Knowledge economy meets development imaginaries

Draft – please do not circulate or cite without permission of the author International Encyclopedia of Education, 4th Edition Section: Globalization and Shifting Geopolitics of Education Edited by Robert Tierney, Fazal Rizvi and Kadriye Ercikan Elsevier Knowledge economy meets development imaginaries Alejandro Artopoulos [email protected] Vito Dumas 284, Victoria, PBA, Argentina 541155092479 Universidad de San Andrés / Universidad de Buenos Aires / Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas keywords knowledge economy, knowledge society, educational change, sociotechnical imaginaries Abstract Born in the mid-1990s, the term Knowledge Economy has been a driving force in discussion around development and education in the last three decades. It became the main legitimating argument for various programmes promoting educational change and innovation by international organizations, national governments and social actors from industry, civil society, and academia. From a sociotechnical imaginaries approach, this paper aims to critically review the concept by mapping theoretical developments resulting from the dialogue between applied research, policy proposals, and case studies. I will examine KE building as an endeavor that comprises symbolic and socio-material dimensions, analyzing discontinuities in specific structural and sociotechnical transitions. I propose conclude that there is no single, universal KE as a desirable development destination per se. The term "Knowledge Economy" (KE) holds relevance in current discussions about human and economic development. Since 1996, when the OECD introduced it, it has acted as an umbrella concept that triggered various lines of public policy at the global and regional levels (Godin, 2006). The concept emerged as an explanatory device for processes of structural change from industrial economies to those based on the use, creation and distribution of knowledge; and was intended to explain and justify a variety of public policies, ranging from economic to educational reforms. Alongside public policies, forms of collective action have emerged based on the appropriation of such explanatory device. Social actors from civil society, industry, and academia have built a public-private agenda that supports their interests around projects for educational change based on the concept of knowledge economy. The initial debates around the notion of KE assumed that the transition to KE was to be completed in advanced countries; and only then other countries could consider it as a reachable destination in their pursuit for development. Moreover, its outcome -the 'knowledge society'- was considered an 'objective' and 'universal' fact—only a set of rational steps to be decoded by less advanced countries to initiate the needed transition. Although the idea of KE suffered significant setbacks, such as the dotcom bubble in 2000-2002 or the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007-2008, escalations in structural changes did not always follow a market logic, as evidenced in the free software or open science movements. Moreover, the belief in the assumed benefits of a transition to KE maintained a steady presence in the policy agenda of a variety of countries around the world, showing that the concept still holds relevance Due to the persistent resilience of the concept, it is necessary to further develop non-linear explanations of the post-industrial transition to KE. The relative absence of alternative critical approaches to the notion of KE and its implications in economic and educational terms, even in advanced countries, contributes to the reproduction of unequal conditions of access to knowledge and its application to individual and collective life projects. One of the biggest challenges in apprehending the idea of a KE is that the concept has become a moving target. Meanings shift as sociotechnical transitions become more complex, both when digital infrastructure becomes a private-public endeavor and when globalization blurs the national state as a valid unit of analysis of the symbolic sphere of the development process (Bhatt & MacKenzie, 2019). In this essay, we will examine the goal of constructing a KE as a national endeavor that comprises symbolic and socio-material dimensions, analyzing discontinuities in specific structural and sociotechnical transitions. We propose the hypothesis that there is no single, universal KE as a desirable development destination per se. We assume, after the observation of case studies, that each nation-state puts its stamp or name on the construction site of its KE. In their eagerness to promote public development policies, international organizations have oversimplified complex and unstable processes and made development imaginaries invisible. It is necessary to open the black box of KE to link it to symbolic work, so that each country can find its development path, avoiding the manifest dangers that platforms and algorithms present to the political and economic institutions necessary for sustainability. Society has reached a point where the technologies that build the KE also give body to the same sociotechnical material that lays the foundations of ignorance as a social practice (Latour 2018). I attempt a critical approach to KE that incorporates the multidirectionality of the transition to KE and the interrelation between economic-based infrastructural changes and socio-cultural appropriation strategies at the nation-state level. The individuation process during the late capitalism has modified the premises of development theories but not the diverse identity that supports them (Hui 2020). In the first section, we will examine the concept of KE in the context of its emergence in the second half of the 20th century, both in applied research by International Organizations such as the OECD and in their theoretical foundations. In the second section, I will trace UNESCO's humanistic response, contrasting it with the perspectives of the OECD's monodisciplinary approach. The shift to the idea of a Knowledge