The Global Knowledge Economy and Higher Education

Global refers to worldwide in scope and substance and de-emphasizes the concept of nation, but without negating it. Globalization, in general, is the flow of technology, knowledge, people, values, ideas, capital, goods, and services across national borders, and affects each country in a different way due to the nation’s individual history, traditions, culture, and priorities (Knight 2004). Economists define globalization more narrowly as the integration of commodity, capital, and labor markets. In any case, globalization involves the coming together and interaction of human beings. Thus, the process of globalization began with the genesis of human beings. It has always been driven by the human desire for economic and political gains, a zeal for spreading faith, ideology, and culture, and a quest for new knowledge. It has been made possible by advances in transportation and communication technologies. Globalization clearly is a continuous process that is dependent on and intertwined with technological progress. Until about two centuries ago, it was possible to identify different civilizations as distinct from one another, simply because transportation and communication technologies were not as developed and widely available as they are today. This meant that different communities could not interact sufficiently to influence each other in a manner that would lead to new socioeconomic and cultural syntheses. Since then, and especially in the previous century, however, a single global civilization has emerged that like a marble or an amalgam, consists of the “higher outputs” of different cultures, political, scientific, technological, socioeconomic, artistic, and literary that