Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures
Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures
The rise of a cultural conception of knowledge is rooted in contemporary existence, in the current transition to a knowledge society. Today at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is argued by many, we are well on the way to an era beyond modernity and the sort of industrial economy and nation-state societies that came with it; the terms suggested to refer to the transformations and the new type of system involved include postindustrial society, postmodernity, information society, risk-society, globalization, and knowledge society (e.g., Giddens, 1990 : Archer, 1995 : ch. 1 ). Though knowledge and information appear only in some of these terms, nearly all accounts suggest that issues of knowledge and information are central to the transformation. Thus, whatever else the new era brings – the decline of the nation-state, the globalization of risks or individualization – we are also entering a period focused upon knowledge and information (and these are entangled with the other processes). The concepts of epistemic culture and knowledge culture belong to this transformation. The dominant definition of a knowledge society is economic; it states that knowledge has become a productive force that increasingly replaces capital, labor, and natural resources as central value- and wealth-creating factors (e.g., Bell, 1973 ; Drucker, 1993 : 45). Analysts may also emphasize the ...