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The article comprehensively reviews the theoretical and empirical work on gender and the knowledge society and introduces the articles of the special issue. Three ways in which the knowledge society and economy are gendered are distinguished: the gendering of human capital; the gendering of networks and the gendering of the definitions of the knowledge society. Using data from the Labour Force Survey, an original analysis of the gendering of the UK knowledge economy is presented. It finds that the choice of definition of the knowledge economy makes a difference to its gender composition: the more centred on technology and fixed capital, the more masculine, the more centred on human capital, the more gender balanced. The knowledge economy provides better work and conditions. Gender gaps are narrower in the knowledge economy than the overall economy: occupational hierarchies are narrowed to women's advantage, while differences in work temporalities are narrowed to men's advantage.

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which neoliberal globalization is produced through educational restructuring and new modes of urban development. Neoliberal globalization, however, is a variegated process wherein local social hierarchies articulate with state policies and global capital. This study shows how caste and class relations in the education sector in Andhra Pradesh are instrumental to forming Hyderabad's connection to the global economy. The contradictions of these regional realignments of education, geography and economy are manifest in the uneven development of the region and the rise of new socio-political struggles for the right to the city.

Over the past decade, international development policy has paid increased attention to social reproduction. While this offers an improvement over past practices in which care work was all but ignored, these policy frameworks continue to fall short of feminist goals. One reason for this is the way that dominant economic representations of social reproduction continue to rest on a universalizing portrayal of the household economy and family life as mired in patriarchal tradition, which fails to capture the diversity of economic and affective arrangements in which reproductive labor takes place at the local level. In this paper, I develop an alternative conceptualization of economic and affective life that challenges dominant understandings of the distinctions between market and non-market activity, paid and unpaid labor, and work and intimacy to provide space for new feminist conceptualizations of economy and care that can capture the diversity of its sites and practices.

Cloud computing has started to transform economic activities in the global South. Many businesses are taking advantage of the pay-as-you-go model of the technology, and its scalability and flexibility features, and government agencies in the South have been investing in cloud-related mega-projects. Cloud-based mobile applications are becoming increasingly popular and the pervasiveness of cellphones means that the cloud may transform the way these devices are used. However, findings and conclusions drawn from surveys, studies and experiences of companies on the potential and impact of cloud computing in the developing world are inconsistent. This article reviews cloud diffusion in developing economies and examines some firms in the cloud's supply side in these economies to present a framework for evaluating the attractiveness of this technology in the context of evolving needs, capabilities and competitive positions. It examines how various determinants related to the development and structure of related industries, externality mechanisms and institutional legitimacy affect cloud-related performances and impacts.

ABORIGINAL people are condemned to poverty and treated as "museum pieces" by governments whose education policies have locked a generation out of the real economy.

"In assessing the various forms of welfare capitalism, normative political philosophy typically draws on two major philosophical traditions - republicanism and liberalism, invoking either equality and the public good or, alternatively, individual autonomy as normative criteria for evaluation. Drawing, instead, on Critical Theory as a tradition of social philosophy, I advance a proposal for assessment of the types of welfare capitalism conducted as 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Normative criteria thus emerge within a diachronic dimension of social transformation, which in turn grounds the comparison among synchronic types of capitalism. This ultimately enables a research agenda for the operationalisation of a normative analysis of capitalism within which social justice is gauged by the degree of voluntary employment flexibility - a key factor in the distribution of life-chances in the early twenty-first century."

This article critiques the notion of a cross-national convergence of institutional and policy responses to science-based technologies. The continued significance of institutional legacies is demonstrated through a comparative analysis of strategies for the biopharma industry in two radically different settings: India and the European Union (EU). Tensions are evident in both the EU 'high' route and the mixed strategy pursued in India. State promotion of biopharma is seen in India as a pathway to economic development, framed by a vision of India as a global power. Here, the 'low' route of cost advantages is combined with a 'global' rhetoric of innovation, modeled on US experience, and uneven forays into advanced R&D. The pursuit of product innovation was reinforced by India's adoption of TRIPS-mandated intellectual property rights. In the EU, the aim is an integrated policy and regulatory approach to sustain and legitimize European integration, with the ultimate intent of overtaking the USA.

"Throughout the history of film, plots have required that a character be rendered unconscious for a finite period with no explanation of the process and with no other consequence, to which end, the medium invented the "magic-single-punch." All one character has to do is say: "I hate to do this but . . ." then throw a swift punch to jaw, and the recipient agrees to pass out for however long the plot requires. More significant than this compliant character is the equally compliant viewer, who accepts this miracle of anesthesia, that works to perfect effect even on a character who, in other scenes, might have a chair broken over his head or receive several karate chops to the trachea with barely a blink or stagger. Although I believe that car chases were the reason God invented "fast-forward," even more bewildering than the apparent popularity of this screen event is the fact that audiences have failed, over the last two decades, to wonder why not one of the cars involved has a working airbag. Such thoughts, of course, disrupt the pleasure that has been paid for with money, time, and attention, in the same way, for example, that disputing the comparably absurd tenets of Reaganomics disrupts the myth of satisfaction purchased with (low) taxes, lip-service patriotism, and self-serving citizenship.1 In 1984-in the middle of Reagan's reign over morning in America-federal law required that all cars have passive restraints by 1989. Since Reagan's second term, in other words, in defiance of legality and common sense, the premises of Reaganomics and of movie car chases have remained unchallenged. Fueled on the one hand by pleasure industries, and on the other, by think tanks and talk radio, the speeding of the economy and of the movie-chase car, along parallel courses toward disastrous crashes could be glossed by saying that, as usual, American mass media had disabled the wrong airbags. Although we do not n

