International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   The Global Knowledge Society is a broad interdisciplinary effort to probe the socioeconomic, technological, and geopolitical dimensions of knowledge production, growth, diffusion, and exploitation, in terms of the impact on the development of societies worldwide. The intrinsic subject, namely the structural conditions for genesis of new ideas and their social utilization in specific national environments, leaves practically no major tradition of inquiry untouched. The field conjoins scholarly undertaking not only across all areas of social science – including international relations, international communication, information technology, international development, and economics – but also across the physical sciences and humanities. Its emergence as a field of inquiry in the last decade of the twentieth century signaled intellectual recognition of the increasingly decisive role of knowledge infrastructure in national development and international policy (for example, NSTC 2006 ; World Economic Forum 2006 ). But the field also addresses a historical void in traditional social science – from economics and political science to international affairs and development studies – for explaining structural and environmental differences in societal rates of knowledge generation, application and adoption. How nations develop new knowledge, or successfully adopt and ... log in or subscribe to read full text