Journals à la mode? Twenty years of living alongside Mode 2 and the new production of knowledge

Abstract

This article considers the institutional and political background to the life of Organization associated with continuing debates about ‘modes of scientific knowledge’ and the supposed rise of Mode 2. It suggests that Organization should provide space for a more fully theorized and politically aware position of the new—and old—production of knowledge. It does so by, first, critically exploring the substantial volume of work that continues to insist that Mode 2—and its many variants—have tended to displace more traditional, so-called Mode 1, forms of scientific knowledge production. But its main contribution lies in suggesting that what has lurked behind scientific knowledge production for centuries is a more insidious and underlying mode of knowledge production—one which we label Mode 0—that corresponds to knowledge production based upon relations of power and patronage. We argue that not only does this notion allow us to develop a more penetrating critique of the claims made by proselytizers of Mode 2 but that Mode 0 has proved a more enduring form of knowledge production than Mode 1 and may well have greater longevity. Rather than becoming too embroiled in questions raised by the Mode 1/ Mode 2 debate about the utility of knowledge for managers, we suggest that readers may wish instead to pry further into the hidden world of Mode 0 patronage of knowledge production.