ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. Technological unemployment, a notion treated as heretical, if not absurd, is now increasingly taken seriously as a key factor holding down job creation, wages, living standards, and economic growth. In a sense, it is obvious that the subject of a political economy of research and innovation (PERI) is the production - and inseparably, the distribution and consumption - of knowledge, and how this shapes and is shaped by political economies. The need for this both dynamically historical and structural political-economic perspective is particularly acute given the period within which PERI has arisen and which it has immediately sought to analyse, namely the broadly neoliberal era of the past few decades. The funding of science, whether by public/state or private/market sources, inevitably calls upon arguments for legitimation of spending money in that way and not on some other priority.
