Rhetorical Determinism

Economists included knowledge their models to improve their explanatory accuracy. A major step was to describe the production of knowledge as well as its exploitation as an internal part of economic models. Politicians prefer to talk about a new kind of economy so they can sustain the myth of progress. Rather than explain economies using a new model they try to leave economic history intact while describing the future using the new and different model. Once the knowledge economy became a progressive new entity and embedded in political rhetoric at the highest level, institutions competing for resources have to adopt the vocabulary and redefine themselves as knowledge organisations. As more and more professions, firms and organisations described their activities in terms of the new knowledge economy, so performatively the knowledge economy became part of political reality. Knowledge is metaphysical. If it has any kind of existence then it is embodied and projected through the skills of the knowers. Since technology connects with all human activity, the reformulation of institutions and priorities demands changes to descriptions of what technology is. Knowledge is at one end of a spectrum. Whim is at the other end. It makes little difference to economic models what the algebraic terms are called. Talk of the knowledge economy is therefore simply a way of saying our cultures and therefore our technologies are dynamic. Political Rhetoric Politicians have heralded a new knowledge economy1. “Europe's leaders”, for example, have recently “set out a strategic vision” to turn “the European Union into a world-class ... knowledge economy”2. Previously, in 1997, US President Clinton in his State of the Union address highlighted the “education standards” needed for success in “the knowledge economy of the 21st century” which he linked with “the power of the Information Age”3. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, at a conference in 1998, acknowledged, “we are entering a knowledge economy”4 and, two years later he was able to report, “[t]he new knowledge economy is here, and it is now”5. On the same occasion the Portuguese prime minister, Antonio Guterres, declared “[t]he transition to an innovation and knowledge based society and economy is now under way.”6 Blair’s ministers, added a sense of urgency. Stephen Byers, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, announced that “[t]he shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy at the beginning of the 21st century is quite as profound as the move from an agricultural to an industrial economy at the beginning of the 19th century”7 , and his successor, Patricia Hewitt, clearly saw the situation as one that demanded action from politicians when she said “The global knowledge economy confronts British politics, and politicians, with ... large challenges”8. In Canada, “the real Canadian story is”, announced Finance Minister Paul Martin, partly “about the extent to which [Canada has] embraced ... the knowledge economy”9. For Industry Canada, this knowledge-based economy has the “ability to generate and use knowledge [as] a determinant of wealth”10. Politicians from many other countries, are involved, for instance this year, “[h]igh-level delegations from Brazil, China, and India gathered on the outskirts of London ... to design preliminary strategies on how to help their countries succeed in the global knowledge economy of the 21st century.”11 In South Korea “a vision of ... becoming a knowledge-based economy has now become a key objective of government policy”12. And a commentator reports that a “transformation ... has quietly begun ... of the Singapore economy into a knowledge economy”13 which is compelling “Singapore's politicians ... to grapple ... with the power equation as the new knowledge economy redefines leadership roles”14. In the wider Asia-Pacific region leaders have “underscored the importance of knowledge as a key driver of future economic growth and development”15. The knowledge economy has therefore become a significant term in the rhetoric of political leaders and they seem to agree that “[t]he society we live in has been gradually turning into a “knowledge society,””16 and that this incorporates a new kind of economy. Economic models Kenneth J. Arrow was an influential economist who wrote about knowledge as a component in models of economies. In particular, he incorporated in his theories terms representing the process of acquiring knowledge — learning. Learning he associated with doing, and knowledge with experience. He regarded experience and knowledge as a stimulus to technical change John Monk, Rhetorical Determinism 1 5th ESA conference, Helsinki, August 2001 while simultaneously technical change is a cause of environmental change and accordingly an agent in the production of new knowledge. He observed that since knowledge and technical change feed off one another, knowledge is not something that is static and asserted that “knowledge is growing with time” 17. Arrow’s aim was not to generate a model of a new kind of economy, but to make good some of the deficiencies in existing models. Paul Romer, who took up Arrow’s work used data series dating back over several centuries to motivate the study of models that incorporated knowledge. For instance he looked at data for the Netherlands, Britain and the US from 1700 until 1979, data about the US from 1800 to 1978 and statistics derived from data series that began no later than 1870 from Britain, France, Denmark, US, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Norway, Japan and