Society (KS) in the first decade of the 21st century promoted an expansion of the conceptual space of KE to establish frameworks that integrate economic and human development. UNESCO developed an interactive perspective of the economy-society relationship rather than the unidirectional one proposed by economic theory. In the last two sections, from a critical perspective of linear approaches to the transition to KE, I develop the analytical framework on the missing cultural link between economics and education. I apply the concept of Sociotechnical Imaginaries to the interpretation of the Finnish and South Korean cases in the third section. In the final section, I evaluate educational reforms in various countries and analyze how they related with institutional development. The “rational” knowledge economy The notion of the knowledge economy, introduced by OECD (1996) as knowledge-based economies (KBE), has tried to describe economies whose core activities to develop and sustain long-term growth are characterized by knowledge. Research pursued by the organization to coin the term drew data from the most advanced economies and the transition processes of certain "exemplar" countries that have caught up, including Finland (Dahlman, Routti and Yla-Anttila, 2006) and South Korea (Bank, Thomas, and Carl, 2001; Marginson, 2010). It tried to make sense of transformations in economic structure and innovation processes due to technological change triggered by the diffusion of microelectronics and the personal computer 20 years earlier. KBE was defined as "economies which are directly based on the production, distribution and use of knowledge and information. This is reflected in the trend in OECD economies toward growth in high-technology investments, high-technology industries, more highly-skilled labor and associated productivity gains. (...) In this view, investments in research and development, education and training and new managerial work structures are key" (OECD 1996, p. 7). By focusing on the KBE, the OECD established a new growth strategy characterized by the use, creation and distribution of knowledge. The introduction of the concept also meant a significant shift in the epistemic communities of development politics, both in cases' interpretation and policy recommendations. The core of advanced economies was no longer to be based on processing physical or material inputs dependent exclusively on traditional resources such as natural resources (e.g., land), labor, or capital (Haas, 1992). Peter Drucker, management consultant and founder of the management field, served as a source of inspiration for OECD. In 1959 he coined the term "knowledge worker" to distinguish a new type of labor productivity. A new management, a new economy, and therefore a new society, the knowledge society, would emerge (Drucker 1959). Although the influential thinking of Drucker was decisive in crafting the narrative of KE in the public sphere, his texts were based on primitive forms of KE prior to the micro-computing revolution and the spread of the internet. Thus, he did not go beyond prospective arguments. Among the foundations of the OECD, we can also find Machlup’s estimates on the growth of knowledge industries, Gibbons et al.’s proposal on the new mode of knowledge production (1997), the theory of National Innovation Systems (Freeman 1987), Lundvall’s Learning Economy (2010), and Paul Romer's (1994) endogenous growth theory. The first theorists of KE such as Mashlup or Bell turned their attention to information processing, knowledge production, and the creation of intangible assets. Nevertheless, intangible assets such as patents and other products of scientific and technological research and development in the form of explicit knowledge, do not account for tacit knowledge accumulated in knowledge-based organizations and communities of practice. Still, early stages in the process of building the concept of the KE also enhanced human talent through the massive training of highly specialized manpower at informal education systems and in continuous training circuits where the knowledge of the workforce is updated. Furthermore, International organizations stimulated and followed the study of the evolution of National Innovation Systems (NIS) proposed by Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Åke Lundvall. They described the innovation process as an interactive relationship between private and public organizations and actors that evolved in time to a dense network of institutions “located within or rooted inside the borders of a nation state” (OECD, 1997; Lundvall, 2010). Focused on the diffusion and modification of new technologies, the production of applied knowledge combined with theoretical and empirical production in the early 1990s formed a variety of epistemic cultures in IOs (Haas, 1992; Kallo, 2021). Nevertheless, these failed to factor into the equation what we know today as the creative industries or creative economy. Such a new line of inquiry opened in 2002 with the work of Hesmondhalgh and Florida (Florida 2003; Hesmondhalgh 2002). Indeed, the 1990s OECD's "rational" approach to the knowledge economy encountered a blind spot in creative activities and startups when identifying how knowledge is distributed and circulated, only considering technology drivers. Furthermore, networked information technologies combined with knowledge management and new economic theories triggered a "rational and control" mindset about development. Knowledge was now to be seen as input, output, and capital, even if imperfectly accounted for or understood. Public agencies were convinced that knowledge could be managed in sophisticated, rational ways, where diffusion of information technology was essential. Sociotechnical transition, in particular the organizational transformation after the first wave of internet use in the production system, operated as (partial) evidence of structural change. Ideas about Knowledge Management as a new and powerful lever for development gave, beyond the hype, a tinge of rationality and control to development policies. The