Crossposted from the STS list. Apologies if you have seen it before....
Social Epistemology
Special issue on the Commercialisation of Epistemology, Oct-Dec 2001
That knowledge is power and ultimately money is a dictum that has been
around
since the scientific revolution turned into an industrial one. Few would
dispute that knowledge of resources and markets can be turned into a
profit. A
recent twist to this link between knowledge and money is the turning of
'knowledge about knowledge production' into a commercial product in its own
right, sometimes more successfully than knowledge about a specific subject.
For
instance, under the heading of Knowledge Management, marketable principles
are
now derived for commercially applied knowledge creation, validation and
dissemination. At the same time, in much the same way that Taylorism
revolutionised manufacturing by rendering the process of work an object of
systematic study, principles for knowledge work are increasingly becoming
described, manipulated and commercialised.
The journal Social Epistemology is planning a special issue devoted to
critical
reflections on this phenomenon, its roots in intellectual history, its
current
practices and implications, and its future. While we expect people in the
field
of organisational studies to take a particular interest in the subject, we
would especially like to encourage submissions by researchers from a
variety of
perspectives in the social and policy sciences and the humanities.
Typical papers might address:
* The implications of commercial technologies of knowledge for a
social
theory of knowledge, and vice versa.
* The implications of these new developments for those fields that
have
specialized in the study of knowledge: the history and philosophy of
science,
as well as various perspectives in science and technology studies (STS).
* The relation between the traditional scientific expert and the
knowledge professional.
* Case studies on the role of knowledge workers in the
commercialisation
of epistemology, inside and outside academe.
* The implications of markets for 'knowledge of knowledge' for
philosophical and social theories of value, and of power, and for debates
on
the expansion of 'the market' into new domains.
* The implications of attempts to Taylorize knowledge production for
a
range of legal, political and policy issues such as intellectual property,
knowledge-based economic development, etc.
* Explorations of alternative future scenarios related to this
phenomenon.
Please submit a 250 word abstract to Sujatha Raman
(mailto:[log in to unmask]) and Tomas Hellstrom
(mailto:[log in to unmask]) by October 15, 2000. We expect to complete
the
selection of abstracts by the end of October. The deadline for completed
papers
will be 1 March 2001, with publication expected by the end of 2001.
Tomas Hellstrom
Institute for Management of Innovation & Technology
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
[log in to unmask]
Sujatha Raman
Centre for Science Studies
University of Lancaster, England
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|