'What you always wanted to know about the "knowledge society",
Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons are telling it in
Re-Thinking
Science, the sequel to their much acclaimed book
The New
Production of Knowledge (1994). This is a splendid book, full
of empirical insight and intellectual vision.
Re-Thinking
Science is reliable and robust at the same time.'
Wolf
Lepenies, Rektor, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin
'The authors take us beyond the dichotomies of science and
society in their ovular new work, Re-Thinking Science, into
a new agora of interactive forces in which old institutional
boundaries of science, industry and government are transcended.
Re-Thinking Science re-thinks society.' Henry Etzkowitz,
Director, Science Policy Institute, State University of New York at
Purchase
'This book goes far beyond The New Production of
Knowledge (1994), the earlier collection of essays by Michael
Gibbons, Helga Nowotny and others. That book launched the debate on
the trend towards a new regime for the production of knowledge and
the practice of research ... Re-Thinking Science revisits
these themes in the form of a single brilliant essay in social
theory ... a splendid vision of a probable future world, in which
science and society will increasingly overlap and be exposed to the
growing expertise and contesting forces of the agora.'
Nature
'This book is packed with novel and quite complicated ideas ...
We look forward to a further harvest of sharp observations and deep
interpretations in the next product from this outstanding scholarly
team.' Interdisciplinary Science Review
'an enourmously important book, which deserves to be widely read
and discussed.' Science as Culture
The book could be influential in providing sustenance to higher
education managers as they struggle to find new definitions of what
it means to be a university. Political leaders too would do well to
study it in order to move their policy-making away from dependence
on mode 1 ideas. The vision of the science of the future outlined
in the book could perhaps have gone further. However, there is a
balance to be struck between being influential and being visionary.
This book will clearly be influential. The vision will hopefully
grow." Studies in Higher Education