framework was completed at the macrosocial level with the role of the "information society" in distributing knowledge through computer and communication networks. Daniel Bell had observed in the late 1960s through the theory of the Postindustrial Society that the axis of advanced societies was shifting toward service activities (Bell 1976). Bell claimed information rather than energy was the transforming resource. Nevertheless, Bell did not visualize the interactive relationships between economy and culture. Rather than considering the emergence of new economic actors such as startups, entrepreneurs, and creative industries, Bell’s theory turned out to be a dead-end theory of problems and contradictions of post-industrial capitalism. Still, and in the context of conceptualizing KEs,Bell’s writings reinforced the assumption that endogenous abstract knowledge growth processes could determine KEs. The bubbling knowledge economy The idea of a KE model gained recognition as the momentum of the growth of IT companies as expressed in the value of their shares. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index grew by 400%. The early stages of the popularization of Internet use fueled unrealistic expectations around explosive economic growth. The launch of Mosaic in 1993, the first web browser, and the spread of its successor web browsers during the following years gave computer users access to the World Wide Web, the first version of a service-based digital economy. Momentum met its end, or a long pause, with the dotcom bubble, a stock market bubble caused by excessive speculation of Internet-related companies. Between March 2000 and October 2002, Nasdaq fell 78%, giving up all its gains during the bubble, and causing a drastic change in the optimistic expectations about the KE. Drastic change in expectations raised critical voices that pointed to the importance of integrated more fully the economy-society relationship from approaches to technological change that account for the political, cultural, and social aspects that affect these seemingly exclusively economic development processes (Florida, 2002; Peters, 2003; Godin, 2004, 2006; Beech, 2005a, 2005b; Dale, 2005; Olssen and Peters, 2005; Kenway et al., 2006; Sörlin and Vessuri, 2007). The topic's relevance stimulated a "second wave of knowledge economy studies." Theoretical and empirical research production in different fields of the social sciences overflowed the boundaries and reformulated the strictly economic approaches of early applied research (Choong and Leung, 2021, p. 18). In this new context, UNESCO (2005) published its strategy to transition to Knowledge Societies by placing the Knowledge Economy in a macro-social framework. UNESCO narrative introduced a sociological twist in the references to the Knowledge Society theories of Nico Stehr (1994), Manuel Castells' Informational Capitalism (1996), and Amartya Sen's capability theory approach to development (2000). The UNESCO document attempts an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to human and institutional development aspects. Identifying a plural destiny for "Knowledge Societies," the document mentions that the knowledge existing in all societies may or may not be mobilized for application by the knowledge economy model. It asks, what are the limits to the commodification of knowledge? UNESCO (2005) stated that societies must be based on four pillars: freedom of expression, universal access to information and knowledge, respect for cultural and linguistic diversity, and quality education for all. It is the first significant report by an international body to define the digital divide as a form of multidimensional inequality on the global public agenda. The document incorporates the idea developed by Warschauer (2003) that there is not one digital divide but several: material, geographical, age, gender, linguistic, educational-cultural, accessibility. The UNESCO proposal set out an agenda that has become even more urgent in times of the Covid 19 pandemic (Van Dijk, 2020). Inequality in knowledge societies is not exclusively technological in origin, but the material basis of digital disconnection is combined with cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of digital inequality. This cognitive divide includes the capacity to interpret information on the internet, what we today call applied computational thinking, and educational and communicational aspects of inequality, such as the availability of digital content in the local language appropriate to the cultural context (Denning 2017). Influenced by the trilogy The Information Age published in 1996 by Manuel Castells, UNESCO cited the notion of Network Society to serve as a theoretical anchor for the applied narrative of the transition from the Information Society to Knowledge Societies. Castells goes a step further in explaining the triangular interdependence between economy-technology-culture. For UNESCO, unlike the OECD, the new social infrastructure of the KE is the techno-social networks and not only the circulation of information. The KE is contained in the Network Society. The production of goods and services in the KE requires information and knowledge to be processed by the body of the workforce connected by the internet and, nowadays, by platforms (UNESCO, 2005, p. 49). What characterizes the sociotechnical nature of the KE is "the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation.” (Castells 1996, p. 31). Therefore diffusion of technology amplifies their power as it becomes appropriated and redefined by its users. Computers, information networks and algorithms are not simply tools to be handled, but digital infrastructure to be developed. Creating and manipulating symbols (culture) are strongly related to the capacity to produce and distribute goods and services (economy). Castells based his theory of knowledge accumulation on Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) work on knowledge management, that introduced the analysis of the circulation of tacit dimension in the production of knowledge through the creation