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.

Provides an introduction to the knowledge economy. Illustrating the benefits of conversing with the ghosts of alternative economies, this book provokes 'conversations' between the knowledge economy and those marginalised economies that haunt it: the risk, gift, libidinal and survival economies.

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.

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

Cities and the Knowledge Economy is an in-depth, interdisciplinary, international and comparative examination of the relationship between knowledge and urban development in the contemporary era. Through the lenses of promise, politics and possibility, it examines how the knowledge economy has arisen, how different cities have sought to realise its potential, how universities play a role in its realisation and, overall, what this reveals about the relationship between politics, capitalism, space, place and knowledge in cities. The book argues that the 21st century city has been predicated on particular circuits of knowledge that constitute expertise as residing in elite and professional epistemic communities. In contrast, alternative conceptions of the knowledge society are founded on assumptions which take analysis, deliberation, democracy and the role of the citizen and communities of practice seriously. Drawing on a range of examples from cities around the world, the book reflects on these possibilities and asks what roles the practice of ‘active intermediation’, the university and a critical and engaged social scientific practice can all play in this process. The book is aimed at researchers and students from different disciplines – geography, politics, sociology, business studies, economics and planning – with interests in contemporary urbanism and the role of knowledge in understanding development, as well as urban policymakers, politicians and practitioners who are concerned with the future of our cities and seek to create coalitions of different communities oriented towards more just and sustainable futures.

This book opens a window into how two ambitious countries – India and Brazil – are seeking to become knowledge powers in the 21st century. As the knowledge economy became the preferred way of conceptualising the economy and its future direction, in the more economically-advanced countries, our search for understanding also followed the same direction. This generated a body of work that has neglected countries that, like India and Brazil, are attempting to make the leap into knowledge economies. Muzaka explores these motivations and the ways in which they have inspired a number of institutional reforms in India and Brazil. The author offers an investigation of the role the state in shaping the respective intellectual property systems pertaining to the pharmaceutical and agro-biotechnology sectors and the multiple social conflicts that have unfolded as a result.

Over the last two decades, Singapore has undergone a substantial degree of ‘Asianization’. Apart from participating in the Asian values debate of the 1990s, re-visioning itself as ‘New Asia’ and a global-Asian hub, and establishing Asian identities for the commodities it consumes and produces, Singapore has also repurposed its modernity, cultures, and ethos along similar regionalist precepts. However, even in recent times, Singapore continues to vacillate ambivalently between identifying with and differentiating itself from Asia. Responding to the challenges Singapore faces in coming to terms with its Asian identity, this book examines the complex cultural, social, and political underpinnings that have shaped Singapore’s mainstream discourse on Asia. Indeed, it argues that its legacy as a colonial port city, the exigencies of managing the post-independence nation state, and the larger forces of imperialism and capitalism all contribute to its politics of Asianism. Taking a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach that spans history, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and cultural geography, Leong Yew reveals how Asia has been used to narrate Singapore’s beginnings, revalidate Singaporean ethnic culture and to consolidate its practices of consumption and commodification. This book will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a range of fields, including Asian culture and society, Asian politics, cultural theory and postcolonial studies.