ABSTRACT
Today, universities are widely regarded as centres of research. However, it is only recently that universities have organised themselves to carry out this task. Although from the nineteenth century onwards, individuals carried out research at universities, it was not before the end of the Second World War that research, and in particular basic research, was taken on by universities to become a part of their core values. During the second half of the twentieth century, universities made systematic efforts to expand their domain from preserving and transmitting knowledge to generating new knowledge. The process of generating new knowledge, however, is undergoing important changes that challenge the traditional disciplinary structure of knowledge production. This chapter discusses the new mode of knowledge production and it considers the implications of this new mode for the knowledge production system, of which universities (and the higher education sector in general) are an important part.
