ABSTRACT
This glimpse examines some of the paradoxes that are played out within research and the significance of what have been called ‘new modes of knowledge production’ (Gibbons et al. 1994). These can be seen as both a consequence and a realisation of globalisation, but our discussion will be framed mainly in the context of the relationship with, and the effects of this on, knowledge production in the academy. In particular and again, we will look at the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs), computer-mediated communication (CMC) and their impact on the academy as a work site. We will argue that knowledge production in the academy is being reconfigured by globalisation and the cultural practices within which new technologies and modes of communication are implicated. Inevitably, and we do recognise this, there is a danger of a Western and partial gaze in our
approach being taken as generalisable. The role of the academy and the academic is neither universal nor uniform, varying according to context, funding and institutional structures. It is necessary, therefore, to introduce a post-colonial dimension to the discussion to bring to the fore the contemporary location of knowledge production within the ambiguities and tensions of globalisation, while also recognising that all knowledge workers and producers, wherever they may be specifically located, are now in an important sense part of the ‘global game’. They are now part of what Green (1998) refers to as the ‘global academic’, by which he means not just the jet-setting activities of specific individuals but the contemporary trend, with many different and complex aspects, towards the globalisation of knowledge and the academy.
