Post-Intellectuality? Universities and the knowledge industry.

Cooper, Simon

Introduction

While 'knowledge' is regarded as the twenty-first century commodity and the saviour of economies, nations, and communities alike, universities, once considered the prime institutional sites of knowledge, are in a state of crisis. The increased production and circulation of knowledge via media and information technologies, as well as the creation of knowledge from alternative sources such as commercial R & D centres or private think-tanks has meant that the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the role of the university are increasingly being called into question. As Bill Readings pointed out, '[t]he wider social role of the university is up for grabs. It is no longer clear what the place of the university is within society, nor what the exact nature of that society is'. (1) While traditional defences of the university along the lines of Newman or Humboldt have been passionately mounted, (2) they do not seem to have gained much purchase among the wider community, or even within the university itself. This does not mean that they ought to be dismissed, however. The more traditional 'idea of the university' and the kinds of knowledge it produces still remain a powerful, if somewhat muted, ideal. Indeed it is arguable that a more traditional understanding of knowledge--the idea that knowledge has both an ennobling aspect and a crucial role in the self-interpretation of societies--remains a motivating ideal behind the embrace of the knowledge society. However, much of the current enthusiasm for knowledge fails to go beyond merely invoking the term and considering its benefits as a tradeable commodity. The differing modalities of knowledge--information, cultural and social interpretation, wisdom and so on--are frequently collapsed together within a more instrumental framework, especially in the claims of those who wish to reinvigorate the university by harnessing its potential as 'knowledge producer'. Arguably, it is this relatively unexamined conception of knowledge that has allowed academics to largely accept the corporatization of their own institutions, for at least (in their eyes) they can go on producing knowledge, and thus do what they have always done, albeit under increasingly difficult circumstances.

This may go some way towards answering Masao Miyoshi's question:

 Today's corporatized university--which would have been an
 unspeakable sacrilege for many less than a generation ago--is
 now being embraced with hardly any complaint or criticism by the
 faculty, students, or society at large. What is it that has
 transpired between the university as the mediator and the university
 as the corporate partner, between the protest of the sixties and the
 silence of the nineties? (3)

The transformation from the university as an institution of critical interpretation (as well as knowledge generation) to the current corporatized university that Miyoshi observes is of course a complex one. While to some extent, the inability of academics to resist these changes comes from a simple fear of losing their jobs, (4) it is also due to many academics' misrecognition of their own conditions of formation as 'intellectuals', and the transformative power of their intellectual work as it is fused with the commodity form. Some academics have retreated into a bunker-like mentality, repeating mantra-like phrases such as 'the pursuit of truth' or the 'life of the mind's (5) as a means of defence against corporatization. Others have adapted to the corporatization process. From this point of view, intellectual work has finally come of age. Today, knowledge is paramount, playing a pivotal role in political, cultural and economic life. In other words, from this perspective intellectuals have climbed down from the ivory tower and become 'relevant'. (6)

Neither approach is particularly insightful into the conditions of possibility or the reconstructive effects of intellectual practice. The first approach, still holding to the notion that intellectual work is uniquely 'creative', fails to perceive the way in which such 'individual' creativity has transcended the bounds of the university to become a increasingly dominant way of seeing the world. That is to say, a world in which everyday social and cultural lives are created precisely, in a creative synthesis of media and information, or more generally--'knowledge'. The second approach contains the same misrecognition, although in a more aggressive form, as knowledge is forced into an entirely instrumental and corporatized framework. The result of this is that the kinds of knowledge produced can actually work in contemporary societies to undermine the role of the university: that the expansion of one aspect of the university, the creation of knowledge (understood in a particularly narrow sense), can under contemporary conditions erode the grounds for the legitimation of the university as a semi-autonomous institution. Furthermore, unless the cultural and social implications of understanding knowledge almost purely through an instrumental framework are explored, it will be impossible to take a critical and reflexive position towards the society that is now, in Reading's words, 'up for grabs'.

This article will explore the changing function and status of knowledge and consider the role the university plays in this transformative process. I want to argue that the corporatization of knowledge signifies a great deal more than the onset of a full-blown version of 'academic capitalism', (7) as significant as such a change is in itself. I wish to argue that the more embracing reconstitutive capacities of the intellectual practices have been obscured behind standard interpretations of this shift, interpretations which either understand the commodification of knowledge from the point of view of political economy, or of more straightforward complaints that the commodification of knowledge leads to the destruction of the traditional university.

Several examples allow us to reflect upon the changing context through which academic knowledge is produced, circulated and received. The first is academic publishing. Recent changes within this field allow us to focus on the ambivalent relationship of new technologies to knowledge, the uncertain role of universities in the knowledge society, the effects of corporatization upon academic work, and finally, the struggle over how knowledge is legitimized. The struggle over the legitimation of knowledge is further explored in relation to how universities now account for their research activity. Increasingly, I argue, these processes compress knowledge into an instrumental framework, a framework which necessarily undermines the capacity for intellectuals to come to grips with the social implications of the knowledge they are called upon to produce. Furthermore, such procedures tend to preclude any analysis of the social implications of intellectual practice.

These arguments are explored in relation to my third example, the Australian Labour Party's 'Knowledge Nation' policy statement, an attempt by government to harness knowledge for its economic value (and revitalize the university in the process). I argue that even within this most instrumental of documents there are tensions and struggles over what actually constitutes knowledge. However, these tensions are subsumed within a more general enthusiasm for knowledge-driven societies. Indeed, the benefits claimed for the Knowledge Nation are unlikely to manifest themselves in any comprehensive sense, and an unreflective commitment to reconstituting the nation via "knowledge' will exacerbate, rather than heal, current social divisions.

The final section of this article considers an alternative to the dominant instrumental understanding of universities and knowledge. This alternative view argues that the university could reconstitute itself by taking a leading role in promoting cultural and technological forms of citizenship. Although this approach has some merit, I point out how it downplays the social implications of life constituted primarily at the abstract level of the knowledge society. The form of knowledge produced and encouraged in the present context is conditional upon the emergence of the techno/ information-sciences. This high-tech framework can destabilize other ways of working and being with others when it allows individuals to transcend their attachment to places or to concrete others, the settings which have always grounded social life and any sense of a co-operative ethic. To what extent we can live cooperatively in the absence of these settings is a question which, at the very least, needs to be considered before we wholeheartedly embrace the knowledge society.

