The Spectrum of ( Explacit ) Knowledges in Firms and Nations

The economic value of knowledge in explaining the growth of Western Europe and North America in the last half-millennia is central to knowledge capitalism. Marx theorized that knowledge is a major factor in production and illustrated how knowledge was constructed (e.g. chemistry) and sold for a price (e.g. patents). The packaging, selling and buying of knowledge for a price is commodiŽ cation. The commodiŽ cation of knowledge was already well established in sixteenth century Europe. That mechanism of commodiŽ cation was accelerated with the founding of America where explicitly formulated knowledge was part of the American concern with formalization as the base for developing expert systems covering huge distances across both time and space.2 The American approach to information processing has been exceptional. Beniger3 traces how the relationship between knowledge and information became obscured so that in the modern, positivist period explicit information became the objective. Military contest provided an impetus to developing software expert systems that contained the utopian image of perfect future control. The early development of computing power—although slow and somewhat prosaic—provided an image of usable information. Those developments highlighted and indeed elevated explicit, formalized notions of knowledge as in the use of UNIVAC computers in the Vietnam War. The analytic power of formulaic expert systems and abstract models was highly prized. These also demonstrated the practical use of heuristic knowledge in the form of ratios in order to structure both Ž rms and society. In the past two decades the commodiŽ cation of knowledge has quickened and has been qualitatively transformed in a transition that creates a new mode of capitalism. Two decades ago attention was focused on the embodying of explicit knowledge in information technology, in its software and in the patterns discerned from the data warehouses that can now be immediately analyzed. That focus has continued and spawned a whole array of new occupations in Ž rms and new, highly proŽ table roles for consultancies. The international role of the consulting industry was transformed. These information systems were proclaimed as the new knowledge by the supply industry and