Accounting for ideas: Bringing a knowledge economy into the picture

Abstract

Over the past 15–20 years, the margins of industrial classifications, corporate balance sheets and GDP have been altered to capture knowledge as a new category of value. This has resulted in the institutionalization of categories such as an information economy (1997), intangible assets (2001) and, most recently, a knowledge-adjusted GDP (2013) in these calculating technologies. By harnessing knowledge as a manageable and valuable object, these shifts are responding but also contributing to the concept of a knowledge economy. This paper investigates the conditions necessary to anchor these new categories of value. The analysis attends not only to the changing rules and regulations, but also to the rhetorics of visibility/invisibility, materiality/immateriality, and measurability/immeasurability used to make a case for these transformations.