Academic Publishing: Knowledge and Hyper-inflation

The recent controversy in Australia surrounding Melbourne University Press (8) drew attention to a wider transformation, namely, the commercialization of university presses and their changed relation to the university itself. Instead of facilitating the publication and circulation of academic work to a small academic community, university presses increasingly see themselves as commercial operations. This push to commercialization is partly a result of pressure placed on university presses from within the university itself, as university managers increasingly embrace the logic of outsourcing. Instead of publishing scholarly work, part of an understanding of the university's essential function as a contributor of knowledge, this function is subordinated to the commercial imperative. University presses are 'pressed by cost conscious university administrators to make it on their own, without institutional subsidies'. (9) Stanley Fish, former director of Duke University Press, claims that university presses 'no longer think in terms of a 900 to 1500 print run' but instead concentrate on publications likely to 'sell between 5000 and 40, 000 copies'. (10) The need for university presses to produce commercially successful books also stems from the fact that the sheer volume of academic publications has increased substantially in the last decade. While the university demands more publications from scholars, university presses can only publish monographs if they can find enough profitable publications at the other end of the market. (11) The tension between publishing as a signifier of academic merit and the need for university presses to become commercially viable indicates the changing context in which knowledge is produced and legitimized within the university. Overall, more books and monographs are being published than ever before. However, this does not indicate that academic life is flourishing. On the contrary, the expansion of published works is indicative of a more general crisis, especially in the humanities where the explosion in monograph publishing has been most evident. Lindsay Walters, editor at Harvard University Press, employs the metaphor of hyper-inflation to describe the current situation, claiming, '[t]he currency of books is becoming deflated in the way that is reminiscent of the decline of the Deutschmark in the 1920s'. (12) More and more monographs are being published, less are being read, and there is a general consensus that many of them ought not to have been published at all. The scholarly book now confronts the danger of being devalued.

What has led to this situation of hyper-inflation? Walters claims that the 'monograph fetish' is the only means in the current context by which workers in the humanities can legitimize their activities and compete with the sciences. While the sciences have adapted more easily to the demands of the corporate university--by focusing on the techno-sciences and producing patents, licences and so on--the humanities produce more and more books in a desperate attempt to keep up in the profit game. The university considers the publication of a book to be valuable, if only in a limited sense, because:

 In our profit-driven university ... a university-wide committee can
 understand that it costs a lot of money to produce. Even if
 committee members can glean nothing about the book's content,
 they know that it cost someone a lot of money to publish and,
 therefore, somebody else a lot of effort to mobilize support to get
 it published. (23)

Walters argues that publication works as a means of outsourcing scholarly legitimation. Instead of a scholar's work being assessed within the university, it goes out to publishers and readers to do the work of assessment via committees and anonymous refereeing. The public debate of ideas within the university decreases as a consequence. It becomes possible for academics in a department to never have to encounter the work of their colleagues.

The diminishing connection between the university and the knowledge produced within it is equally evident in relation to academic journals. Journals were once produced largely within university departments or research centres; today they are increasingly drawn in to the ambit of a small number of commercial publishers. While editorial control is, generally, left in the hands of journal editors, all other functions, such as production and distribution, are run through the commercial publisher. The result is a more abstract mode of knowledge exchange outside the university. The identity of the journal retreats from whatever university connection it once had and attaches itself to a commercial publishing house. Knowledge comes to be valued for reasons rather different than in the past. Simon Frith points out that the commercial interest in most journals, especially in the humanities, has more to do with the selling of knowledge for teaching purposes than with any real interest in research. He argues that,

 commercial interests are met not by the promotion of research but
 in the support of teaching ... an expansion of journals in the arts
 and social sciences--the refereed journal ... can be profitable to
 publishers on a very small circulation (not least because its
 authors and editors don't have to be paid). (14)

As long as knowledge can be harnessed to the sale of materials for teaching, academic journals will continue to be commercially viable. Research less amenable to teaching formats is likely to be marginalized. By and large, the journals that have attracted the attention of commercial publishers have been discipline-based and highly specialized, catering to very specific audiences. The space in which a journal might play a culturally interpretative role directed towards an intellectually formed, but not necessarily highly specific audience is shrinking, as are the number of independent journals which might perform this function. The bracketing of knowledge into increasingly specialized, autonomous contexts of production and reception is reinforced at the commercial level as each academic discipline is 'branded' and identified with its own set of journals and specific audiences.

The increasing specialization of academic knowledge as seen in journal publishing reflects the fragmentation of knowledge within the institutions themselves. The ideal of autonomous inquiry where academics searched for the 'truth' has been replaced by processes whereby each discipline searches for its own particular truth, ignoring the work of other disciplines. As Steve Fuller notes, one no longer searches for the truth but instead 'applies a paradigm or follows through a research programme until its intellectual resources, or more pointedly financial resources have been exhausted'. (15) Perhaps this is why the corporate takeover of journals has attracted so little comment, for academics can still produce and receive knowledge in their own disciplines. From this perspective, the changes in academic publishing may appear only minor. However, Fuller argues that the intellectual and material processes of specialization ease the transition from knowledge produced within the academy to knowledge produced outside it in a fully commercial environment. He remarks:

 The division of labour in today's academia has modularized,
 perhaps even decontextualised, the commitment to autonomous
 enquiry. A vivid reminder of this development is the ease with
 which the research units of some academic departments can be
 transferred from the institutional setting of the university to
 another--say, a science park or a corporate facility--without
 seeming to lose anything in the translation. (16)

This corporate 'supplement' to knowledge specialization has been facilitated by the electronic processes and formats that commercial publishers can now offer, processes that have been harnessed aggressively to monopolize access to information. Through a comprehensive process of accumulation and block marketing on the part of major publishers, large numbers of previously independent journals can be offered as a bulk package to libraries. The growth of electronic forms of distribution via the Internet mean this process can be taken a step further. Electronic publishing allows single articles to be purchased and read, rather than the whole journal. This is a restrictive development, on several levels. First, the decline of budgets in real terms means that librarians are increasingly likely to choose one publisher's package over another, as they are no longer able to choose individual journals. Second, the tradeability of single articles means that the reader is less likely to browse through a range of articles in a particular issue of a journal. The productive possibilities of chance encounters with interesting material, or exposure generally to a wider range of material, are reduced. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the role played by any particular journal's distinctive editorial policy, its 'identity'--including the journal's potential role in promoting a counter-institution for knowledge--is undermined. Journals come to be seen merely as a series of discrete articles. It is quite likely that if present trends continue independent journals will not make it into universities at all: they are not part of the block packages offered by larger publishers, and cannot compete against their economies of scale.

