Markets and New Modes of Knowledge Production

Abstract

Two of the most important factors influencing the future direction and shape of the academic profession are, first, the growing emphasis on the ‘market’ in higher education and, second, the development of new, more fluid and more open, knowledge production systems. The two are often linked. There is no clearer demonstration of the (overweening?) influence of neo-liberal ideas in higher education policy than the virtually automatic assumption that the development of new modes of knowledge production is — inevitably — a market phenomenon. The fact that some of these new modes of knowledge production are either unrelated to, or actively antagonistic to, the advance of the market in higher education and science is often forgotten. The result is that a false dichotomy is established between, on the one hand, traditional forms of scholarly and scientific production, rooted in a traditional academic culture, and, on the other, new and less familiar modes of knowledge production, rooted in the culture of the market.