Should the Knowledge- Based Economy be a Savant or a Sage?

Wisdom and Socially Intelligent Innovation. D. Rooney and B. McKenna. Prometheus. Vol. 23, No. 3, Sept 2005.
Type of paper – article
Audience – academics, Public policy professionals.
This article explores the idea that knowledge without wisdom leads to social dysfunction and cataclysm, making public policy the context of their enquiry. They explore the Aristotelian idea of practical wisdom and briefly acknowledge an Eastern perspective (the Chinese “I Ching” and Persian philosopher Avicenna). The authors use the taxonomy devised by an eighteenth century Aristotelian (Giambattista Vico) that provides a framework of four intellectual types ranging from the Savant (imprudent) to the Sage (wise people) to explore how the administrative complexities of contemporary life can be approached from a knowledge point of view. They postulate that a knowledge economy managed without wisdom is deficient and can lead to cataclysmic outcomes (they cite the dot-com crash, I am thinking of the GFC) and that policy level discourse must contain social and ethical considerations, or the “knowledge” is wanting. Otherwise we are at the mercy of rationalist, functionalist, utilitarian and technocratic driven short term gains.

The article is very technical in its philosophical approach and is a hard read. However the argument is compelling. The savant approaches ethics slowly and most often fails. The sage has both practical and theoretical wisdom and makes plans for the long term. This they argue is a humanistic approach and is better for social policy in complex technological societies in the long term. Perhaps this assertion has been proved correct by the economic events of the past year?

Week 5, Class 7 - Knowledge Regiment group

Rooney, D. (2005). Knowledge, Economy, Technology and Society: The Politics of Discourse.

Knowledge, economy, technology and society: The politics of discourse

Article Summary for Week 5 Class 7

(Group: KMx6- Fatemeh, Skalk, Bee, Lanoi, Max, Roger)

Rooney, D. (2005). Knowledge, economy, technology and society: The politics of discourse. Telematics and Informatics, 22(4), 405-422. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2004.11.007

Type of article: Results of a discourse analysis.

Audience: Academics, Knowledge Management Professionals, Public policy makers.

Aim: To provide data and insight on how governments sees knowledge. With the aim to show that what might be possible in knowledge societies can not be seen or realised from a technocratic view point.

Summary:
Large corpus of documents on knowledge policy. Want to show that the discourse is technocratic. Makes the point that technocrats adopts “discourses of expert knowledge” and uses these in policy statements. Asserts that technocrats have a primary concern that knowledge is an object and must be co-modified; knowledge should have a commercial and / or industrial use. Gives a brief explanation of knowledge. Computer assisted text analysis software (Leximancer) that does automated grounded analysis were being used. Documents were obtained on a number of countries and supranational organisations (OECD, EU). The results at a high level indicated that out of the 20 most important concepts, governance, technological and commercial concepts are central. There is a sharp focus on technology and business. Social concepts like access, public and medical also appear, but are of less important. Governments appear to like to work harder on technologizing the community. The technological deterministic view that technology transforms the community, creates opportunities for access and makes people creative are most often mooted. Knowledge are used a vehicle to convey vested interests. Very few document mentions social and cultural aspects. It is concluded that the value and nature of knowledge as represented in the documents are seen only in the light of technology and economy. This is useful in that it (a) points to a society that choices a political context that is technocratic as opposed to emancipatory. Technocratic discourse threatens democracy and national sovereignty. (b) being aware of the dominant discourse would make policy writers aware of aspects that are not being mentioned. And it would make these kind of statements less like smokescreens. Reflexivity, creativity and culture are essential aspects of knowing. (c) Enacting knowledge is messy. This messiness should be valued since it enriches life.

Review:
This article reports on an innovative use of text analysis. The author goes to great length to explain the validity of the tests being performed. Although statistical counts are given for the various analysis areas it is sparingly used in the document. A shortcoming of this article is that there is no list given as to what, how many documents were analysed. No indication is given or assertion being made that the number of documents are actually representative of the discourse being studied. For the maps that are represented there is also no indication as to what the different access are where the items are being plotted. Although the results are very interesting and support the main argument of the author, the presentation could do with a little bit more work. It would be interesting to do a comparative analysis on the dataset to see where, New Zealand and Australia sits in the discourse on the Knowledge society.