An emerging cultural shift in the way knowledge is received is occurring not merely at the point of publication, but also at the point of reception. It is ironic that at the same time as universities are under pressure to become more accountable to the public their knowledge base is in danger of being restricted, the flow of information being regulated not simply by the laws of copyright but, more importantly, by the narrower laws of contract. New technologies, in combination with contract law, can now be used by publishers to further commercialize and privatize access to knowledge. For example, contract law can be used to regulate the number of people allowed to view, read and use digital material. Regulation was more difficult when knowledge had a material existence in the form of books and journals. However, in the digital age, 'knowledge' must be called up each time an individual wishes to use it. Because digital technologies cause 'written' material to manifest in a different form--summoned from a databank--a more individualized form of intellectual property regulation becomes possible. From this point of view, new laws and technologies contribute to reconstituting the public sphere of knowledge as a series of atomized transactions. Anne Flahvin explains the emerging situation where:

 We've moved away from an era where universities were free to
 purchase material, books, journal articles, and simply kind of put
 them up on the shelves, and allow anybody to come in and take a
 look at them--where students or just Joe Citizen--could walk
 into a university library, pick the material off the shelf and read
 it without any payment being made to anybody, let alone the owner
 of copyright. When material is purchased digitally, that's just no
 longer going to be the case. Now part of the reason for that is just
 merely in reading digital material, you are engaged in exercising
 one of the rights comprised in copyright. And what we're seeing is
 we're moving into an era where owners of copyrights are able to,
 and will, seek to extract payment for that activity. We're moving
 into an era where we have an exclusive right to read. (17)

The shift towards such a highly individualized 'user-pays' system is a cultural shift in the way we view knowledge and experience reading. In this move from knowledge rights enforced through copyright, to rights enforced through individual contractual agreements between publisher and reader, the very act of accessing knowledge initiates a process of reification: knowledge comes to be experienced as a discrete end-product to be purchased. In this shift from public access to individual consumption, the social contexts of learning and understanding are reduced to a narrower context where knowledge as a commodity is consumed in a one-to-one transaction.

Knowledge and the University: the Rise of the Audit Culture

The way universities now value the knowledge they produce mirrors these changes in the publishing world. In the accounting practices of universities and the governmental bodies which oversee them, knowledge is understood only as a quantifiable 'thing', removed from any context or relationship with the social environment. As Lyotard predicted, knowledge has ceased to have a meta-narrative function, and instead has been incorporated into the production process as such. (18) The two-fold effect of this--a loss of knowledge's autonomous status and the reconstitution of knowledge into fragmented micro-spheres of information--has in turn caused the university to re-examine its role in respect of its wider constituency. The new demand for public accountability has led to the creation of systems of measurement for the legitimation of academic work. In terms of academic research, this has led to the introduction of university auditing procedures that, in the main, recognize knowledge only to the extent that it can be incorporated into the contemporary mode of production. Richard Poynder observes that one result of this is to further enforce the relationship of academic production to commercial interests:

 Academic salaries, career prospects, are increasingly tied up with
 the amount of research they publish, so there's great pressure to
 publish. And for the publishers initially, this was a wonderful
 opportunity because it meant they could introduce lots of new
 journals, they could increase the page count of journals, and they
 could charge an annual subscription to institutes for buying those
 journals. (19)'

In Australia and the United Kingdom in particular, funding for universities, and individual departments and centres, is increasingly tied to research output. In Australia, the Federal Government, responsible for university funding, has recently narrowed the categories so that almost the only material eligible for funding are peer-refereed publications. Given the corporate takeover of university presses and scholarly journals, this research output is more closely tied to commercial frameworks than ever before. (20) The degree to which such knowledge might critically engage with the community must also necessarily be reduced. The move to make universities accountable is measured only to the extent that quantitative criteria can reconstitute research as a valuable commodity. In the absence of any contextual understanding of knowledge, the only criteria for value lies in quantity--how many publications, grants, etcetera. As Samuel Weber notes (endorsing the work of Bill Readings): '[a]ll that the system requires is for activity to take place, and the empty notion of excellence refers to nothing other that the optimal input/output ratio in matters of information'. (21) Intellectuals are both pushed into this process and highly cynical about its value. Simon Frith notes that: 'the quantitative increase in research publications rests on an increasing number of routine papers and reports which add little to the sum of human knowledge'. (22) Although there is increased production of knowledge, the conditions that have enabled this increase have narrowed the traditional critical and interpretative role of knowledge. Furthermore, the demand for 'more' knowledge means that the kinds of knowledge produced by intellectuals must become increasingly narrow and specialized as this becomes the only way to remain constantly publishable. Arguably, such institutional pressures have contributed to intellectuals in the humanities legitimizing theoretically certain ways of being in the world--shifting and unstable forms of social and cultural life governed through the consumption of media and information--so as to remain innovative. The techno-sciences (as a de facto or an actual partner with commercial industry) work to materially reconstruct the world so that it is less grounded and stable.

The rise of the audit culture (23) in relation to universities reflects the crisis in the status of knowledge generally. If, on the one hand, societies are attempting increasingly to harness forms of knowledge to advance themselves economically, politically and culturally, the grounds on which knowledge can be legitimized have shifted. The rise of auditing practices must be seen as an attempt, however impoverished, to re-legitimize universities' role in the production and circulation of knowledge. As we shall see, however, these procedures are contradictory on a number of levels. First, any system of accountability which simply replicates the capitalist emphasis on endless productivity undermines the idea of the university as a semi-autonomous institution capable of deploying knowledge for critical and interpretative purposes. Hence, while universities are pressured to become more innovative, the meaning of this term remains unclear, and universities are judged instead by the quantity of knowledge produced. Given this narrow paradigm, the university cannot easily distinguish itself from other institutions and/or new technologies which are adept in the production of knowledge. Second, as we shall see, the process of symbolic recognition between intellectuals, institutions and social forms is reduced to a process of recognition via records of citation and the production of articles, a fragmentation of academic culture into a series of micro-networks within which academics struggle to keep up with the proliferation of published and cited material in their field. Here, a system which ought to determine the significance of intellectual work actually results in intellectual fragmentation. Third, although the aim of auditing is to make universities publicly accountable for knowledge, the reality is that they fail to consider the 'public' implications of knowledge at all. The context in which knowledge has an impact is ignored by procedures that focus on knowledge exclusively as a quantifiable end-product divorced from its conditions of production and reception.

