RAJAN GURUKKAL
Kerala State Higher Education Council, India
Knowledge economy, much discussed these days, is topical and most of us have a fairly good idea about it as an economy that transforms the contemporary world. Acquisition of knowledge, the basic economic resource, is a critical economic process today. We talk about nations leapfrogging into it by ensuring preparedness to be globally competitive in innovative research. Still most of us are commonsensical about conceiving this economy and characterising it transformative. Scholars have been adding to the dubiousness by using the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ as well as ‘economy’ and ‘society’ interchangeably and by coining new expressions like ‘information society/economy’ as corollary.
Most economists have characterised the knowledge economy as an entity independent of Capitalism. Even specialists forget Capitalism, while they characterise the knowledge economy, despite the former being the dominant economy of the world for so long. Some scholars who are bothered about Capitalism have taken the knowledge economy either as a post-capitalist or post-industrial economy or as a phase of the dissolution of Capitalism. As a result, all of them have lost sight of the fundamental process under way and the far reaching consequences thereof. Amidst a commendable number of economists, only a few critical political economists and social theorists have approached the knowledge economy in the context of Capitalism. Based on their insights and drawing on the meaning and implications of the term economy as a system of production, consumption and exchange; this article seeks to do a theoretical review of what the expression ‘knowledge economy’ connotes and how it operates. Examining who coined the expression, how the concept evolved, when it got lost in descriptions of features, and why a theoretical resuscitation indispensable, the essay attempts to show that ‘knowledge economy’ is a rhetoric that hides new dimensions of Capitalism.