of new products and services. Nonaka and Takeuchi described how new innovative products were conceived in an iterative process of researching tacit knowledge as a primary source of value. They emphasized the growing importance of personalization and socialization of knowledge, to the detriment of knowledge codified in objects, text, or patents (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Knowledge accumulation in KE occurs primarily through knowledge embodied in practices, capabilities, and skills. Disciplinary or scientific knowledge, while an input, is just the codified part of the source of value. The primary source of value is the tacit knowledge embodied in intellectual practices applied to the production and distribution of goods and services assisted by online information. Although Information and communication technologies (ICTs) act as a driver of change since they provide the material basis for human activities, KE involves an economy based on the manipulation of signs. That is why the main factor to be considered is the human intellectual activity around manipulating signs that require a reconfiguration of labor under a new technical division of creative activities. Thus informational capitalism relies as much on ICTs as on human creativity, tacit knowledge, and creative talent (Castells, 1996, p. 93; Lash and Urry, 1998; Lash, 2005). Castells (1996) developed a model to interpret the transition from an industrial to informational capitalism, which identified common patterns of change observable in different types of societies, both central and peripheral. Informationalization describes a common process of structural change that, regardless of the level of development of each country, occurs and is expressed in each national cultural sphere according to its identities and trajectories. Informationalism according to Castells "cannot be equated to the emergence of the service economy” (Castells 1996, p. 100). For the author, the socio-technical transition between the industrial economy and the knowledge economy crosses sectoral activities of intellectual work, management and design, supported by the power of information technologies, resulting in informational agriculture, informational manufacturing, and informational services. By connecting economics and culture, the Theory of Informational Capitalism brings into focus a third element of development: institutions. In addition to economic and human development, the construction of each state is based on institutional development. In the next section, we try to address the missing cultural link between economics and education institutions by applying the concept of Sociotechnical Imaginaries to selected cases. Missing links of knowledge-based development (KBD) Despite UNESCO's efforts to reconcile economic development with human development, the third wall of development, the institutional one, persists in an unbridgeable divide. How to address the institutional dimension of development divides? Knowledge discourses in policy documents of advanced countries such as Canada, the UK, and Australia have suggested that Institutions must promote generic skills acquisition in an individualist and universalist model of education. Universities were under increasing pressure from companies to respond to training and professional updating demands. The vision shared by IOs and companies is that the ideal type of a knowledge worker is a 'technopreneur' that grasps innovation discovery (Al-Fehaid and Shaili, 2021; Fenwick 2010). KBD strategies for reassuring the development of developed countries rely on techno-determinism derived from a Schumpeterian approach to innovation as preceding and 'driving' the economy—a hard agenda on institution building where educational goals are vaguely directed at upskilling, emphasizing control and measurement. By placing the techno-entrepreneur at the center as the determining factor of the KE the narrative of KBD underestimate or fail to consider dense aspects of innovation culture, such as the maker movement and open source communities of practice, where knowledge assets are collectively owned and driven by the individual will. The institutionalist agenda of development policies overlooked the interactive relationship between economy and culture (Stiglitz 1999; Peters, 2003). Ironically, large technology companies such as IBM or Microsoft understood sooner or later that they had to integrate such communities of technological practice and their cultures into their business strategies. This led to the development of management research on open innovation (Chesbrough, 2007). In order to explain cultural preconditions for the development of economies based on knowledge, Peters presented the concept of Knowledge Cultures as the hubs of meaning that bind collective action in the transitions to KE, "shared practices of epistemic communities" that embody culturally preferred ways of doing things at a supranational level (Peters, 2003, p. 375). Knowledge production requires a grounded set of shared ideas that depend upon certain cultural conditions, including trust, reciprocal rights, and responsibilities between different knowledge partners, institutional regimes, and strategies. However, it is unclear at what social levels communities of practice share knowledge and create their "ways of doing things." While Knowledge Cultures assume supranational spaces, Innovation Systems, on the other hand, assume national or even regional spaces. In that sense, the revision of the theory of National Innovation Systems adds to the interactive institutional processes the learning capacities to connect diversity. KE depends on a delicate balance of trust, social distance, and feelings. Attempts to reduce this complex interaction to "exchange of information" do not capture the most critical dimensions (...) lead to normative conclusions and recommended arrangements that differ from those reached on the basis of standard economics analysis" (Lundvall, 2010, p. 20). The case of Finland's transition to KE was often taken to illustrate a virtuous process. The case's