These methods of accountability create an artificial and misguided means by which to determine the value of knowledge. As Frith points out, such procedures, by regarding knowledge simply as a finished product, ignore the way in which intellectual work ought to mediate between sections of the community. Commenting on the United Kingdom's Research Auditing Exercise (RAE), he notes that:

 research influence works indirectly, not through 'findings'
 presented to 'users', but in the patient build up of contacts and
 networks through which discourse is shaped. The [RAE's] account
 of the public is narrow. We do have public responsibilities as state
 funded intellectuals, but not simply in accounting terms, to our
 funders. (24)

The very process of building up contacts and networks, through which academics can engage with the work of their colleagues, is in reality threatened by the expansion of current form of academic research. The pressure to publish, the often crude process of legitimizing an academic career by the counting of publications and citations, and the expansion of particular kinds of academic publishing, have worked to undermine the conditions which could foster Frith's understanding of 'research influence'. Steve Fuller points out how the expansion of academia, along with its capitalization, has led to a more insidious form of marginalization--'the marginalization that results from one's published work going unread, undiscussed, uncited--and even when cited, cited in an omnibus fashion'. (25) The sheer proliferation of academic material, if a boon for academic publishing, has created nothing short of an epistemic crisis for academics. Fuller argues that the Darwinist metaphor for knowledge--in which the best knowledge will eventually survive and distinguish itself from its 'competitors'--although a comforting assumption for those who wish to redeem value in an information age, is inappropriate. Instead, he says:

 Most of today's research fails to survive because it perishes once
 it is published, still-born, never quite connecting with an
 environment long enough for other scholars to subject it to critical
 scrutiny ... the natural sciences have displayed the most
 exaggerated symptoms [of this phenomenon] but the social
 sciences and the humanities are following close on their heels. (26)

The reduced shelf-life of research, or even the capacity of new knowledge to be noticed at all, further narrows the possibility of critical and culturally interpretative knowledge emerging. The space where knowledge might engage with societal processes, be debated, reinterpreted or rethought, is narrowed, as is the reflexive capacity of intellectuals to interpret the implications of knowledge as a social form in itself. To adopt a phrase by Slaughter and Leslie, 'academic work remains autonomous but is transformed'. (27)

The changes in both academic publishing and the production of knowledge in universities indicate several things:

* An increasing fusion of knowledge with capital. Knowledge is increasingly gathered up within commercial frameworks (publishing companies, commercial scientific research). Universities re-design themselves so as to resemble private industry.

* The collapse of various modes of knowledge--cultural, critical-interpretative--into a single instrumental mode. The knowledge society does not simply add knowledge to a preexisting industrial society, but rather comes to recast the meaning of knowledge according to a set of values derived from industry and capital.

* The inadequacy of audit models (peer review, citation systems) and their contribution to a further fragmentation of knowledge as it is split between and even within disciplines. There is a 'crisis of legitimation' of knowledge produced in the university.

* The greater emphasis on knowledge production reduces the space where intellectuals and institutions are able to reflect upon the expansion of a certain kind of intellectual practice within the social.

Taken together, these shifts make it increasingly difficult for intellectuals to see the significance of their own practices. Once knowledge is framed by processes of commodification, the particular kind of social relation on which intellectual practices depends is obscured. This is a problem in terms of how intellectuals recognize each other, quite apart from how intellectual practices relate to the wider social realm. For example, Steve Fuller notes how citation processes in the sciences alter the way intellectuals engage with each other. According to Fuller, there is an 'implicit social ethic' in the process of citation as a form of intellectual engagement. In other words, 'the way one treats texts is intimately tied to the way one treats their authors'. (28) Where knowledge is cited without attention to its context; where a good deal of the knowledge produced is not engaged with by the academic community; and where the critical and interpretative capacities of knowledge are downplayed, given that knowledge is produced and accounted for only within certain narrow parameters, the 'social ethic' of intellectuals is radically undercut.

Fuller's view that when one encounters an author's texts one ought to treat them as one would the author, prompts a question about what might ground a social ethic of intellectual practice in a wider context. Extending his claim, it is possible to argue that sustaining ethical relationships in the context of absence in the condition of intellectual exchange--requires the use relationships grounded in presence as an orientation point. A balance is required between more and less abstract kinds of social relations. Geoff Sharp has pointed out that the ability of the intellectual to stand outside and interpret their societies has always depended on technological mediation, whether it be writing or the Internet. Mediation allows them to reach across times and spaces and thus reverse the traditional self/other relationship. (29) The more abstract relations engendered by technological mediation enable them 'to become autonomous agents, implying that individuals can become arbiters of their own ethic, free from the constraints of an established way of living'. (30) Fuller's observation implies that the basis for ethics is derived from more concrete relations, a recognition not always observed by intellectuals framed by a more idealistic understanding of their own special nature.

Thus, the intellectual has always been a 'techno-social being' able to operate at a distance from the rest of society, whose sense of individuality is enhanced by this more abstract structural relationship between self and other. Perhaps the fact that this structural condition of possibility has been misrecognized or under-theorized has not been important in the past, as the scope of intellectual practice has been checked by cultural and technological limits. However, postmodernity has ushered in two fundamental shifts. First, the scope and constitutive power of intellectual practice has been radically enhanced via the techno-sciences and the collapse of cultural-moral frameworks which might have set limits on intellectual activity. Second, the degree to which intellectual practices have come to the centre of daily life has increased. More and more of our daily life is constituted through some kind of intellectual practice, culturally through the use of media and information, materially (31) through the replacement of natural environments with techno-scientific ones. As our taken-for-granted ethical points of reference, based in mutuality and presence, are superseded by more abstract relations, where individuals can become 'arbiters of their own ethic', it becomes vital to understand the nature and limits of a way of life based around the intellectual practices.

