ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a knowledge-creating social economy, in which a university plays a leading part, whereby 'business', in conjunction, involves the nourishment of life: Swedish naringsliv. It constitutes a 'Northern' transformation of bureaucracy and the welfare state into a knowledge-based, social economy, with its moral economic core, with which its focus on the Common Good. The greatest influence on such 'social economics' was Geneva-based Sismondi, whose 69 years of life spanned the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and European tension leading to the turmoil of 1848. The conventional economists, for Sismondi, preoccupied with the accumulation of material wealth rather than with the well-being of the people producing it, gave little attention to any blips in the growth-producing economic engine. Engels' intimate knowledge of social and economic conditions in that country was invaluable to Karl Marx. In the historical overview, the drive of the Northern function of operations management towards knowledge creation becomes tangible.