attraction came from a leapfrog from an industrial economy with little or no competitiveness to a KE. Nevertheless, while the IOs present the case as exemplary, other less linear analyses show dynamic and interactive aspects and even shadowed areas of development "models" (Himanen and Castells, 2004; Dahlman, Routti and Yla-Anttila, 2006; Schienstock, 2007). Himanen and Castells distinguished between egalitarian national strategies to KE (informationalism) and individualistic and exclusionary forms. In the egalitarian strategy, the Finish welfare state built-up public goods leading to accelerated material wealth creation while integrating and equalizing opportunities for its population. The second form (USA) maintained its informational leadership without human development, leading to the decline of its middle class, as can be observable in the "Rust Belt," and a scarce presence of public goods that can integrate poor immigrant workers, often also illegal (Himanen and Castells, 2004; Schienstock, 2007; Saxenian, 2014). A comparison between Finland and the United States reveals the shape of the ideal transition but also hides the more viscous side of transitions. When comparing Finland with other paralleled, less extreme cases, such as South Korea, we can observe a pattern describing the construction of a national institutional superstructure based on a sociotechnical imaginary. Sociotechnical Imaginaries, according to Jasanoff and Kim (2009) are “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009, p. 120). While research has largely applied this theoretical framework to energy policy formulation processes, we have found cases of policy formulation processes to promote the knowledge economy. These cases are examined in the following paragraphs. The national narrative of Finland's development project was based on the "information society" as a national destination. A hacker vision of building an egalitarian post-Soviet "open" society. Pekka Himanen (2001), one of the curators of this narrative, turned it into theory in a well-known essay "The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age," in which he attempts to re-seed the Weberian formula for the 21st century. A narrative rooted in material and real achievements such as the Linux Operating System financed by university scholarships put the country at the center of an epistemic community that became a game-changer for the global IT industry (Castells and Himanen, 2002). Himanen's efforts as a curator of the national narrative later evolved into an attempt to construct a global proposal based on globalist readings of the hacker spirit and the free software movement. This proposition was shared by Peters (2003) when he pointed to the free software movement as one of the components neglected by the KE formulators. Proposals that ignored the national roots of the construction of socio-technical imaginaries (Himanen and Committee for the Future in Parliament of Finland, 2004; Sahlberg, 2011). South Korea, on the other hand, presented dissociation and discontinuities. It developed its economy in two distinct stages: advanced industrial capitalism through a long path of improving industrial labor productivity concentrated in its industrial conglomerates (Chaebols), mainly under a dictatorial regime (1953-1979). A second stage after the 1997 crisis described a transition to a KE promoted by the state under the imaginary of the "Smart Nation." South Korea's "last mile" knowledge economy development strategy consisted of reforms to institutional incentives for creativity-oriented smart education investment and cultural openness, with enhanced knowledge exchanges between universities, firms, local governments, and research institutes. Between 2008 and 2013, following president Lee Myung-bak's cabinet reorganization, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy was named the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (Biggart and Guillén, 1999; Bank, Thomas, and Carl, 2001; Marginson, 2010; OECD, 2015). Finland and South Korea, despite their differences, are cases of sustained economic growth and an accelerated transition to KE that transformed their innovation and educational systems based on a common national narrative. Sociotechnical imaginaries supported both political consensus and a set of national symbolic elements that built a cohesive identity that contributed to the wide appropriation of social change. While both are KE, each has its way of building its own culture of knowledge. The cases of Finland and South Korea describe streamlined narratives with the power to produce development. But what happens when sociotechnical imaginaries do not achieve the expected socio-economic outcomes? What can we find in failed educational reforms about the missing cultural link between economics and education? The labyrinths of educational digital inclusion in the Global South During the wave of neoliberal education reforms in the 1990s, when decentralization and choice through privatization were promoted, linear approaches of the transition to KE promoted economistic policies without considering appropriation processes in Brazil and Argentina. Centralized bureaucracies were dismantled from educational organizations without ensuring capacities for autonomy and flexibility (Beech 2014). The education reforms implemented in several Latin American countries in the 1990s were based on the idea that education systems had to adapt to the 'knowledge society. Under the influence of views mainly imported through international agencies, national institutions suffered an increasing division of labor in the top-down implementation process. While experts defined policy goals and curriculum guidelines, teachers were downgraded to mere technicians, and local and national educational institutions were reduced to plain transmission chains (Beech 2005a, 2005b). Paradoxically in the quest to produce the transition to KE, the IOs tailored policy implementation in such a way, that the result was a weakening of existing institutions by reducing the autonomy and flexibility of teachers, principals, and