If intellectuals are increasingly locked into a process of production where knowledge is valued instrumentally, like the commodity, the context in which knowledge was produced, the symbolic recognition of the intellectual, and any understanding of the social relation of knowledge, is prematurely foreclosed. To return to Fuller's point about an implicit social ethic in intellectuals' citation of each other's work, we can see how current systems of citation recording create conditions in which it is all too easy to ignore the distinction between a more abstract interchange and a more concrete encounter. The idea that you might treat the author's work as if you were directly encountering the author constitutes an ethics for an abstract mode of interaction which is determined through a less abstract form of exchange. The way in which citation schemes and audit cultures reify an already abstract system of exchange obscures this relation. As Geoff Sharp notes: 'the basic "form of life" of the intellectually related groupings is inseparable from extended interchange and this tends to undermine the centrality of a life form which is marked by human presence as a defining characteristic'. (32)

Yet much of the work which welcomes the knowledge society as a boon to both universities and populations assumes that the values which have underpinned that life form can simply be transposed to the more abstract kinds of relations based in knowledge. It assumes that 'knowledge' simply equates with the social good, instead of asking what it might mean when knowledge no longer interprets the world but radically expands its constitutive power. Technological progress, along with the break-up of modern social and cultural traditions, has allowed the intellectual practices to expand in terms of the objects they encompass--think of the techno-sciences reaching into every taken-for-granted aspect of our life, or the way almost every aspect of social interaction has become subject to a further process of mediatization and interpretation. The result is that our identities are increasingly built upon the shifting signifiers of the information society.

Sadly, at the level of public policy there is no recognition that a greater commitment to the intellectual practices as they are generally understood today might come at the cost of social and cultural integration and coherence. The recent policy document An Agenda for the Knowledge Nation, released in 2001 by the Australian Labor Party, provides an example of the way governments, under the guise of enriching our knowledge base, set down conditions that will further the trends we have observed in relation to publishing and university research.

Universities and the Knowledge Nation: Anti-Intellectual Knowledge?

The concept of a Knowledge Nation suggests that cohesion will be forged through granting its citizens access to knowledge. This was to some extent the case in modernity. In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings argues that the modern university was legitimized through the enculturation of national citizens. The decline of the nation-state is hence connected with the legitimation-crisis of universities. (33) Although Readings is right to locate this crisis in the severance of any connection between learning and nation building, it is significant that in many countries today knowledge is regarded once again as a means of re-invigorating the nation, the university occupying a crucial role within this process. (34) The Knowledge Nation report, An Agenda for the Knowledge Nation, is typical of such a strategy. The report bears consideration, not because it forms a special case but rather because it reflects many of the dominant assumptions about the capacity of knowledge to rebuild nations and communities, assumptions that have become almost universal.

The general tenor of the report can be gained from the following statement:

 In the face of a changing world economy where knowledge is
 paramount, Australia is facing a national crisis ... the only way
 forward for Australia is to become a courageous and effective
 Knowledge Nation in which everyone participates and shares the
 benefits. (35)

In a moment I will examine the extent to which everyone will 'share the benefits'. It is clear, however, that the benefits of knowledge in this statement are economic. Knowledge is regarded by its authors (36) as almost entirely a commodity, rather than something that might provide its subjects with a means to know themselves and the world. (37)

The university is to play a key role in the Knowledge Nation in terms of education and research. These activities are separated from each other, instead of informing each other as they have done traditionally, and both are understood within a completely instrumental framework. Any process of enculturation in relation to knowledge is accidental. First, education is considered in terms of vocational skilling so that graduates will be able to participate actively in the knowledge economy. Second, the creation of an education export industry will allow Australia to harness the economic potentials of online learning, where the aim is to "become a world leader ... winning at least 10 per cent of global market share of revenue'. Although there are token remarks about the need for 'fundamental research' (that is, research with no obvious market value) most of the report concerns itself with taking steps to 'improve the commercialization of university research'. Biotechnology and information technology are emphasized particularly. (38)

Although most of the report is concerned with the economic and social 'benefits' of knowledge, conceived of purely in terms of the commodity, the humanities are not entirely ignored. Indeed, one of the key characteristics of the Knowledge Nation requires 'the study of the humanities as well as applied knowledge'(my emphasis). However, no actual reasons are given for why the humanities ought to be encouraged. This absence contrasts with the wealth of material advocating and justifying techno-scientific and information technology research. The question has to be asked: why should the Knowledge Nation preserve the humanities at all? The only attempt to address this question occurs when the humanities are considered as potential commodities (and thus applied knowledge):

 the expansion of the university system to create a Knowledge
 Nation must include a corresponding improvement in the position
 of the humanities and social sciences. The arts, which are
 increasingly becoming the key providers of 'content' for
 information-based industries must be nurtured and expanded'.

We have turned full circle, and are back at the very corporatization procedures that are transforming academic publishing. As with publishing, there has been little opposition by intellectuals to Knowledge Nation-type policies. Arguably this is due to the 'auratic' quality associated with the term 'knowledge', a term which still resonates with its non-instrumental modalities of reflection, criticism, and cultural and social interpretation. The paradox here is that opposition to the Knowledge Nation seems like an anti-intellectual position, yet in terms of the context in which most public policy seeks to support 'knowledge', nothing could reduce the scope of intellectual interpretation more drastically.

It ought to be clear by now that not all kinds of knowledge are the same. The compression of knowledge into an instrumental framework works to displace and undermine the critical-interpretative and cultural functions of knowledge. It is not the case that the production of more kinds of knowledge leads to more 'knowledge' as once might haven been understood. We have seen how within universities the expansion of commodified forms of knowledge does more than compromise the university as a public institution. Indeed, increased knowledge production leads both to the fragmentation of disciplines and to the lack of an adequate basis from which to judge the value of knowledge. Consequently, the significance of knowledge from a traditional standpoint--the extent to which knowledge can provide a cultural and critical perspective on the world in which we live--is undermined, as the mode of knowledge production leads to a crisis in the legitimation of its various institutions.

This process of undermining occurs on a number of levels. First, non-instrumental knowledge is increasingly hard to justify in the context of a Knowledge Nation. Second, where forms of critical and interpretative knowledge are generated, they tend to circulate in a narrow context--produced for specialized, discipline-based journals in which narrow theoretical or critical innovation is valued over broader social and cultural interpretation. Third, there is very little knowledge produced which explores the reconstructive effects that intellectual practices have on the social field more generally. There is either an inability to recognize that intellectual practices have expanded both in scope and constitutive power in the last few decades, and thus the question of knowledge is regarded ahistorically; or interpretations of the knowledge-society relation are made that recognize the transformative capacities of knowledge upon society, but fail to address the degree to which the reconstructive power of intellectual practice can remain unchecked. In other words, this latter position--an unreflective acceptance of the Knowledge Society--never really asks to what extent can we construct an ethical and democratic society when social relations and individual identities are maintained entirely within the unstable and abstract flows of knowledge. If we consider the way in which social and cultural bonds have been sustained and developed in the past--through relations centered around mutual presence, orientation to place, and some degree of manual labour--and conclude that such relations have determined whatever ethical and cultural orientation points we currently have (39)--we at least need to ask to what extent we can rely on the ceaseless production and flow of knowledge, which tends to transcend those more concrete reference points, to guide us towards a more equitable way of living. At present the idea of the Knowledge Nation retains some of the appeal of traditional notions of knowledge--wisdom, critique, culture. But the structural conditions that promote the Knowledge Nation limit the extent to which these older notions associated with 'knowledge' might be realised.

