In what is routinely described as a ‘knowledge society’, this book argues that contemporary knowledge is systematically filtered and distorted by the requirements of the bureaucratic-managerial organisations that constitute the structural core of hypermodernity. As knowledge becomes increasingly politicised, almost every ‘fact’ with which we are presented serves an agenda.
This book traces the historical and conceptual foundations of ‘governmental knowledge’. It examines how problematisation, mediation, informationalisation, and substitution translate human life into abstract representations that can be managed, manipulated, and retrojected back onto social reality. The proliferation of experts and managerial intermediaries institutionalises these processes across domains as diverse as public health, education, corporate management, and everyday digital interactions. It argues that, far from being neutral, expert knowledge instrumentalises liminality and subordinates social life and individual conduct to the algorithmic logic of managerialism. Technocracy thus systematically filters out the dimensions of meaning, participation, and embodied existence, constructing a ‘second reality’ that blinds us to whole ranges of human experience.
A compelling study of the politics of knowledge, Technocracy: Knowledge and Power in the Information Age sheds light on the way a certain type of knowledge is used to lay claim to authority, status and resources, and how the endless expansion of such knowledge reshapes society. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and social theory with interests in the sociology of knowledge.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. The Codetermination of Knowledge and Social Organisation 2. The Growth of Formal Organisation 3. The Ascendance of Technique 4. Managerial Subjectification and Knowledge 5. Detachment and Instrumentalism 6. Problematisation and Parasitism 7. Informationalisation 8. Domains of Equivalence 9. Quasi-Objects and their Institutionalisations Conclusion: Beyond the Second Reality
About the Author :
Paul O’Connor is Associate Professor of Sociology at United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Home: The Foundations of Belonging and the co-editor of The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine, Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism, and the Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Anthropology.
