Purpose: This paper aims at exploring politics of contemporary knowledge cultures and possible directions for responding to the postdigital challenge. Design/Approach/Methods: This paper researches history and present of several prominent strands and readings of the knowledge economy. Following Caruso's work (2016), it examines more closely the…

This speculative paper enquires into the discourse of the 'end of labour' or 'disappearance of labour' as a result of the development of 'intelligent capitalism' clearly seen in 'intelligent manufacturing' systems that are now pursued and developed as Industry 4.0 strategy in East Asia, Germany and others parts of the world. When 'intelligent…

Marx developed a sophisticated theory of labour under capitalism's expanding reproduction but wrote little specifically on immaterial labour. This paper reflects on how to build from Marx's writings a more comprehensive theory of immaterial labour. Integral to this theorisation is bringing in young Marx's writings on alienation and human nature,…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

This special issue focused on "Digital Media and Contested Visions of Education" provides an opportunity to examine the tendency to hypothesise a rupture in the history of the university. It does so by contrasting the traditional Humboldtian ideals of the university with a neoliberal marketised version and in order to ask questions…

This article reinterprets Lyotard's argument in "The Postmodern Condition" as a basis for a radical political economy approach to knowledge capitalism focusing on post-industrialism in order to put the case that education and knowledge are increasingly becoming part of a globally integrated world capitalism (IWC) that is structured through…

This article introduces the "Policy Futures in Education" special issue on neoliberalism, reviewing its origins in the founding of the Mt Perelin Society at the beginning of the Cold War and its political phase with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's policies in the 1980s. It sets the scene for the rest of the issue and investigates the…

This is an experiment in conversation on the topic of "a post-occidental globe". It emerges from a moderated discussion group where members of a class--master's and PhD students--reflected upon a set of resources provided as part of a course in Global Studies in Education at the University of Illinois. The conversation threads were moderated and…

This article first reviews claims for the knowledge economy in terms of excludability, rivalry, and transparency indicating the way that digital goods behave differently from other commodities. In the second section it discusses the theory of "public knowledge cultures" starting from the primacy of practice based on Marx, Wittgenstein and…

Fast knowledge can be considered part of fast capitalism, especially an emergent new generic form of capitalism based increasingly on forms of symbolic capital associated with the rise of global finance and associated with new information and communication technologies. In this essay, the authors first theorise fast knowledge in relation to fast…