education officials. Thus, they reduced the capacity to manage the diversity of the institutions that were supposed to expand them. In the absence of teachers' and principals' autonomy, with narratives that empower their agency, the transition to national education systems ready for KE could result in an Orwellian nightmare (Wilson and Segal, 2005; Zuboff, 2019). Cases such as Brazil and Argentina in the 1990s offered evidence of dangerous outcomes of structural change when nation-states choose symbolic passivity. Because passivity did not lead to a narrative vacuum but to the almost mechanical reproduction of the imaginaries that gave rise to the notion of KE. This is the enthronement of the figure of the techno-entrepreneur together with the promotion of the "innovative culture" whose main reference is located in the Silicon Valley. As was required of the rest of society, teachers also had to become entrepreneurs, to be innovative. They failed to achieve appropriation of economic or educational reforms, but they opened the door to tearing apart the previous institutions that sustained the social relations of knowledge. A decade later, weak capacities eroded new digital inclusion plans when countries such as Argentina, Peru, and Nigeria, tried to bridge the digital divide and modernize their educational systems by deploying 1 to :1 programs. The exception was the case of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, probably the most successful implementation of Negroponte's OLPC project (One Laptop per Child) (OECD, 2010; Rivoir, 2012; Warschauer et al., 2014; Artopoulos, 2020) The OLPC Project, born in 2005, promoted the idea of one-to-one computing in education institutions in developing countries. The independent attempt triggered the quest for a stabilized classroom device that finished with Chromebook teachers’ acceptance in 2015 in leading OCDE countries, adding a computational layer to school sociomateriallity for good (Ames 2019). One-to-one computing in education (sometimes abbreviated as "1:1”) allowed new teaching practices (ex. Flipped Teaching) based on student’s activities on a computational device both in class and out promoting more autonomous learning based in teaching platforms before the COVID Pandemic (Artopoulos et al 2020). Although Latin American countries such as Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica reached considerable leaps in public goods, educational reforms did not achieve enough sustainability and/or quality standards. Informationization of the region advanced in the primary sectors (mining, agriculture, construction) without producing significant changes in the labor force or national innovation systems (Castells, 2003; Calderón, 2015; Artopoulos, 2020). Decentralization of state apparatuses facilitated conditions for private investments in education. The absence of a soft institutional agenda and adequate regulations caused a legitimacy crisis in the expansion of education systems, as was the case of Chile with the so-called "Penguin Revolution." The social movement gave rise to a new political coalition that changed the structure of the Chilean political system. The social conflicts of the knowledge society seem to provoke strong political earthquakes (Calderon and Castells, 2014). Civil society mobilization around the big tech industry was the other side of "laissez-faire" approaches to education reform based on the techno-entrepreneur imaginary. ONGs tried to set up an agenda of educational reform that fits Big-Tech industry interests in alliance with certain parts of academia. Two relevant cases describe how currents of opinion born in the USA become social movements of an international scale that seek reforms in basic education in consecutive moments of technological change. They are still relevant today because they significantly impacted dominant narratives of educational change. The first wave of "digital culture" and 1 to 1 model between 2002 and 2013 was encouraged by the educational use of new web services such as Wikipedia and participatory digital culture through blogs. At the beginning of the "convergence culture" in 2002, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) was founded, advocating for integrating generic skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication into teaching core academic subjects. It represented a mixture of creative industries, media, and information technology multinational companies such as AOL Time Warner, Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Dell Computer Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, and SAP (Jenkins, 2006). The second wave, "one hour of code," promoted coding for all and introduced computational thinking as fundamental knowledge in the curriculum. Ten years later, in 2013, Code.org and "Hour of Code Challenge" platformed the social media scene and heated the debate around coding at the basic education level. Non-profit organizations started their activity by promoting learning computer science through a website with free coding lessons and tutorials. It also has targeted schools to encourage them to include more computer science classes in the curriculum. In contrast, the code.org initiative seemed to be more grassrooted but with a more tech-driven agenda and less sensitive to curriculum and pedagogical issues. As the new century progressed, other attempts to transition to KE offered slightly more sophisticated cases of failure. In "Imagining a Modern Rwanda: Sociotechnological Imaginaries, Information Technology, and the Postgenocide State," Bowman (2015) illustrated how a Rwanda government in need of KE models found a mirror to look at with images that sound attainable. Rwanda was a case of importing KE models without an IOs intervention or abstract models. Relying on the term "sociotechnical imaginaries," Bowman explained how the new democratic government of Rwanda announced its ambition to be an "African Singapore." Rwanda's government unsuccessfully tried to build a KE by borrowing the socio-technological Imaginary of an autocratic Asian nation. The KE Singaporean