Certainly, the move to create ways of life centered increasingly around 'knowledge' will not necessarily lead to the more confident, more equalitarian society assumed by the authors of the Knowledge Nation report. In fact the opposite may be the case. Fuller notes that:

 the overall increase in high-skilled labour means that the value of
 being highly skilled declines, which in effect makes any given
 member of the 'elite' more dispensable than ever ... In that
 respect, informationalism's openness to 'lifelong learning'
 backhandedly acknowledges the inability of even the best
 schooling to shelter one from the vicissitudes of the new global
 marketplace. Education, though more necessary than ever, appears
 much like a vaccine that must be repeatedly taken in stronger
 doses to ward off more virulent strains of the corresponding
 disease--in this case, technologically-induced unemployment. (40)

The report, like many similar odes to the knowledge society, fails to come to grips with such contradictions. The capacity for knowledge to improve and interpret the world is necessarily related to the social framework which carries it. 'Lifelong learning' in the contemporary context actually indicates the need for constant retraining in order to ensure a small degree of security in the post-industrial economy. It is hard to figure how the traditional understanding of knowledge, as a means of interpreting the self and the world, can apply in an environment of such rapid obsolescence. Indeed, knowledge as applied, commodifiable knowledge (the kind of knowledge increasingly valued by governments and institutions) works to disrupt the world as it is reconstituted through the practices of the techno-sciences and information/media. John Hinkson suggests there is such a contradiction in the Australian political context, arguing that today's one-sided promotion of knowledge threatens to exacerbate the already existing political divide between urban and regional areas. Knowledge has inherent destabilizing effects to the extent that it reconstitutes more concrete and established ways of life; face-to-face relations are replaced by technologically extended relationships; physical labour is replaced by high-tech jobs (often with a rapid obsolescence of skills); and so on. John Hinkson has recently argued, in relation to the Knowledge Nation report, that the expansion of knowledge may actually create the condition to further divide, rather than heal social divisions. Thus in relation to the capacity of knowledge to solve the problems of regional Australia he writes:

 If the regions resent urban dominance, promote the culture which
 lies behind that dominance; if the regions despise the role of
 global markets, promote those high-tech processes which have
 made the markets possible; if the regions despair at the loss of
 continuity in social life, promote discontinuity and high-tech
 turbulence! (41)

Although appeals to knowledge, access to education and 'lifelong learning' have a veneer of democracy, there is a danger that a commitment to a full-blown knowledge society won't be democratic at all, as those unable or unwilling to commit to the impermanence of life based around high-tech forms of knowledge will be structurally excluded. The postmodern nation will be likely to fragment further through the application of instrumental policy, rather than cohere like its modern precursor.

Is it possible, then, to think about the about new context of knowledge in a more constructive way than simply harnessing knowledge as a commodity and regarding universities as little more than R&D centres or skills providers? One alternative approach has been to think of the university as an institution perfectly placed to provide a 'knowledge-based' citizenship.

Alternatives to Academic Capitalism: Knowledge-based Citizenship?

With the power and significance of the structures and institutions of modernity having been eroded (and this includes the university) the concept of citizenship has been raised as a means to ensure that democratic social relations are maintained. Generally, advocates for citizenship emphasize the need to grant the Individual an adequate degree of social and cultural resources in order to fully exercise their political rights and to be aware of their corresponding responsibilities. Contemporary citizenship is global in focus, as the individual becomes more and more able to transcend the structures of family, community and nation-state and construct their cultural and social identity from a global resource bank of media, information, and communications technologies. (42) Increasingly, questions of citizenship are posed in relation to access to knowledge. To some degree, this kind of approach escapes both the instrumental focus of the Knowledge Nation and the 'end of knowledge' thesis (43) by arguing that knowledge is more important than ever in the construction and maintenance of democratic social bonds. Such knowledge must necessarily exceed a purely instrumental focus.

One work which takes up this issue and, importantly, sketches an active role for the university within this process, is Gerard Delanty's Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society. (44) As a starting point, Delanty accepts the displacement of the university from its traditional role as source and generator of knowledge. While this has created a problem for universities--the twin dangers of corporatization and competition with sources and flows of knowledge elsewhere--Delanty argues that the university can construct a new role for itself in the knowledge society. If the university cannot claim to be a unique source of knowledge production any more, what it can do, according to Delanty, is reclaim a role for itself in the public sphere as a key site of 'inter-connectivity' within society. He claims that:

 There is a proliferation of so many different kinds of knowledge
 that no particular one can unify all of the others. The university
 cannot re-establish the broken unity of knowledge but it can open
 up avenues of communication between these different kinds of
 knowledge ... (45)

The task of the university, then, is to open up sites of communication in society so as to promote 'the formation of cultural and technological citizenship'. If the university, according to Readings, has a diminished role in the enculturation of students as national subjects, it can, argues Delanty, assist in producing the kinds of cultural literacies that will enable its students to be effective global citizens. The university will facilitate the relationship to knowledge rather than have students absorb any particular culture. Thus, the university will enable the shift from information 'knowers' to information handlers, as first predicted by Lyotard, but in a way that does not necessarily lead to the 'end' of knowledge.

Delanty outlines two forms of citizenship, both of which rely on the use of knowledge, although in different ways. 'Cultural citizenship' means the rules governing the constitution of cultural communities. Cultural communities are becoming increasingly important as contemporary structures of association are becoming more diverse and complex. Delanty claims that 'it can no longer be assumed that political community rests on a relatively uniform cultural identity'. Cultural citizenship recognizes the changing contexts of rights and responsibilities as individuals detach themselves from more traditional physical and cultural contexts, forming new relationships with others across mobile information and knowledge networks. Because knowledge has always been mobile, and thus global in reach, the university as a site of knowledge is perfectly suited to foster this emerging mode of citizenship. As Delanty puts it; 'given that this new culture of citizenship must be transnational, then university as cosmopolitan communication community is ideal for this task'.

