Since the 1960s we have had the ‘culture wars’ fought over the standards with which to adjudicate between competing claims to knowledge (i.e. statements about some or other aspect of the world and also about whether neutral standards for this task are even conceivable). These wars were also fought over whose knowledge it is (the Greeks’ or Africans’), and over the right to ‘voice’ (pitting males against females, heterosexuals against homosexuals, and incumbents of the status quo against ‘others’ of various stripes).

I, for one, do not think these debates go very far at all; this is so because knowledge does not ‘belong’ to anyone, and the debates about what knowledge is, how to be certain that what we know is true, and so on, are ongoing and open. Nonetheless, these debates have placed ‘knowledge’ on the agenda of various institutions and, as such, contributed to the human quest to act on beliefs with more certainty on their side.

In writing on ‘Creating a Knowledge Culture’, Susanne Hauschild, Thomas Licht, and Wolfram Stein called ‘knowledge management’ ‘one of the trendiest topics in management circles’ (The Mckinsey Quarterly, 2001, Number 1). This is a clear sign of the times, and also another way in which knowledge is placed not only on the agenda of business, but also on that of society as a whole.

Generally, we depend on formal education to take academic debates and the emerging needs of the market place, such as those about knowledge, into classrooms and other sites of learning by way of equipping the new generation with the wherewithal to handle the problems and tasks of their world. In this way, too, the more it is knowledge that makes the world go round, the more we worry about the quality of education and opportunities for life-long learning. ‘Building better educational systems is a challenge whose success will determine the outcome of all major world crises, from global warning to poverty’, says Michael Barber, a consultant for McKinsey and Co at a recent conference on ‘The Challenge of Achieving World Class Performance: Education in the 21st Century’ (for more, visit info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/PresentationPrint.asp?PID=2168&EID=970).

We can all easily agree that good, better, and the best knowledge for any particular task at hand is underpinned by educational systems which are also good, better, or (at best) excellent; what we do not talk about often enough is the kind of society in which knowledge and education are properly twinned and adequately valued by all. In past pieces to The Skills Portal, I clarified, ‘knowledge’, ‘cognition’, ‘research’, and ways of handling ‘the gap’ between the knowledge a company needs and what is available. I regard these as all closely interwoven parts of the business of knowledge management. A fashionable task, to be sure, but one generated by real changes in the world; changes that compel us to ask about the state we are in culturally or as a society.

Peter Drucker, who made the notions ‘knowledge workers’, ‘knowledge societies’, and the ‘knowledge economy’ famous, described a Knowledge Society [KS] as one where knowledge is the key economic asset (rather than land, labour, or energy). It is a society where every institution in it has to be globally competitive, because, such a society is borderless (knowledge travels fast, and respects no geographic boundaries given modern forms of communication). A KS is also characterised by possibilities for upwardly mobility (to the degree that there is open access to formal education), and it is one where both success and failure are real possibilities because anyone can acquire the “means of production”, i.e., knowledge (visit www.druckerarchives.net/ ). Note, too, that a KS is not only about Engineers, IT professionals, and other highly skilled professionals who have undergone extensive and intensive formal education and training, it is also about the extent to which every role and all jobs are deeply dependent on changing knowledge – certainly markedly more so that in a society structured by, for example, labour as the key economic resource.

From another angle, a KS is one where its citizens are generally ‘well-informed’ or where there is a broad ‘reading-class’; it is a society where people:

• engage in ongoing, critical inquiry into their beliefs;
  
• search for verified/verifiable beliefs (or for claims justified by objective evidence and through formal, logical rules of inference/drawing conclusions);
  
• devote considerable resources to such inquiries;
  
• evaluate and use their knowledge (rather than, say, their values or commitments) for engaging the tasks before them; and
  
• consider their values and goals in view of their knowledge.

(See Lane, R. 1966. 'The decline of politics and ideology in a knowledgeable society', American Sociological Review, 31/5, pp.649-62.)

A KS is thus one where citizens value and use knowledge; it is a society where all activities, feelings, values, beliefs, and concerns are made subservient to knowledge. I do not think it takes much reflection to conclude that this is not the state we are in. And not only this: there are possibly people who think it is a good thing that we do not value knowledge over and above other identifications and commitments, that is to say, people who will defend their identities/cultures, traditions, and religions as better guides for engaging the world and its tasks successfully, than knowledge.

In addition to such resistance to the role of knowledge in modern economies and thus societies – everyone who has tried to keep up with the explosion of knowledge on topics of daily concern knows – that it is increasingly difficult to ‘keep up to date’ with the best of current knowledge on a topic. A difficulty that leads many people in and out of the workplace to give up the quest and to allow celebrities (famous people, political authorities, church leaders) to shape their thoughts and actions. This is no good! It puts us back, culturally speaking, in the Dark Ages.

This state we are in has been described as ‘a knowledge aversive culture’, that is to say, in the workplace we increasingly shy away from the explosion of specialized knowledge and the informational demands imposed by occupational specialization – both of which is typical of a ‘knowledge economy’, i.e. exchanges characterised by knowledge as the key resource/asset. (See Ungar, S. August 2003. ‘Misplaced metaphor: A critical analysis of the "knowledge society"’ The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 40/3, pp. 331-347). Outside work, we tend to rely on self-appointed gurus who exploit the human hunger for knowledge (or our gullibility) by selling the most unworthy tales or recipes for success, happiness, good marriages, popularity, and more. Certainly, none of these self-help books deal in knowledge (i.e., justified, true beliefs), at best, they are well-rehearsed platitudes that serve as comfort pillows for those who would like to be successful, happy, etc.

We need a ‘cultural reformation’ around knowledge, someone has to pin the standards for truth on the back of every nonsense publication or celebrity’s silly utterance about anything from health, to stem cell research, genetically engineered food, and more (visit www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/, where they try to do just this).

I can only agree with James J. Duderstadt who said, in his address to the 175th Anniversary Symposium of the University of Toronto, on ‘The Future of Higher Education in the Knowledge-Driven, Global Economy of the 21st Century’ that ‘ ... the most critical challenge facing most institutions will be to develop the capacity for change ...’ (visit milproj.ummu.umich.edu/publications/toronto/index.html). This capacity for change certainly underlines this discussion of the state a society is in. Are we building a knowledge society, or sanctioning a knowledge aversive culture? Are our educational institutions and specific opportunities for learning and developing the skills required by global exchanges setting up knowledge as an ideal, or not? And are these facilitating the ability to deal with ‘knowledge’ as such, or are we avoiding this in the name of some or other resistance or aversion?

A society or culture clinging to past modes of operating – fearful of knowledge – with members unwilling to submit their beliefs and practices to the critical scrutiny of verification (or trial by evidence and justification) will not readily change. And a society where there is too much talk of ‘in my culture’ and too little talk of ‘in our world’ is also a society that will not develop the capacity for change in its institutions.

We change because we are creative; knowledge and education are human endeavours that allow us to reach into the future and beyond the naturally, given.

AP Craig

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