narrative of the "smart nation" was abandoned without solid local roots (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). When addressing digital inclusion It is necessary to consider the historicity of KE in terms of changes in the socio-materiality of digital learning environments and work, commerce, or entertainment. Since the OECD defined it in 1996, techno material foundations of education have evolved dramatically. In 2005 1.02 billion people were connected to the internet, only 15.76%. In 2021, 16 years later, those connected amounted to 4.9 billion, exceeding 62.5% of the world's population (ITU 2021). During the COVID-19 pandemic, many education systems have been able to continue providing lessons and teachers assistance to students, not only because schools and educators have shown remarkable resilience in trying to compensate for the crisis, but also because techno material conditions of learning had changed over the years (Vincent-Lancrin, Cobo Romaní and Reimers, 2022). The Pandemic Crisis showed the value of smartphones, introduced in 2006 when the iPhone was launched, maintaining student-teacher contact even in precarious conditions. Paradoxically at the same time, it revealed new layers of digital divides that were not contemplated 16 years earlier in UNESCO's proposal (Warschauer, 2003; Toyama, 2015; van Dijk, 2020). Algorithms and intelligent technologies turn literacy into multiliteracies and the meaning of digital progress. Platforms are increasing uncertainty and risk instead of providing rationality and control. We need to address how new attempts to build more egalitarian KE are translated into policies (Beck 1998; OECD, 2016, 2021; Srnicek, 2017). The translating power of "Creative Britain" Advanced countries with a degree of bureaucratic capacities, such as Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom, transition to KE allowed renewed airs of change in education systems. In the presence of adequate autonomous capacities, both teachers and management teams could trigger virtuous processes of bottom-up school quality improvement from communities of practice (Fullan, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003). As we will see in the present section, in these softer processes of transition toward KE, the construction of the institutional superstructure played a fundamental role in the convergence of change in innovation systems and education systems. Nevertheless, KS could become less egalitarian when top-down reform without the same capacities disregarded such institutional arrangements. Each culture has its manner of understanding knowledge and learning. It is impossible to bridge the divide between the economic and the educational sides of the knowledge society by bypassing the cultural nature of the connection. In 2022 the concept of KE is still meaningful. Sustaining semantic weight is less a result of a consensus on an abstract model of KE than instead supported by the evidence of the above-mentioned national experiences such as South Korea, Finland, Canada, or Australia. Perhaps the case of Creative Education under the "Creative Britain" policy sharply illustrates how complex forms of educational policies merge into development policies. How they intertwine and hybridize transversally with economic and cultural policies through national strategies of constructing their own "sociotechnical imaginaries" of KE. Throughout the New Labor administration, between 1997 and 2007, Chris Smith, Secretary of State, promoted the KE in the form of creative industries and economic contribution of culture. Creativity was one of the leitmotivs of the political agenda of prime minister Tony Blair (Smith, 1998; Hewison, 2011; Mangabeira Unger et al., 2019). Smith, head of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, in 1998 set up Nesta, a decentralized innovation agency's national endowment for science, technology, and the arts. Nesta was originally funded by a £250 million endowment from the UK National Lottery. New Labor's institutional reform led to a substantial investment in the cultural infrastructure. The visual and performing arts, museums, and galleries were persistently promoted as a stimulus to national economic revival. In this context, a national education commission chaired by Ken Robinson, then professor of arts education at the University of Warwick, issued the "All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education" Report that called to create a national strategy focusing on creative and cultural education. It argued that the national debate on education in Britain had been expressed as a series of failed dichotomies — "as a choice between the arts or the sciences; the core curriculum or the broad curriculum; between academic standards or creativity; freedom or authority in teaching methods." (1999) "Creative Education Trust" was an example of the implementation of transversal creative education/economy policies based on a national sociotechnical imaginary ("Creative Britain") NESTA introduced a new model of organizations in charge of policy implementations. The trust worked in England's post-industrial cities and coastal towns: areas of economic disadvantage and with a history of academic underachievement. Its methodology involved integrating a knowledge-rich curriculum with skills and creativity (CET 2020). There were also international effects of these creative education policies. Sir Ken Robinson, also known for having one of the most viewed TEDTalks, "Do schools kill creativity? With 72 million views, became one of the first educational "influencers" of a global epistemic community. A new figure converged with other educational change thinkers such as Nicholas Negroponte or Michel Fullan in the international arena. Later, others followed Robinson, such as Salman Khan, Jeanette Wing, and Sugata Mitra. Another interesting case was Manuel Castells appointment as Minister of Universities of the Kingdom of Spain, which began a reform of upper education in 2020 that is still in progress. Conclusions In this chapter, we have examined KE building first as