«'Global Creation' is a path-breaking, magisterial treatment of the global knowledge economy in all of its detail and complexity. Thanks to Marginson, Murphy and Peters we discover what they call 'the K-economy' a unique space for innovative public and private partnerships, constant networking as well a global market for millions of students. Rich in ideas, they provide us with an unforgettable picture of the new dynamics of power, the fascinating world of state strategies and the cultural categories of creativity in the new global information economy. Critically their research also establishes the structural limits of these markets. In a word, indispensable, provocative and challenging.» (Daniel Drache, Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada) «This book opens fresh perspectives to the phenomena of Globalization and Knowledge Economy. The authors not only broaden our historical understanding but also open new insights into creativity and its relationship with higher education institutions, the potential sources of innovations in global knowledge economies. The authors claim that we enjoy an enlarged freedom to create in global knowledge economy.
Our main challenge is, however, whether we use our growing freedoms for production of meaning, for originality in creativity and design, for ideas that open up our condition and our fate. This excellent and thought-provoking book may be recommended to everyone interested in understanding the nature of creativity and higher education in global knowledge societies.» (Jussi Välimaa, Professor of Higher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland) «Global creation - what does that mean? From one perspective globalization processes have shown us the inescapable and imminent creativity of humans in this world. It seems that the historical creativity - set on form in art by e.g. modern aesthetics, from Baumgarten to Adorno, art as such - however brilliant almost succumbs to the quotidian creativity at large in globalization processes. From another perspective such a view is naive. Global creation is creation under certain terms and taking place in certain confines and contexts - it is under the constraint of form.
The current volume attempts to follow creation at large but under the constraint of form: to map globalization as if it was creation proper, yet under the constraint of a particular topic - reflection, knowledge, science. The book is mapping crucial and strategic relations between 'the protean and the global' in an intense set of texts focusing on the formation of knowledge as global creation proper. First, it maps the conditions for the emergence of organized knowledge within the pre-modern and modern network of portal urban linkages circumspanning the oceans of the world. Then, it deals with the formation of the ensuing and enduring institutional forms, the modern research universities, as a field where all the prospects and constraints of modern global creativity are playing out. Finally, in the third set of texts, it presents a breathtaking overture of open knowledge and creativity set loose as novel form - complicit with global networks and civil societies and possible new roles for the modern institution of the university. Here we see the agenda of this highly learned work: the fascination of knowledge as a system turning in upon itself and discovering what it means to take command over its own form of creativity, e.g. in the self-reflective process now known as open source - that is, the importance of free, creative and self-reflective intellectual work.
Few books have the persistent courage of the present volume: to argue that knowledge is neither primarily of something, nor a constructivist or merely political zero sum game, but in itself a world shaping creative magma and as such shaping a.