VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE OF THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AS A POLICY CONSTRUCT

The article examines the knowledge economy which took shape in the 1990s largely through the efforts of international organizations, with the OECD playing a central role. Drawing on the approaches of intellectual history, the authors analyze the theoretical foundations of the knowledge economy – namely, how disparate intellectual traditions were selectively assembled into a coherent policy framework. The paper situates the concept within the broader field of international political economy, emphasizing how it reflects and reinforces the intersecting interests of national and transnational actors within the global economic order. Four key theoretical pillars underpin the knowledge economy: new growth theory, information society, national innovation systems and human capital. The article demonstrates that each of them emerged from distinct intellectual and socio-political environments, and their validity was historically contingent upon the conditions in which they were first deployed. While the attempt to synthesize them into a common framework highlights their contextual limitations, the knowledge economy is deemed remarkably resilient. It has managed to become background knowledge shaping contemporary understandings of economic progress – even amid global crises. The reason for this endurance is its alignment with the material and ideological interests of a dominant social bloc in the United States during the 1990s–2010s: finance capital, high-tech industries, national and international bureaucracy. The paper concludes that the knowledge economy should be understood as a descriptive framework for the unfolding dynamics of the global economy. This dynamics is best observed in the formation of a three-tiered structure – enterprises centered on intangible assets, capital-intensive enterprises, and labor-exploitative enterprises. The knowledge economy serves as a tool for the ideological articulation of this regime.

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