Is market-driven research healthy? Responding to the language of “knowledge mobilization” that percolates through Canadian postsecondary education, the literary scholars who contributed these essays address the challenges that an intensified culture of research capitalism brings to the humanities in particular. Stakeholders in Canada's research infrastructure—university students, professors, and administrators; grant policy makers and bureaucrats; and the public who are the ultimate inheritors of such knowledge—are urged to examine a range of perspectives on the increasingly entrepreneurial university environment and its growing corporate culture.

A humanistic account of the changing role of technology in society, by a historian and a former Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT. When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family's farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis's granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather's and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life. Rosalind Williams served as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT from 1995 through 2000. From this vantage point, she watched a wave of changes, some planned and some unexpected, transform many aspects of social and working life—from how students are taught to how research and accounting are done—at this major site of technological innovation. In Retooling, she uses this local knowledge to draw more general insights into contemporary society's obsession with technology. Today technology-driven change defines human desires, anxieties, memories, imagination, and experiences of time and space in unprecedented ways. But technology, and specifically information technology, does not simply influence culture and society; it is itself inherently cultural and social. If there is to be any reconciliation between technological change and community, Williams argues, it will come from connecting technological and social innovation—a connection demonstrated in the history that unfolds in this absorbing book.

Alan Sears examines education reform in relation to a broad process of cultural and economic change. His book makes the case that education reform is one aspect of a broad-ranging neo-liberal agenda that aims to push the market deeper into every aspect of our lives by eliminating or shrinking non-market alternatives. The author begins by showing that advocates of education reform have had to make the case that the current system is not working. This sets the ground for an examination of the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution, ' a claim that drastic change was required to redesign government policies to fit a changing world. Lean production methods are a crucial component of this changing world, and broader social and cultural change is now required to consolidate the emerging order built on the spread of these methods. Education reform is designed to recast the relations of citizenship, contributing to the cultural and social change promoted through the social policy of the lean state.

This book presents an extensive analysis of the multifaceted benefits that higher education in the humanities offers individuals and society, as explored in the context of Hong Kong. Using both quantitative graduate employment survey data and qualitative data from interviews with past humanities graduates and with leading humanities scholars, the study provides an objective picture of the “value” of humanities degrees in relation to the economic needs and growth of Hong Kong, together with an in-depth exploration of their value and use in the eyes of humanities graduates and practitioners. Therefore, although it is hardly the only book on the value and status quo of the humanities worldwide, it nonetheless stands out in this crowded field as one of the very few extended studies that draws on empirical data. The book will appeal to both an academic and a wider audience, including members of the general public, non-academic educators, and government administrators interested in the status quo of humanities education, whether in Hong Kong or elsewhere. The report also includes a wealth of text taken directly from interviews with humanities graduates, who share their compelling life stories and views on the value of their humanities education.

Fourteen essays map Canadian literary and cultural products via advances in digital humanities research methodologies.

The underlying idea and motive for the book is that the notion of complexity may humanize the social sciences, may conceive the complex human being as more human, and turn reality as assumed in our doing social science into a more complex, that is a richer reality for all. The main focus of this book is on new thinking in complexity, with complexity to be taken as derived from the Latin word complexus: ‘that which is interwoven.’ The trans-disciplinary approach advocated here will be trans-disciplinary in two ways: firstly, by going beyond the separate disciplines within the fields of both natural sciences and social sciences, and, secondly, by going beyond the separate cultures of the natural sciences and of the social sciences and humanities.