From conceptual modeling to quantitative measure

The notion of knowledge-based economy has been introduced in recent years in the economics of science and innovation, to indicate a qualitative transition in economic conditions where knowledge production has become central for the economic dynamics and development. As such, it has also been widely used in political discussion especially at the European level. However, already some of its fathers have remarked that, if this concept is not to become a sort of buzzword without a precise meaning, both a sound conceptualization of what is meant by it and a set of tools to measure this phenomenon empirically are required. On both requirements, Loet Leydesdorff, professor at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research, has provided outstanding contributions during its whole scientific career. First of all, he has developed in the last two decades a strong theoretical view of the knowledge-based economy, based on Luhmann systems theory and on the centrality of communication for the co-evolution of knowledge systems, economic markets and political systems. Second, he successfully proved that, exactly based on this conceptual model-ing, it is possible to design quantitative measures of some aspects of the knowledge economy and has thus provided a number of original contributions to quantitative science and technology studies, for example, in the analysis of scientific fields and networks using bibliometric indicators and in the measurement of the dynamics of the knowledge economy and of triple helix interaction. This new book covers these two dimensions of Loet's work. Thus, the reader is firstly given an introduction to the concept of knowledge-based economy and its implications to the dynamics of social systems. Leydersdorff argues that the emergence of knowledge production and control as a third coordination mechanism to the social system alongside economic exchange and political control leads to a profoundly different dynamics from in market-based systems. Further, Leydersdorff identifies the specificity of knowledge in its ability to codify meanings and thus to reduce uncertainty in the (collective) representation of the social system by becoming increasingly selective as to the information to be retained as relevant ; across time, this provides a capacity to produce informed expectations of possible futures, which are then fed back into historical processes. It is exactly this reflective and anticipatory capacity that accounts for the stability of the evolutionary trajectory of the knowledge-based economy, leading to self-organizing patterns like that observed in the triple helix. These arguments are discussed in detail in …