Our global economy is going through a major transformation, from an industrial economy, to a knowledge economy, rendering knowledge a primary factor in production. In this practical, real-world focused book, expert authors come together to define and discuss knowledge work.

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

This book's unique perspective stems from its “knowledgediamond” framework to examine how individuals, communities,organizations and host industries reciprocally influence each otherin the course of knowledge work. This highly topical book focuses on work-based projects as afocus for organizational learning. Establishes the link between individual, community,organization and industry learning. Suggests that organizations need to recognise and understandthis link if they are to capitalize on project-basedlearning. Incorporates material on project-based learning in virtualcommunities. Refers to different examples, such as the film industry, thesoftware industry and the boat building industry. Includes end-of-chapter questions provoking reflection anddiscussion.

This book traces the theoretical explanation for clusters back to the work of classical economists and their more modern disciples, who saw economic development as a process involving serious imbalances in the exploitation of resources. Initially, natural resource endowments explained the formation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century industrial districts. Today, geographical concentrations of scientific and creative knowledge are the key resource. But these require a support system, ranging from major injections of basic research funding, to varieties of financial investment and management, tothe provision of specialist incubators, for economic value to be realised. These are also specialised forms of knowledge that contribute to a serious imbalance in the distribution of economic opportunity.

"What The Double Helix did for biology, David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does for economics." —Boston Globe A stimulating and inviting tour of modern economics centered on the story of one of its most important breakthroughs. In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it. This book tells the story of what has come to be called the new growth theory: the paradox identified by Adam Smith more than two hundred years earlier, its disappearance and occasional resurfacing in the nineteenth century, the development of new technical tools in the twentieth century, and finally the student who could see further than his teachers. Fascinating in its own right, new growth theory helps to explain dominant first-mover firms like IBM or Microsoft, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy. Like James Gleick's Chaos or Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, this revealing book takes us to the frontlines of scientific research; not since Robert Heilbroner's classic work The Worldly Philosophers have we had as attractive a glimpse of the essential science of economics.

Chapter 1 Introduction -- chapter 2 Knowledge and learning -- chapter 3 Creating knowledge: Transfer, exchange and gifts -- chapter 4 Development of economic knowledge: Paradigms and new ideas -- chapter 5 Knowledge exchange in networks: within-firm analysis -- chapter 6 Knowledge exchange between firms: economic geography of high-tech firms -- chapter 7 The knowledge base of an economy: What contributes to its entropy? -- chapter 8 A dynamic welfare perspective for the knowledge economy -- chapter 9 Concluding remarks.

This fascinating Handbook defines how knowledge contributes to social and economic life, and vice versa. It considers the five areas critical to acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the knowledge economy: the nature of the knowledge economy; social, cooperative, cultural, creative, ethical and intellectual capital; knowledge and innovation systems; policy analysis for knowledge-based economies; and knowledge management. In presenting the outcomes of an important body of research, the Handbook enables knowledge policy and management practitioners to be more systematically guided in their thinking and actions. The contributors cover a wide disciplinary spectrum in an accessible way, presenting concise, to-the-point discussions of critical concepts and practices that will enable practitioners to make effective research, managerial and policy decisions. They also highlight important new areas of concern to knowledge economies such as wisdom, ethics, language and creative economies that are largely overlooked. Distinguished by a combination of practical relevance and analytical rigour, this Handbook provides new insights into the basic mechanisms that constitute a knowledge economy and society, and will be invaluable to practitioners and academics in diverse areas of interest, including: knowledge management, innovation management, knowledge policy, social epistemology, and development studies.

The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States marked the beginning of the study of our postindustrial information society. Austrian-born economist Fritz Machlup had focused his research on the patent system, but he came to realize that patents were simply one part of a much bigger "knowledge economy." He then expanded the scope of his work to evaluate everything from stationery and typewriters to advertising to presidential addresses--anything that involved the activity of telling anyone anything. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States then revealed the new and startling shape of the U.S. economy. Machlup's cool appraisal of the data showed that the knowledge industry accounted for nearly 29 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and that 43 percent of the civilian labor force consisted of knowledge transmitters or full-time knowledge receivers. Indeed, the proportion of the labor force involved in the knowledge economy increased from 11 to 32 percent between 1900 and 1959--a monumental shift. Beyond documenting this revolution, Machlup founded the wholly new field of information economics. The transformation to a knowledge economy has resonated throughout the rest of the century, especially with the rise of the Internet. As two recent observers noted, "Information goods--from movies and music to software code and stock quotes--have supplanted industrial goods as the key drivers of world markets." Continued study of this change and its effects is testament to Fritz Machlup's pioneering work.

This book presents some of the most trenchant critical analyses of the widespread claims for the recent emergence of a knowledge economy and the attendant need for greater lifelong learning. The book contains two sections: first, general critiques of the limits of current notions of a knowledge economy and required adult learning, in terms of historical comparisons, socio-political construction and current empirical evidence; secondly, specific challenges to presumed relations between work requirements and learning through case studies in diverse current workplaces that document richer learning processes than knowledge economy advocates intimate. Many of the leading authors in the field are represented. There are no other books to date that both critically assess the limits of the notion of the knowledge economy and examine closely the relation of workplace restructuring to lifelong learning beyond the confines of formal higher education and related educational policies. This reader provides a distinctive overview for future studies of relations between work and learning in contemporary societies beyond caricatures of the knowledge economy. The book should be of interest to students following undergraduate or postgraduate courses in most social sciences and education, business and labour studies departments, as well as to policy makers and the general public concerned about economic change and lifelong learning issues. D. W. Livingstone is Canada Research Chair in Lifelong Learning and Work and Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. David Guile is Professor of Education and Work at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative—a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy—continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.