Canada. Romer, therefore, was not referring to a new economy, but to an economic model that fitted historical data, similarly Arrow’s economic model was inspired by earlier observations, for instance, by empirical work from 193618 that revealed the cost of production diminished with experience. These economists did not, therefore, regard the knowledge economy as a new phenomenon.19 Knowledge For those that construct economic models knowledge is simply a variable in the equations and can be aggregated so that “the state of knowledge”, as Romer puts it, can be “denoted by k”20. One of Arrow’s insights was that by making knowledge instrumental, knowledge did not need an interpretation. Arrow merely noted that knowledge is “difficult to measure” 21. There is no need for elaboration, however economists seeking a connection between their knowledge variable and the use of the word ‘knowledge’ might see it, in their jargon, as “the basic form of capital”22 or an “intangible capital good”.23 This intangibility though turns knowledge into an enigma. It seems knowledge “flows”24,25, forms a “current”26, enters through “channels”27 or “a conduit”28; a “stock of knowledge”29 can be held in “stores”30 thus there are “repositories of knowledge”. Knowledge can be “tapped”31, “excavated”32or perhaps “mined [from] the richest veins of ideas”33 or extracted from “low grade ore”34 using “tools of knowledge extraction”35. It can be put in “harness”36, “filtered”37, suffer “absorption”38, or “diffusion”39. It has a “volume”40 that can be contained in a “pool”41 or a “reservoir”42. This torrent of metaphors makes it evident that it is difficult to pin down knowledge. For philosophers, the topic of knowledge has been problematic, particularly when it was linked with the troublesome notion of truth43. Wittgenstein offered a clue to an alternative when he wrote “The grammar of the word “knows” is evidently closely related to that of “can”, “is able to””44. Helpfully, he added in parentheses “(‘Mastery’ of a technique,)”45. From a behavioural point of view, what causes us to say that people have knowledge is something about their performance. Knowledgeable people have a skill and a skill is a practice executed well. Knowledge, then, is a word that is instrumental in explanations of practices and does not have to correspond with any distinctive mental object. But to say someone has knowledge requires a judgement, which is inevitably culturally specific. Distinction There have been attempts to categorise knowledge in various ways46,47. A common distinction is made between knowledge that is embodied1 — dubbed tacit knowledge — and signs of knowledge imprinted in artefacts that can be transferred and copied — often termed codified knowledge. Tacit knowledge is said to be “codifiable if it can be written down and transferred easily to others”48. Authors go to some lengths to uphold the differences. Tacit knowledge or “human capital”49 is said to be “slow to acquire and much more difficult to transfer”50, “more internal and experiential”51, “subconsciously understood and applied, difficult to articulate, developed from direct experience and action”52, “held in the mind/brain”53, “inside the heads of people”54, unsharable55 and “highly personal”56. Codified knowledge, or explicit knowledge is said to be “expressed in words and numbers ... easily communicated and shared in the form of hard data, scientific formulae, codified procedures or universal principles”57 , “an abstract mathematical formula derived from physical experiments or a training manual describing how to close a sale”58, “knowledge that can be codified into written rules, facts and instructions”59, “procedure manuals, product literature, or computer software”60, sharable61. Explicit knowledge is treated as though it were a material sign of knowledge. The distinction is attractive to economists because codified knowledge, linked to artefacts, can be regarded as capital and tacit knowledge as a component of labour. Sharing A crucial consideration for Arrow was that “[l]earning is the product of experience”62. Romer however presumed that somehow the results of experience could be easily transferred from one person to another. The effort involved in creating a new design, Romer assumed was made easier by the availability of (rather than experience of) previous designs. He thought that once 1 I perhaps need to add embodied in people. Embodied is sometimes used to refer to artefacts. John Monk, Rhetorical Determinism 2 5th ESA conference, Helsinki, August 2001 someone had created a design, “other inventors” could “spend time studying the patent application ... and learn knowledge that helps in the design”63 of new goods. It is commonly supposed that knowledge can be transferred or shared, that “technology has made the transfer of knowledge easier and cheaper” 64 and that it is the role of “knowledge management” to ensure knowledge is “acquired and well shared within firms”65. It is first anticipated that “we can translate partial and implicit knowledge ... into organized explicit knowledge.”66; secondly it is assumed that “once ... knowledge is codified, it can be spread easily and cheaply”67 and that “knowledge can be freely transported”68. From a behavioural point of view, the outcome of learning is the ability to display a skill (such as passing examinations) recognised by an authority. A student, who the authority judges, can convincingly imitate an authorised teacher would be said to have gained knowledge. Artefacts that help learners create the illusion that they contain knowledge. Particular kinds of artefacts, like