However, cultural citizenship alone is insufficient. It has to be linked with our relation to contemporary technologies, which need to be 'humanized'. Technological citizenship concerns itself with rights to the benefits of new technologies. As Delanty puts it:

 In an age characterized by the mobility of capital, labour,
 communication, food and images, new kinds of rights will emerge
 which cannot be organized around the centrality of the state and
 national societies. It is evident that many of these kinds of rights
 will increasingly depend on new technologies which will in turn
 shape the discourse of rights. (46)

The key to both forms of citizenship lies in the relation between knowledge and democracy. Knowledge provides both a means to democracy, and knowledge itself needs to be democratized. For Delanty, 'a new role and identity for the university is emerging around the democratization of knowledge. By democratization I mean the participation of more and more actors in the social construction of reality'. (47) In short, the university facilitates cultural and technological citizenship through being a key site of interconnectivity for diverse forms of knowledge.

Up to a point this is desirable, perhaps even necessary if the university is to remain relevant and the trend towards the instrumentalization of knowledge is to be curtailed. However, it is unclear whether a knowledge-based form of citizenship is capable of resisting some of the more problematic aspects of the knowledge-society, or how the university is to play a role in this context substantially different to its present one. We can agree with Delanty that 'the university must recover the public space of discourse that has been lost in the decline of the public sphere'. (48) This could mean that the university could take a critical role in relation to the wider implications of a knowledge society. Important questions could be posed. What kinds of social bonds are possible if individuals rely on knowledge to constantly redefine themselves in relation to changing world? Will the more abstract modes of communication involved in the technological consumption of knowledge provide a more equitable way of life? What are the cultural consequences of a life based around knowledge? The current crisis of the university provides an example of the problems faced in the wake of a knowledge explosion. The implications of the corporatization of knowledge--the pressure to produce more knowledge and be constantly innovative, the problematic attempts to legitimize intellectual work, and the fragmentation of disciplines--indicate just some of the consequences of the expansion in knowledge production. Will these problems--corporatization, instrumentality, fragmentation--which currently threaten to undermine the university compound outside of the university as knowledge becomes the chief means of organizing the social?

Delanty seems to be aware of these problems yet is unwilling to engage fully with them. Cultural and technological citizenship seems to be about accepting the implications of a comprehensive knowledge society and then attempting to democratize it, rather than recognizing that this society may at heart be undemocratic. This is likely to be so because as older social and cultural frameworks are transcended by knowledge, whether it be technological or cultural knowledge, all we are left with are cosmopolitan individuals and their competing rights. Delanty argues that the university can play a role in this context:

 [T]he university can allow people to live at greater ease with
 uncertainty ... the role of the university must be to make sense of
 this situation of endless change, and secondly, it must enable
 people to live more effectively in this chaotic world. (49)

Such statements draw attention to the contradiction at the heart of any knowledge society. Knowledge, in order to have critical and interpretative force, must be able to engage with a relatively stable situation, field or object. This has been the condition of possibility for intellectual enquiry in the past, where intellectuals are able to 'stand outside' their object of inquiry. A fully reconstructed knowledge society provides no place to stand outside, and as such leaves little room for sustainable interpretation or critique. How can one, to use Delanty's phrase, 'make sense of a situation of endless change'? Although the university cannot claim the kind of autonomy it had within modernity, it is another thing entirely to understand its critical role as simply that of facilitator of knowledge. Surely the conditions on which that knowledge is produced and circulated, and the social impacts of a knowledge which renders our engagement with the world more abstract need to be interrogated.

In this sense, nothing in Delanty's argument would preclude universities simply carrying on as they are now. For instance, he writes that '[t]he university is the institution in society most capable of linking the requirements of industry, technology and market forces with the demands of citizenship'. (50) This may be the case, but we are not told how these requirements might be balanced against each other. As we have seen, more concrete patterns of social life are destabilized through intellectual practice, especially when enhanced through the technologies which have enabled the techno-scientific and communications revolution. How might these relatively stable modes of social being be balanced against the rights of individuals to new technologies, for instance? We have seen how the market currently plays a key role in setting the context for the production and circulation of knowledge. Delanty gives us little reason to think that technological and/or cultural citizenship might fundamentally alter this. Indeed, the very criteria he uses for the university being able to play a key role in fostering citizenship is precisely the criteria which, at present, lock academics into producing corporatized forms of knowledge. Delanty writes that 'given the enormous dependence of these [market, industry] forces on university-based experts, the university is in fact in a position of strength, not of weakness'. (51) Yet it is this very capacity to provide experts, which has created the demand for universities to perform 'applied' research--consultants for private industry and so on.

While I would agree with Delanty that the university can play an important role in occupying the public sphere and facilitating a mode of citizenship based on knowledge, I would argue that a more comprehensive understanding of the relations between forms of knowledge, intellectual practices and society needs to be undertaken. An emphasis on democracy and access, together with a limited critique of the more baleful aspects of instrumental knowledge, provides insufficient grounds for imagining an alternative future. Knowledge itself is not the problem. Rather, it is the framework in which knowledge is produced and circulated. Societies and communities have always relied upon knowledge, and have perhaps always craved more knowledge. But let us be clear. Much of the knowledge produced in the knowledge society is carried within high-tech frameworks--information, media and the techno-sciences. The central question remains: how are we engage with such frameworks, for the cultural flows of information allow individuals to transcend prior physical and cultural contexts, while the techno-sciences reconstruct our relation to nature. Are these prior contexts simply to be regarded as structural impediments, or do they also provide ethical and cultural orientation points which enable us to live in a sustainable fashion?

Conclusion

The current state of academic publishing, the manner in which universities are increasingly called upon to justify their activities, and the way these activities themselves now tend towards the production of more instrumental forms of knowledge suggest that we are moving towards a state of 'post-intellectuality'. Such a state involves intellectuals working in increasingly narrow and predetermined fields of activity, where the results of their labour are understood purely in the terms defined by a system of commodity exchange. In short, intellectuals increasingly will come to resemble forms of artificial intelligence--running through paradigm-defined operations--lacking insight into their own conditions of possibility. In turn the very grounds on which intellectual work is able to distinguish itself from other modes of engagement with the world are undermined just as more and more people rely upon 'knowledge' to maintain their working lives and cultural identities. I do not wish to resist these developments simply to preserve whatever remains of the 'aura' of intellectual activity, and to set it against the 'tyranny' of massified knowledge. On the contrary, this crude dichotomy must be avoided if we are to determine how, and to what degree we are to embrace the knowledge society and in what relation the university should stand to it. We have observed how the corporatization process has changed the way in which certain forms of knowledge are valued over others, and has threatened to limit access to knowledge despite the promises of the information revolution. However, I have argued that a more comprehensive analysis is necessary--an analysis which would explore the reconstructive capacity of knowledge itself, now that it has disseminated beyond the modern institutional sites which once contained it. The need for intellectual activity within universities is more pressing than ever. However, the appropriate response requires insight into the social and cultural significance of intellectual activity, not simply more activity.

