The European challenge. Innovation, policy learning and social cohesion in the new knowledge economy

Abstract:

This work looks at the impact of globalisation and the new information technologies on the European Union, which has made the development of a socially cohesive, knowledge-based economy its central task for the present decade.

The book opens with a chapter on the new knowledge-based economy, considering how its impact will differ from earlier perceptions and the debates surrounding post-industrial society and the technological revolution. The book then proceeds to deal with five principal questions arising from such debates and their particular reference to the EU experience. Chapter two looks at the challenges of the knowledge-based economy and the role of policy benchmarking within the EU response. Chapter three considers the relevance of growth and stability in formulating a strategy for dealing with the dynamism of the new knowledge-based economy, and these aspects are examined more closely in chapter four. The next three chapters examine these processes of dynamic transformation in relation to enterprises, human investment and social cohesion and the contingent nature of the institutional context. Chapter eight considers the implications for modelling and measuring the new economy and offers an overall appraisal of the benchmarking indicators which the EU has been employing in its drive towards a knowledge-based economy. Chapter nine looks at the role of benchmarking in relation to governance, then the final chapter places the EU experience within a global context and draws out the implications for the debates on globalisation.

The work will interest scholars, students and researchers in the fields of public and social policy, organisational and technological change and innovation and those policy makers concerned with the management of such change.