Diversification of knowledge production actors (including university-industry partnerships)

The nature of knowledge production has been transformed in recent years because of the changing nature of knowledge, knowledge flows and knowledge exploitation. One element of this transformation, which has been increasingly recognised, is that there has been a qualitative shift in the relationships between universities and society in terms of producing new knowledge and the consequences that that knowledge has for society. When almost every element of a society makes use of an array of knowledges, then more of the knowledge that actors such as universities produce has potential societal consequences. This has in turn had profound consequences for universities, where they are facing demands to make not only their technological knowledge accessible and useful to society, but also their tacit knowledge, their social sciences knowledge and their humanities knowledge. However, those kinds of knowledge bring new challenges because of their different natures, relating to symbolic hermeneutic or relative knowledge rather than to absolute empirical truths. In order to address these challenges, this chapter develops a framework for understanding these shifts in terms of characterising the main dimensions of variation involved, to draw them together into a more convergent model for conceptualising diverse knowledge production systems.