"Why and how do issues expire? This paper applies the concept of path dependency to issue-life cycle and argues that the manner in which an issue dies is closely associated with how it comes to life. This paper argues that, on the Access to Medicines issue, the first actors (1) to have called attention to a legal problem, (2) to have capitalised on the HIV/AIDs crisis, and (3) to have used the example of Africa, were also the first to have felt constrained by their own frame in their attempt to (1) look for economical rather than legal solutions, (2) expand the list of medicines covered beyond anti-AIDs drugs, and (3) allow large emerging economies to benefit from a scheme designed by countries without manufacturing capacities. In order to escape an issue in which they felt entrapped, issue-entrepreneurs worked strategically to close the debate in order to better reframe it in other forums."

"While critics have argued that the films of Singapore director Jack Neo posit a critique of the state, this essay will argue the contrary. In deploying Chinese 'dialects' his films may appear to give voice to the Chinese-speaking masses in Singapore, especially those who have been marginalized by the state's political economy, which clearly favours the educated and English-speaking milieu. For the Chinese-speaking masses, his films may even appear to act as a medium or outlet for 'anti-state' criticisms which they feel but cannot articulate, since criticism of the government is essentially prohibited here. However, as this essay will demonstrate, Neo uses such linguistic idioms only as a foil to further perpetuate government propaganda: he uses Chinese 'dialects' to draw his intended audience to his side, and once they are taken in, he persuades them to reconcile with unpopular government policies. In other words, Neo's films constitute an extension of state politics via cinematic means, rather than an authentic political critique. As this essay also suggests, unveiling Neo's manipulation of language in his films as such will be critical to uncover not only Neo's underlying political intent, but also the unequal distribution that underlies the state's language policies"

"Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the importance of strategic unknowns resists the tendency to value knowledge over ignorance or to assume that the procurement of more knowledge is linked in an automatic or a linear fashion to the attainment of more social or political power. Refining and challenging the assumption that modern liberal societies inevitably thrive on the accumulation of information about the public personas, private psyches, consumer habits or political proclivities of citizens, the papers in the special issue explore how the cultivation of strategic unknowns remains a resource - perhaps the greatest resource - for those in a position of power and those subject to it."

This paper serves as reference to some of this new thinking. To provide a context, it will refer to the earlier work and indicate the limitations and breakthroughs of the earlier work which, with the benefit of retrospect, have become apparent. The pape

The purpose of this article is to (re)introduce Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to the study of contemporary African societies. Widely accepted as foundational work in the field of critical pedagogy, it is argued that Freirean scholarship and ana

This article analyzes the role of education in Latin America's development over the last two decades and recommends much greater emphasis on promoting learning, particularly among the poor. It documents significant progress in getting more children into school but little progress in making sure they reach minimum levels of learning (measured by scores on achievement tests). The authors find that the chief obstacles to improving the region's education systems are both technical (weak institutions and poor teaching) and political (teachers' unions that cling to the status quo and little political support for fundamental reform). The authors identify twelve policies they believe will improve the contribution education makes to development.

"This article analyses the discursive unities which make possible the current transformation of teacher training and our understanding of teaching as a profession, while focusing particularly on European educational policy and the situation in Slovakia. Using Foucault's archaeological method, we reconstruct the discursive link points between the circumscribed, and at first glance, different approaches to teacher training, where on the one hand, we have a humanistic and constructivist prism, and on the other, we find the pragmatic, economizing pressure of neoliberal educational policy. Discursive reconstruction, however, shows that these approaches are not contradictory, rather that a humanistic and constructivist discourse, by shaping a specific kind of subjectivity (the teachers), supports the neoliberal reform of teacher training and constitutes the reasoning upon which it is based. The analysis is conducted by drawing together various components: the logic of the higher education reforms, the changes to the epistemological basis of teacher training, the regulation of professional development through professional standards, the psychological content and general permeation of entrepreneurial culture into education right through to the performance culture of the 'portfolios', which are the typical attributes of neoliberal governmentality, and not only in teacher training."

This paper examines the ways in which credentials from a range of education providers are used to (re)produce transnational financial elites in London's international financial district. Extant research has examined the long-standing relationship between educational background and entry into these financial labour markets. Far less attention has been paid to how the relationship between education and financial elites has changed more recently as financial labour markets have become increasingly transnational in nature and education and learning increasingly extend beyond higher education into the workplace. In response, this paper combines work on transnational elite labour markets with work from the sociology of education on the intersection between work and workplace education in order to understand the different strategies used by individuals (from both the UK and overseas) to acquire a range of credentials following their first degree in an effort to advance their careers within contemporary financial services labour markets.