The Crafting of Knowledge Alchemy

This paper examines how the governance of knowledge, innovation, and human capital has moved beyond commodification and quantification to the phase of automation. Our starting point is that the political economy of knowledge has been at the heart of local, national, regional, and global governance of today, with politicians and policy experts exploring and searching for policy models in attempts to ensure that their local institutional practices match the international ‘gold standard’ produced by global rankings. This ‘knowledge alchemy’, which we define as a process of transforming something relatively worthless into something extremely valuable with the help of universal formula, now informs national policies on a variety of sectors, including competitiveness, higher education, and innovation. This paper speaks to the ideas and actors involved in the crafting of knowledge alchemy. We address the following questions: How do commodification, quantification, and automation relate to each other, and what institutional effects can we observe as their coexistence intensifies? How are the related global policy scripts being translated and adopted nationally? By examining the implications of this development for contemporary governance, our paper presents ways forward for retaining and gaining actor reflexivity in an age increasingly defined by quantification and automation.