Building Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (review)

In a knowledge-based economy, higher education is important in a nation's ability to participate in the global economy. This is especially the case for nations in the developing world where any chance of competing in the new economy may hinge on the successful development of a strong higher education sector. Although many scholars have connected their analyses of higher education to changes in the global economy, perhaps few have done so with the theoretical depth of this recent work by Michael Peters and A. C. Tina Besley.

In the introduction to Building Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism, Peters and Besley note that this book lacks the deep philosophical analysis of one of Peters's (2001) previous works—Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism: Between Politics and Theory: "In this book [Building Knowledge Cultures], we have left the field of philosophy pretty well alone, at least in any explicit sense" (p. 2).

We suspect that for many readers of The Review of Higher Education this may not seem the case, as Building Knowledge Cultures is perhaps one of the richest, philosophically oriented works to come along in quite some time—at least in the arena of higher education and development. Peters and Besley do provide a bit of a warning, however, noting that, "it is not possible to write about the knowledge economy without presupposing concepts that stand in need of philosophical explication," including such ideas as "time," "space," and "knowledge," among others (p. 2). This fact makes for provocative albeit sometimes abstract reading.

The intellectual landscape for Building Knowledge Cultures is globalization and the changing nature of the world economy. The new economy is grounded in the production and management of knowledge as well as technological advances related to communications and electronic networking. Such a shift has significant implications for education and development, as Peters and Besley observe: "If transformations in knowledge production entail a rethinking of economic fundamentals, the shift to a knowledge economy also requires a profound rethinking of education as emerging forms of knowledge capitalism involving knowledge creation, acquisition, transmission, and organization" (p. 51).

Recognizing that globalization has many forms, the authors seek to challenge its most dominant manifestation—the neoliberal project—which they view as an outcome of the Washington consensus, shaped to a great extent by the policy dictates of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to Peters and Besley, the neoliberal version of globalization "universalizes policies and obscures country and regional differences," while limiting "the capacity of local traditions, institutions, and cultural values to mediate, negotiate, reinterpret, and transmute the dominant model of globalization and the emergent form of knowledge capitalism on which it is based" (p. 50). Consequently, the authors seek to advance a more enabling and democratic understanding of the relationships among the new knowledge economy, education, development, and public policy. The goal is to offer a theory for the development of "knowledge cultures"—"the cultural preconditions that must be established before economies or societies based on knowledge can operate successfully as genuine democratic cultures" (p. 29).

Building Knowledge Cultures is an in-depth theoretical resource that goes to great lengths in elaborating key constructs and concerns linked to the knowledge economy, development, and the role of education. The 10 chapters (plus an "Introduction" and a "Postscript") are theoretically and conceptually illuminating, grounded to some extent in practical policy decisions and strategies. Chapter 1, "Cultural Knowledge Economy: Education, the New Economy, and the Communicative Turn," does an excellent job of laying out the landscape for the book. In a truly interdisciplinary fashion, the authors note their allegiance to poststructural theory, including in their discussion a wide range of works from fields such as economics, philosophy, sociology, and international development.

Given our own work on international...