Economy and Culture: Keywords Over the Late 20th Century.

The presumed features of the 'knowledge economy' regularly drive critical policy decisions around economy and industrial policy and often spill over into action and rhetoric in education both higher education and primary secondary, labor markets, social security and aging policy, and broadly into social policy considerations. But the 'knowledge economy' is one of several terms that have come to be used to summarize developments and trends in broad features of economic activity: Knowledge economy, information economy, 'new' economy, innovation economy, and like terms all assert basic changes in the structure and drivers of economic productivity. And add to these companion terms like postindustrial society, information society, the digital divide, etc. that blur the specificity of 'economy' and 'society' and also carry models of technology and institutional and societal change. What is to be learned by investigating these keywords and their evolution? In this paper we investigate the post-war development of keywords operating as nouns in apposition to 'economy'. This paper builds upon the work of T Mitchell, Foucault and Meyer, tracking further the historical development of the concept of the economy by tracing keywords such as 'knowledge', 'post-industrial', and 'information', used to suggest a particular quality to this concept. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]