Knowledge

However, knowledge society is not clear about the effects and value of knowledge. Rather, knowledge has become a problem, an unruly resource, which has to be managed. Politicians attempt to search for knowledge that fosters growth in national economies, while businesses search for knowledge that makes products, processes and procedures valuable. Not all knowledge does this. Drucker (1993) tells us that knowledge has become the key, but unfortunately also ambiguous, resource in knowledge society: “The only – or at least the main – producers of wealth are information and knowledge. . . How knowledge behaves as an economic resource we do not yet fully understand. . . . We need an economic theory that puts knowledge into the centre of the wealth-producing process.” We do not quite know how knowledge is a resource and this creates a puzzle. If knowledge is the mostimportant resource but also one whose properties and effects we cannot account for, what use is it? The irony is that knowledge is used and practically adopted in our conduct but in ways that create disruption rather than coordination. Rather than making firms and societies more certain, it has a tendency to make them more uncertain. The growth of knowledge reflexively mobilised is increasing dramatically in knowledge society; this new knowledge creates insight which is used to alter processes and procedures and therefore, with new knowledge comes new patterns of interaction. New knowledge produces change and thus uncertainty, as Giddens (1990) says: “The reflexivity of modern social life [is] that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character”