The rise of new knowledge types and their trailblazers, and the management of value chains

Abstract

In this article, the authors argue that there is no such thing as the knowledge society. Like many others authors, they claim that the fundamental transformations of our time can be typified as the end of the national ‘industrial society’ and the move towards some kind of global society dominated by the production and use of knowledge. They argue, however, that these transformations not necessarily produce a convergence of national and regional socio-economic structures. In industrial society two types of knowledge were dominant: ‘technical knowledge’ and ‘social knowledge’. In our time, the growing diverseness of individual and group identities produced by reflexivisation, globalisation and the advancement of information technologies calls for the development and application of a new type of knowledge: ‘cultural knowledge’. They analyse the consequences of the increased significance of cultural knowledge in the economic sphere in terms of the division of labour, and subsequently conceptualise three different types of knowledge societies: ‘the techno-cultural’, ‘the socio-cultural’ and the ‘socio-technical knowledge society’. Finally, they will portray three ‘categories’ of trailblazers of the knowledge societies, new professionals that perform ‘meta business functions’. These trailblazers directly or indirectly create new value chains by linking or destroying existing ones, and breaking up others in to pieces in order to create new combinations. These professionals, in other words, actively manage value chains.