Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy

This is a major work by three international scholars at the cutting edge of new research that investigates the emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, design, research, higher education and knowledge capitalism. It highlights the role of the creative and expressive arts, of performance, of aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure for the creative economy. This book tracks the most recent mutation of these serial shifts – from postindustrial economy to the information economy to the digital economy to the knowledge economy to the ‘creative economy’ – to summarize the underlying and essential trends in knowledge capitalism and to investigate post-market notions of open source public space. The book hypothesizes that creative economy might constitute an enlargement of its predecessors that not only democratizes creativity and relativizes intellectual property law, but also emphasizes the social conditions of creative work. It documents how these profound shifts have brought to the forefront forms of knowledge production based on the commons and driven by ideas, not profitability per se; and have given rise to the notion of not just ‘knowledge management’ but the design of ‘creative institutions’ embodying new patterns of work.

The Authors: Michael A. Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Adjunct Professor at the School of Art of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and editor of two international e-journals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning. His interests are broadly defined in areas of education, philosophy and social theory, and he has written over forty books and three hundred academic papers, including most recently: Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as Pedagogical Philosopher (with N. Burbules and P. Smeyers, 2008); Global Citizenship Education (with H. Blee and A. Britton, 2008); Global Knowledge Cultures (with C. Kapitzke, 2008); Knowledge Economy, Development, and the Future of the University (2007); and Building Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (with T. Besley, 2006).
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He writes about problems of education policy (especially higher education and research), democracy and creativity in the context of global relations. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia and the Society for Research into Higher Education, United Kingdom and a board member of, among others, Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Higher Education Quarterly, Journal of Education and Work and Thesis Eleven. He has prepared three reports for the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development), his papers have been widely translated into Spanish, and five of his books have been or are about to be published in China. His most recent book is Prospects of Higher Education (2007).
Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications at Monash University. He is Coordinating Editor of the international critical theory and historical sociology journal Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology. His body of work includes more than sixty journal articles and chapters in edited collections. He is co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004); author of Civic Justice: from Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (2001); editor of Agon, Logos, Polis (2000); co-editor of The Left In Search of a Center (1996); and editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (1998) on friendship.