(1.) B. Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 6.

(2.) For an example see many of the contributions in T. Coady (ed.), Why Universities Matter: A Conversation about Values, Means and Directions, St Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 2000.

(3.) M. Miyoshi, 'Ivory Tower In Escrow', Boundary 2, Summer 2000, p. 11.

(4.) See A. Caddick for more on notions of academic "cowardice' and the need for an account of the social relations and conditions of possibility for intellectual practice. A. Caddick, 'Truth and the Academy', Arena Magazine, October 1998, pp. 9-10.

(5.) See R. Gaita in Why Universities Matter for a sophisticated articulation of this position.

(6.) This misunderstanding, whereby knowledge is more accessible, but only in its instrumental modality, also extends to the reconstitution of teaching within the university. In Australia the expansion of the tertiary sector in the 1980s was welcomed by many as a gesture towards an greater equality of education. Arguably however, much education today bears little resemblance to what was understood as a university education even two decades ago. University teaching itself has been radically instrumentalized, with vocational training replacing 'education' as traditionally understood. See G. Sharp, 'The University and After?', Arena, no. 82 (old series), 1988, pp. 117-33 for a critique of these earlier reforms.

(7.) S. Slaughter and L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

(8.) The controversy surrounded the decision of Melbourne University Press not to publish Why Universities Matter, after the board had previously decided to approve publication. The reasons why MUP declined to publish the book are still being debated, but it appears the book was seen as unrepresentative of the range of views concerning the university and too traditional in its viewpoint, and, more controversially, certain essays were thought to be critical of recent developments such as the establishment of Melbourne University Private, a private sector of the university. Whatever the final reasons, the events surrounding the non-publication of the book helped crystallize debate around the changing role of universities in Australia.

(9.) C. Miller, 'The Crushing Power of Big Publishing', Nation, 17 March 1997.

(10.) Cited in Miyoshi, p. 20.

(11.) L. Waiters, 'Monomania', The Australian: Higher Education, 3 October 2001, p. 26.

(12.) Walters, p. 26.

(13.) Walters, p. 27.

(14.) S. Frith, 'Research Matters', Critical Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, p. 127.

(15.) S. Fuller, 'Making the University Fit for Critical Intellectuals. Recovering from the Ravages of the Postmodern Condition', British Educational Research Journal, December 1999, p. 586.

(16.) Fuller, p. 584.

(17.) Cited in 'Knowledge Indignation', ABC Radio National, 12 August 2001. Transcript available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing.

(18.) J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984.

(19.) 'Knowledge Indignation'.

(20.) Information concerning the value of research to universities can be found at the government department site: http://www.detya.gov.au/highered/research/index.htm.

(21.) S. Weber, 'The Future Campus: Destiny in a Virtual World', Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, vol. 21, no. 2, 1999, p. 157.

(22.) Frith, p. 129.

(23.) See M. Power, Audit Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

(24.) Frith, p. 129.

(25.) S. Fuller, 'Life in the Knowledge Society: A Case of Some Really Artificial Intelligence' Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 14, no. 1, 1997, pp. 147-8.

(26.) S. Fuller, 'Life in the Knowledge Society', p. 148.

(27.) Slaughter and Leslie, p. 110.

(28.) Fuller, 'Life in the Knowledge Society', p. 154.

(29.) Sharp, 'Globalization Now', Arena Journal, no. 15, 2000, pp. 112-4.

(30.) Sharp, p. 113.

(31.) This is not to imply that the techno-scientific process is not also a cultural process, rather it is to point out that in many cases, the transformation of received categories via the techno-sciences is a often a more immediate material transformation.

(32.) G. Sharp, 'The University and After?', Arena, no. 82, 1988, p. 130.

(33.) Readings, p. 46. Reasons of space do not permit me to engage with Readings' own position. However much I agree with his diagnosis of the contemporary university, I would disagree with him (a) on the extent to which the university is in 'ruins', as well as the extent to which it has severed any meaningful relationship to culture and the nation, and (b) in advocating a strategy, following Lyotard, of 'dissensus'. While dissensus is an essential function of knowledge, it is a one-dimensional strategy that would easily degenerate into fragmentation if the larger context in which knowledge is produced were not examined.

(34.) 'Third Way' policy in the United Kingdom parallels many aspects of the Knowledge Nation report, especially the emphasis on knowledge as a commodity and the need for 'lifelong learning'.

(35.) An Agenda for the Knowledge Nation: Report of the Knowledge Nation Taskforce (referred to in this article as the Knowledge Nation report) is available at: http://www.alp.org.au/kn/kntreport_index.html.

(36.) The membership of the taskforce derives as much from business and IT as from education and teaching.

(37.) Actually they do come to know themselves and the world, but in a very particular way -the world is constituted abstractly through information and the techno-sciences. The implications of this will be considered in the final section of this article.

(38.) Any ethical concerns about the implications of the biotech industry will apparently be resolved through the creation of a "national code of ethics' change.

(39.) This is, of course, not to imply that these reference points automatically lead to ethical or desirable behaviour. Rather, given that these structures provide points of reference for human behaviour, they ought to be taken seriously in this period of rapid, unreflective change.

(40.) Fuller, 'Making the University Fit for Critical Intellectuals' p. 585.

(42.) See A. Davidson, 'Globalization and Citizenship: the End of National Belonging?' in Arena Journal, no. 12, 1998, pp. 83-110.

(43.) Lyotard.

(44.) G. Delanty, Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society, Buckingham, Open University Press, 2001. It is not possible to do justice to the scope of Delanty's book, which is a both a critical analysis of attempts to contextualize the role of the university and a sketching out of an alternative role for the university in the terms of the Knowledge Society. Hence I will concentrate on his attempts to sketch out the place for the university as a facilitator of forms of knowledge-based citizenship.

(45.) Delanty, p. 6.

(46.) Delanty, p. 157.

(47.) Delanty, p. 6.

(48.) Delanty, p. 7.

(49.) Delanty, p. 155.

(50.) Delanty, p. 158.

(51.) Delanty, p. 158.