ABSTRACT
In a recently published book, Building Knowledge Cultures, Peters and Besley (2006: 117) point out that the notion of the ‘knowledge society’ emerged primarily as a ‘policy construction’ in which education is approached as ‘a subset of wider economic policy’. Operating as a policy tool through which work is reconfi gured around the processing of ‘intangible capital’, the knowledge society is characterised by new social hierarchies and multifaceted divisions of labour (David and Foray 2003; see response by Winch 2003). The notion of a knowledge society also signals a structural shift, from a political economy in which the state pro-actively intervenes in the market, to a political economy based on the ‘responsibilising of the self’; an approach which erects the individual, in the words of Peters (2001), as a
‘moral agent and its construction as a calculative rational choice actor’ (p. 61). This ‘duty to the self’, states Peters (2001), ‘legitimises the concepts of lifelong learning and entrepreneurship aimed at the production of fl exible workers’ and establishes ‘the combined notions of “education for work” and “enterprise education’’ as modes of social participation’ (p. 62).
