The Mixed Blessing of Mode 2 Knowledge Production

Abstract

The notion of Mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001) already has a remarkable history. It was launched fifteen years ago to capture the ongoing changes in the world of science, science policy and the knowledge economy at large. While it is not the only attempt to make sense of the change, it definitively is the most popular. Since its publication in 1994, ‘The New Production of Knowledge’ (Gibbons et al. 1994), which has coined the notions of Mode 1 and Mode 2, has received almost 1900 citations in scientific journals (see Figure 1). It is a blessing that it has helped both scholars and policymakers to get a grip on the profound changes going on in contemporary science systems. But the concept of Mode 2 knowledge production also proved to be a mixed blessing by creating confusion and by conflating interrelated yet independent trends.