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Theories and research on the production of knowledge and societal change |
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In the last several decades innovation and beyond this, knowledge production, has begun to change society in fundamental ways. Rather than our theories of society being built around variations in political economy issues such as power and wealth, increasingly knowledge determines how power and wealth are distributed. The rise of new technologies is fundamentally transforming society via its feedback consequences. The key insight is that the evolution of knowledge production produces major institutional changes except where obstacles and blockages occur because of path dependencies. Thus the theory can predict both evolution and failed evolution and suggest policies that can overcome path dependencies. These policies are reviewed in a manuscript entitled Restoring the Innovative Edge: Protecting American Employment, which is presently under review. This theory provides insights about the evolution of the economy and the long-term trends in macro-economic performances. It synthesizes the work on political development and social movements. These evolutionary changes also have a number of implications for how both organizations and individuals must adapt to social change by becoming more complex. Superficially, one can describe these changes as the replacement of all the various categories of social structure with the new categories of emotional ties as well as cognitive ones, networks of various kinds, and the importance of culture as new forms of social cement that hold society together. The new theory social change theory has five aims: Ø to focus on the evolution of knowledge at the meso level to unit all three levels to better integrate macro and micro theory Ø to integrate sociology by combining the optimism of Spencer, Durkheim, the neo-evolutionists and the neo-functionalists with the pessimism of Marx, Weber, the neo-Marxists, and the post-modernists by up-dating their work and thus hopefully stop the fractionation of the discipline Ø to integrate sociology with economics so as to change the policy discourse in the world and thus create more jobs for sociologists Ø to explain failed evolution, the decline of societies and the dissolution of empires Ø to provide insights in how to correct for failed evolution In addition, members of the Center are working on some key intellectual issues involved in the new socio-economic paradigm. The following papers and investigations are being pursued: ü Revisiting the Coase Problem and why network coordination is replacing organizational coordination ü The importance of intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic rewards Relevant Publications include
Recent Talks Evolution of Knowledge Production: A new socio-economic paradigm of social change, presented at the Department of Sociology, University of California-Riverside, April 2, 2009
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