Power/economic knowledge

There are, I think, a number of things that can be said about our current understanding of economic knowledge. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that there is not one economic knowledge but many. Economic knowledges come in a variety of shapes and forms, ranging from the much prized activities of innovation and R&D which materialize as patented or intellectual objects to the more elusive know-how and ways of doing things that somehow add value to an enterprise. A second observation is the consensus that has arisen around the value of the tacit—explicit knowledge distinction first drawn by Michael Polanyi (1958) and the tendency, certainly among geographers, to map the distinction on to the local—global scale of activity. ¹ And a third, rather different kind of observation, is the almost complete absence of any thought given to the fact that power and its relationships may actually shape the production and circulation of economic knowledge. Knowledge linked to power, whether in the guise of a discursive regime of ‘truth’ or the restrictive practices of an institution, involves domination and influence of one sort or another. The three observations are not unrelated and, when considered together, nor are they without consequence.