternative economies, this provocative book will unsettle the way in which the knowledge economy is understood. Groundbreaking and globally applicable, it has been authored by internationally respected authors and its conceptual breadth pertains to a range of disciplines and gives it its wide appeal.<br />

'Creative destruction': knowledge economy policy and the future of arts and humanities in the academy

Policy conceptualizations of the global knowledge economy have led to the channelling of much Higher Education and Research and Development funding into the priority areas of science and technology. Among other things, this diversion of funding calls into question the future of traditional humanities and creative arts faculties. How these faculties, and the disciplines within them, might reconfigure themselves for the knowledge economy is, therefore, a question of great importance, although one that as yet has not been adequately answered. This paper explores some of the reasons for this by looking at how innovation in the knowledge economy is typically theorized. It takes one policy trajectory informing Australia's key innovation statement as an example. It argues that, insofar as the formation of this knowledge economy policy has been informed by a techno-economic paradigm, it works to preclude many humanities and creative arts disciplines. This paper, therefore, looks at how an alternative theorization of the knowledge economy might offer a more robust framework from within which to develop humanities and creative arts Higher Education and Research policy in the knowledge economy, both in Australia and internationally.<br />1 This article draws on the Australian Research Council project, Knowledge/economy/society: a sociological study of an education policy discourse in Australia in globalising circumstances, being conducted by Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen and Simon Robb. This 3-year project looks at how understandings of the knowledge economy and knowledge society inform current education policy and, in turn, how this policy translates into educational practice. The methodology includes policy analysis, interviews with policy makers in government, and supranational organizations. It also includes cameo studies of innovative educational practice, two of which we draw on here. <br />

The knowledge economy, the techno-preneur and the problematic future of the university

Knowledge economy policies are currently very powerful drivers of change in contemporary university approaches to research. They typically orientate universities to a national innovation system which both positions knowledge as the key factor of economic growth and sees the main purpose of knowledge as contributing to such growth. In this article, the authors explain the economic logic informing such policy interventions in university research and look at the conceptualisation of national innovation systems in various national and international policy sites around the world. Their interest is in what these particular sets of policies have in common, not in how they differ. They introduce three key themes of such systems and the academics they seek to produce. These themes are their techno-scientific orientation, network characteristics and commercial imperatives. The corresponding implied subjects are the techno-scientist, the knowledge networker and the entrepreneur. The authors make the case that evident in such constructions of the future of universities are some unacknowledged and under-acknowledged problems, one of which is a failure to recognise the power of the gift economies of academic culture.<br />

Can universities be good corporate citizens?

As universities respond to a prolonged period of economic rationalism there appears to be resignation, for the most part, that the role of a university is not what it once was. By adopting the operational strictures of economy, efficiency and performance, many universities are behaving like and being run as though they were a business. The term &lsquo;corporate university&rsquo; now carries much meaning and has been the subject of significant discourse over the last decade. Resource limitations, political influences and competitive pressures are commonplace with implications for the way in which a university can fulfil a role in society, however that is defined. In this paper we consider the notion of corporate citizenship and ask whether this concept is relevant to the role of a university in Australia and New Zealand. In these countries universities are substantially (although progressively less so) funded by the government and are public service entities. The application of corporate citizenship to universities serves to highlight the duality of these institutions, which operate like corporations, and yet have more obvious historically based obligations to society. The comparison also suggests that as corporations are becoming more aware of the long-term benefits of a societal role for business entities that universities appear to be moving in the opposite direction. With a few exceptions academics have been reluctant to engage in public debates. They have progressively lost control of their working environment. The risk is that the public interest will have no place in the corporatised university of the 21st century unless academics increase their critic and conscience activities.<br />

Marsupial milk : identifying signals for regulating mammary function and development of the young

The role of milk in providing nutrition for the young is well established. However, it is becoming apparent that milk has a more comprehensive role in programming and regulating growth and development of the suckled young, and an autocrine impact on the mammary gland so that it functions appropriately during the lactation cycle. This central role of milk is best studied in animal models, such as marsupials that have evolved a different lactation strategy to eutherians and allow researchers to more easily identify regulatory mechanisms that are not as readily apparent in eutherian species. For example, the tammar wallaby (<i>Macropus eugenii</i>) has evolved with a unique reproductive strategy of a short gestation, birth of an altricial young and a relatively long lactation during which the mother progressively changes the composition of the major, and many of the minor components of milk. Thus, in contrast to eutherians, there is a far greater investment in development of the young during lactation and it is likely that many of the signals that regulate development of eutherian embryos in utero are delivered by the milk. This requires the co-ordinated development and function of the mammary gland. Inappropriate timing of these signalling events in mammals may result in either limited or abnormal development of the young, and potentially a higher incidence of mature onset disease. The tammar is emerging as an attractive model to better understand the role of milk factors in these processes.