Relations and disproportions

The labor of scholarship in the knowledge economy

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2278769
AutoresAlberto Corsín Jiménez (0000-0002-1360-4060, University of Manchester, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen35
Número2
Páginas229-242
Fecha de publicación2008-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00035.x
OpenAlexW2049501409
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas37

In this article, I provide an ethnographic exploration of some of the terms for imagining knowledge in today's "knowledge society," and I attempt to situate the kind of "sociology of knowledge" behind this imagination. In particular, I am interested in the sociological imagination of knowledge in terms of a relational economy, in which knowledge flows uninterruptedly to create and shape what Yochai Benkler has dubbed "the wealth of networks." I pursue this interest through an ethnography of the production of research among humanities scholars at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC). For CSIC's human scientists, books (and other bookish analogues, such as libraries or manuscript collections) occupy a place of prominence in the institutional production of research. This economy of scholarship (between books, between people and books, and between what books do and what institutions and researchers imagine them to do) finds itself at a "disproportionate" distance from the "network economy of information" encountered in the literature on the knowledge economy and promoted in certain circles within CSIC. I contrast the epistemological economies of CSIC scientists' relational and disproportional views on research and, ultimately, attempt to provide an anthropological description of a contemporary sociology of knowledge, including its analytical categories and models. [knowledge, knowledge economy, relations, proportionality, labor, academia

Economics · Economy · Epistemology · Ethnography · Knowledge economy · Knowledge management · Knowledge production · Political science · Relation (database · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Employment and Welfare Studies · Law · Philosophy