Reconfiguring Knowledge Production

Governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since World War II, especially the funding structures, autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. This book examines these developments in several countries.

The governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since the Second World War, especially with regard to funding structures, the autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. Going beyond previous analyses of these changes in science studies, science policy, and higher education studies, this book presents and applies a novel approach that provides an integrated assessment of changes in public science systems and their impact on scientific innovation. Its basic assumptions are (i) that all changes in public science systems (PSS) affect authority relations - the interests and action capabilities of authoritative agencies in science - and (ii) that the authority relations concerning the selection of goals and approaches in research as well as the integration of research results are the channel through which changes in PSS affect the production of scientific knowledge and particularly scientific innovation. This focus on authority relations as the key interface integrating changes in governance and translating them into changes in the production of scientific knowledge is an important innovation because the effects of governance at the performance level of the science system have been largely neglected by other approaches. By demonstrating that changes in authority relations are field-specific and have field-specific effects on knowledge production , and that these field-specific authority relations do indeed affect the conditions for intellectual innovation, the perspective explored in this book challenges science policy studies to 'bring work back in' to the study of the organisation and governance of the sciences.

Evolution of Knowledge Production The Marketability and Commercialisation of Knowledge Massification of Research and Education The Case of the Humanities Competitiveness, Collaboration and Globalisation Reconfiguring Institutions Towards Managing Socially Distributed Knowledge.

Knowledge is now central to national economic competitiveness and to socio-economic endeavours concerned with inequalities and social exclusion, and in this context higher education is recognized as a core sector of national policy and strategy. Yet the changing pressures, directions and practices in relation to knowledge pose many challenges for higher education itself. How can and how should research and study programs within higher education align with wider knowledge dynamics? How can higher education prepare students in professional fields for different kinds of knowledge-intensive work practices? How can short term economic objectives for higher education be aligned with other kinds of knowledge objectives that have characterized universities and colleges, and with the intensified impact of global rankings? This book takes as its focus the core interest of higher education in knowledge, and takes as its object of inquiry the kinds of reconfiguration of knowledge evident in national policies and governance; and in the redevelopment and practices of a range of professional and academic study programs in higher education institutions in Norway and Australia. From these detailed accounts, the book demonstrates the complexity of knowledge as an object of policy and practice; the competing logics that may be evident within and between study programs and policies; and the different kinds of agents and drivers that are part of knowledge reconfiguration in higher education and that need further attention going forward.

The book studies transformations of European universities in the context of globalization and Europeanization, the questioning of the foundations of the «Golden Age» of the Keynesian welfare state, public sector reforms, demographic changes, the massification and diversification of higher education, and the emergence of knowledge economies. Such phenomena as academic entrepreneurialism and diversified channels of knowledge exchange in European universities are linked to transformations of the state and changes in public sector services. The first, contextual part of the book studies the changing state/university relationships, and the second, empirically-informed part draws from several recent large-scale comparative European research projects.

Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society provides a thorough international investigation of tertiary education policy across its many facets – governance, funding, quality assurance, equity, research and innovation, academic career, links to the labour market and internationalisation.

This refreshingly original book links the postmodern critique of notions such as "reality" and "truth" with approaches to knowledge found in science and technology studies (STS), a field also discontent with traditional epistemology. Exploring STS approaches to knowledge, such as actor-network theory, Ward forges a path through the impasse of the modernism vs. postmodernism debate. Reconfiguring Knowledge is an important work for social scientists and theorists, philosophers, historians, and scholars of science and technology.

The first part of this book deals with the transformation of universities as strategic organisational actors - in some cases creating them as such - while the second shows how governance and authority shifts are affecting the kinds of research goals being pursued by academics in different public science systems.