textbooks, provide evidence of an author’s skill and, it is commonly inferred, knowledge. Exposure to such artefacts can guide students in their attempts to mimic the habits of the author, and because the textbook can help the student compare the product of their skills with those of an absent author, the textbook is sometimes assumed to contain or carry the author’s knowledge. But books do not have the skills that people have, so they cannot be said to be knowledgeable, nd students cannot be said to have the same skills as the author but merely that they can generate similar results. The transfer of knowledge through artefacts is therefore an illusion. An artefact, such as a book, is, at best, a sign of knowledge rather than a carrier. The reaction to such signs is culturally and contextually specific. In suitable circumstances, however artefacts like books incorporated into a customary educational practice can guide students in their attempts to mimic the practices of authors and teachers. Intrinsic Knowledge Skilled practices involve groups of people in environments that inevitably include artefacts. Artefacts can spawn new practices and, occasionally, the new practice has an outcome that is analogous to an outcome of an established practice. A new combination of artefacts and practices can then act as a substitute for a tradition. People find some skills more demanding than others, and when a new, surrogate practice is less burdensome than the customary practice then the differences might be attributed to the change in the repertoire of artefacts. The required skills are diminished when artefacts are introduced, thus artefacts appear to substitute for fragments of skill, and knowledge, no longer needed by the practitioners, appears to be transferred to the artefacts. A calculator, for instance appears to acquire knowledge of addition, or a videodisk of Hamlet, the skill of acting. Two similar illusions arise the first because some goods facilitate learning, and the second because some undemanding practices involving artefacts can replace expert practices. Both of these illusions give the impression that knowledge is intrinsic to material goods. People are deceived into believing that measures of material goods also quantify the knowledge they supposedly contain. Policy makers then become anxious if their community cannot generate signs of knowledge in sufficient quantities. For example, a government agency is concerned when the country “only produces 2.7 per cent of the world’s scientific papers”69. The Myth Berkeley, the eighteenth century philosopher appeared to concur with the view that words and signs contain knowledge. “[W]ords”, he wrote, “are of excellent use”. “By their means”, he continued, “all that stock of knowledge which has been purchased by the joint labours of inquisitive men in all ages and nations may be drawn into the view and made the possession of one single person”. Unfortunately, however, he added, “most parts of knowledge have been strangely perplexed and darkened by the abuse of words”70. First there is the difficulty of codifying knowledge. Diderot, in an account of his work of collecting data for the Encyclopédie, complained, “Most of those who practise the mechanical arts ... operate merely by instinct. Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery they use, and the things they produce, with any clarity”71. Worse still, some machinery defies description. Diderot explains, “[T]here are machines so hard to describe and skills so elusive that, short of trying the work oneself and operating the machine with one’s own hands and seeing the product with one’s own eyes, they are difficult to describe with any accuracy.”72 Even if the difficulty of creating an intelligible formalism has been overcome, the interpretation of the record is not necessarily reliable. In a play by Arthur Miller, a character Chris asks, “The court record was good enough for you all these years, why isn’t it good now?” and in reply George says “But today I heard it from his mouth. From his mouth it’s altogether different than the record. Anyone who knows him ... will believe it from his mouth”73. John Monk, Rhetorical Determinism 3 5th ESA conference, Helsinki, August 2001 In an industrial context, once a record is made and read it does not necessarily allow a reader to reconstitute the skills of using or building machinery that were supposedly recorded. In some cases, Diderot reports, that the only way the writers could find out about certain operations was to learn to do it themselves by operating the machines and making some products. He observed, “in the studio it is the moment that speaks”74 and concluded that “it is not through books that we can learn how to manipulate tools and machines”.75 As Landes colourfully puts it, “It takes more than recipes, blueprints, and even personal testimony to learn industrial cuisine”76. Basalla, who wrote about the evolution of technology offered an example. He explained that when a textile business was to be set up in the US “[h]aving the actual machines did not suffice”77 since “all of technology can never be translated into words, pictures, or mathematical equations” so “the practitioner with hands on knowledge ... will always have a role to play in the dissemination of technical innovations”78. He concluded “Although much of modern technology can be gleaned from the pages of books, articles, monographs, and patents, the artifacts must be studied at first hand, oral information gathered from the persons conversant with the new technology, and the innovations adapted to the recipient economy and culture.”79