Knowledge Capitalism probes the surface of economic and social change, revealing how

the shift to a knowledge-based economy is redefining firms, empowering individuals, and

reshaping the links between learning and work.
Using economic, management and knowledge-based theories, supported by empirical
data and illustrations from leading companies, Knowledge Capitalism describes the
emergence of a new breed of capitalist, one dependent on knowledge rather than physical
resources.
Industrial-era models of firm-market boundaries, work arrangements, and ownership and
control are shown to be inhibiting firms and individuals success in the emerging
knowledge economy. New models are proposed based on knowledge-centred
organization, knowledge-led growth, and knowledge supply as distinct from labour
supply. Continuous learning is shown to be critical to firms as integrators of disparate
knowledge resources, and the only practical route for individuals to become free agents.
Knowledge Capitalism provides a practical guide for business practitioners, theorists and
students to interpret and manage change in a rapidly deconstructing economic
environment.
Knowledge capitalism is the expropriation of knowledge, most often through techniques
of knowledge management, extracted from the knowledge worker and embedded in
systems or process in part through legalistic means (e.g., copyright and emergence of
international regimes of intellectual property rights). Yet it might be argued that, at least
in universities, that knowledge is produced under conditions of what we might call
'knowledge socialism', that is, conditions that emphasise traditional values of collegiality,
trust, peer review, and knowledge exchange by equals? This picture is far too rosy but it
does carry the drift of the argument.