ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of the nature and the evolution of knowledge societies head-on—specifically, the transformation of knowledge societies into knowledge capitalism assisted last but not least by the legal encoding of knowledge. The solidity of the attributes of knowledge societies is magnified by law, in particular, patent law, intellectual property rights law, copyright law, and other laws that resemble legal restrictions placed on cognitive phenomena that represent symbolic capital. The development and the growing usage of the idea of that modern society is a knowledge society dates to the early 1970s and more prominently and intensively to the 1980s and later decades. Peter Drucker doubts that modern education reacts to the changes in the modern world of work. Skepticism about the traditional demand-driven view was also expressed in other ways, for example prominently by Randall Collins’ discussion of functional and conflict theories of educational stratification.
