knowledge contract |
Working Definition:
The bond between what universities study and the contemporaneous requirements of society for it.
Disciplinary Definitions:
a "bond between the work of the university and the particular society in which it functioned" that set parameters on what counts as knowledge.
Even though there was considerable latitude with disciplinary parameters, many different kinds of human understanding were excluded from the modern discourse of knowledge. but these exclusions were thought to be acceptable because the contract also registered certain obligations for the general improvement of social and cultural life. (The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace 22)
Downing's conception of a "knowledge contract" underlying the evolution of disciplines in the American university sheds light on the development of the fields of communication in that they are closely tied to the socio-economic trends of the times during which they emerged or shifted
Comments:
The pattern of the development of communication studies Ruben and Stewart trace reveals a tendency to favor the techniques and technologies of communication rather than the personal aspects of communicative situations which is consistent with their "knowledge contract." By and large, practitioners are less concerned with the integrity of their disciplines than with the utility of their work that might make it publishable or fundable.
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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