Knowledge Societies and Knowledge Economies 1. Introduction: Mapping Disciplinary Knowledges

1 1. Introduction: Mapping Disciplinary Knowledges Concepts have histories. They also have homes. Normally we can locate them in relation to a family of kindred terms that have a home in a discipline or discourse. 'Knowledge society' and 'knowledge economy' are no exceptions. In fact they prove the generalization as both concepts are anchored in a complicated network of family terms and belong to different discourses or disciplines, respectively, as one might expect, the disciplines of sociology, on the one hand, and of economics, on the other. These twin concepts while displaying similar characteristics – among them the attempt to describe society or economy in terms of dominant axial principle from which other societal or economic trends can be inferred – belong to different disciplines and discourses. To all intents and purposes these are separate and parallel discourses that are not cross-threading—in each case the trajectories of the disciplines seem to be powered by their own problematics, by the set of problems thrown up by the discipline rather than any external pressures, and they seem particularly impervious to radical cross-disciplinary borrowing or analysis. Where they do come together is in the area of policy, in policy studies, in actual policies or policy discourse, where the master concepts borrowed from the sociology and economics of knowledge have come to help shape and define policy templates for economic and social development and well being. At the level of policy the same demands for theoretical consistency or disciplinary rigor or internal consistency do not seem to operate; rather the easy dualism of the knowledge society and the knowledge economy is embraced without difficulty or contradiction. While there is, of course, some analysis of trends and even the collection of relevant data, these twin concepts are empirically underdetermined. They operate more like performative ideologies with constitutive effects at the level of public policy. And there are a whole series of self-legitimating sibling concepts spawned by policy analysts and think-tanks that now roll off the tongue of any sociology undergraduate: 'information society', 'learning society', 'information economy', and, more recently, 'learning economy'.