The structure and silence of the cognotariat

Abstract

This paper describes the most likely social structure awaiting ‘knowledge workers’ in the knowledge economies of high‐ and medium‐income nations. Commentators from across the political spectrum and in diverse institutional positions have been noting that the source of new products and industries is increasingly ‘cognitive’. They have been concluding from this that knowledge workers are in effect knowledge capitalists who will either own, and/or control, the economy, and will gradually acquire the economic power historically allotted to owners, shareholders and top executives. The paper analyses the discourse of ‘knowledge management’ in conjunction with the structure of higher education’s primary disciplines to argue that in fact knowledge workers are divided into traditional social groups. Only a small ‘creative class’ will achieve control or creative freedom, and they will achieve this largely because of their direct institutional connections to the owners and executives who run the knowledge economy. There are no signs that the current economy is redistributing economic authority in a more egalitarian way, nor are knowledge workers showing signs of political mobilisation against this traditional stratification.