a narrative that justified the policies proposals of IO’s both of OECD and UNESCO, and then as a national endeavor that comprises symbolic and socio-material dimensions. We proposed the hypothesis that there is no single, universal KE as a desirable development destination per se. Although much more empirical research is needed after examining case studies, it is plausible to assert that attempts at symbolic construction of each KE can be found in both paradigmatic and regular cases. We can even find them in the transition to KE of central advanced countries. We found that exemplary types of development such as Finland and South Korea did not respond to the KE narrative of the OECD's monodisciplinary approach. Instead we observed that the construction of a national institutional superstructure based on a sociotechnical imaginary requires a state leadership effort. When public-private leadership deserts the crafting of a socio-technical imaginary of development, the vacant voids are filled by global narratives such as the techno-entrepreneur figure and the culture of innovation. Countless countries have tried to build their own Silicon Valley by turning their backs on their educational institutional contexts. They have failed by enmeshing social actors who could have been recruited into cohesive national enterprises. In their eagerness to promote public development policies, international organizations have oversimplified complex and unstable processes making the symbolic construction of sociotechnical imaginaries invisible or at least irrelevant. When no symbolic work was pursued, and only mimicked operating models of other “successful” countries, institutions built in the previous industrial period ceased to be effective in their functions. Although the KE narrative has managed to survive setbacks and transformations, it is doubtful that its power of persuasion can continue to inspire sustainable development processes without reflection on its blind spots. Cases such as "Theranos" and the trial of its founder Elizabeth Holmes or the bankruptcy of "WeWork" point out the crescent exhaustion of the production of meaning of the generic KE narratives. One blind spot was the idea that entrepreneurs are in charge of producing new knowledge when they only take the last link in a chain of public goods investments. Another blind spot was the overestimation of knowledge as a marketable good. The circulation of knowledge is highly dependent on the tacit knowledge circulating in communities of practice around and within educational institutions. If we have learned anything about KE definitions, it is that they are all transitory. Due to current sociotechnical infrastructure conditions, the Knowledge Society is a moving target, a black box that is constantly resetting itself. It is advisable to constantly exercise systematic reflexivity in the social sciences dealing with the development of KE. Perhaps the closest we came to a definition of KE was with an economy based on the manipulation of signs that requires human creative activity exercised in a given institutional space and cultural (national) context through platform technologies. Twenty-six years after the arrival of the term “Knowledge Economy”, the public agenda today is not very different from early linear, globalist ideas based on reliance on entrepreneurial individualism, even though they have been modified by the evolution of the experience of sociotechnical change. The humanist reaction to KE did not question the very concept in their attempt to bring KE into dialogue with social and cultural diversity and address inequalities in access to up-to-date education and the tools of thought. UNESCO's attempts to put KE in the context of human development while putting the digital divide and cultural diversities on the agenda met with stiff resistance. But it attempted to do so from a weak globalist and identity-defensive position that dismissed the importance of the symbolic national construction of the KE. The case with the 1:1 (OLPC) model of educational digital inclusion was an example of the fragility of attempts at well-intentioned globalist interventions. Since the free or open knowledge movements flourished in the Global North civil society, weaknesses of the nation-state in developing countries have not been able to take advantage of their projects. Then the 1:1 proposals that were born open source became a battering ram of the more closed platform. The sustained demand for digital talent in the new millennium, combined with the reliance on Edtech technology solutions, has pressured education systems with experiments such as MOOCs and Microdegrees. Without conclusive results, secondary and higher education moves post-pandemic towards hybrid or online scenarios. The Negroponte dichotomy between atoms and bits is diluted in post-digital hybrid fluids. Among the difficulties in thinking about the interactive relationship between economy and society in the datification era, the most difficult challenge is to overcome a narrative of the single abstract model of KE. Educational reforms of the future need inspiration within the framework of development policies around a national-specific endeavor that comprise symbolic and sociomaterial dimensions, capable of justified new endeavors of digital educational infrastructures. Few efforts have been made to build an enriched body of theory that integrates educational, institutional, and cultural change around the uniqueness of each nation-state. It is necessary to encourage a multi-scalar explanatory framework that aims to connect micro, meso, and macro levels of educational change concerning Sociotechnical Imaginaries. There is no longer an automatic translation between the digitization of the world and the advancement of KE. Digital transformation can also lead to the permanence of collective ignorance. Advanced digital technologies are no longer necessarily synonymous with development based on the personal dignity of dignified life projects. References Al-Fehaid, H. Y. N. and Shaili, V. 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