Introduction

Abstract

While the control of knowledge is becoming the dominant means by which economic, political, and social control is exerted globally, the mechanisms through which this is happening—including intellectual property rights, state and commercial surveillance, digitisation and datafication, and a nearly ubiquitous internet mediating human interactions—are often examined separately instead of as part of a larger phenomenon of knowledge governance. This edited volume brings experts in these areas from across the social sciences to explore these areas as forms of knowledge governance, by adopting the understudied (at least from a knowledge-governance perspective) work of the late International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange, notably her concept of a knowledge structure. In this chapter, we present an introduction to and critique of Strange’s theory of the knowledge structure and offer an overview of this volume’s chapters.