Niilo Kauppi

This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from North America, Europe and Asia, it explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation. The book examines how governments around the world have embraced global models of world-class university, human capital and talent competition as essential in ensuring national competitiveness. Through its analysis, the book shows how this strongly future-oriented and anticipatory knowledge governance is steered by a surge of global classifications, rankings and indicators, resulting in numerous comparisons of various domains that today form more constraining global policy scripts.

This book argues that contemporary European politics creates new forms oftransnational power that challenge the traditional parameters of the nation-state.Kauppi identifies and critically explores the evolving dynamics between nationaland transnational spaces, groups and knowledge, and suggests that European publicpolicies and transnational institutions like the European Parliament create new spaces,types of knowledge and novel political practices.Toward a Reflexive Political Sociology of the European Union is structured aroundthree parts. The first focuses on evolving transnational fields. The second explores thechanging role of academics and universities. The third section engages with the worksof Pierre Bourdieu on politics and the media. The issues discussed throughout thebook revolve around the challenges to the nation-state and of knowledge productionthat is tied to it.This book will be an invaluable resource to academics and researchers interested inEuropean politics, European Union studies and political sociology.

This book argues that contemporary European politics creates new forms oftransnational power that challenge the traditional parameters of the nation-state.Kauppi identifies and critically explores the evolving dynamics between nationaland transnational spaces, groups and knowledge, and suggests that European publicpolicies and transnational institutions like the European Parliament create new spaces,types of knowledge and novel political practices.Toward a Reflexive Political Sociology of the European Union is structured aroundthree parts. The first focuses on evolving transnational fields. The second explores thechanging role of academics and universities. The third section engages with the worksof Pierre Bourdieu on politics and the media. The issues discussed throughout thebook revolve around the challenges to the nation-state and of knowledge productionthat is tied to it.This book will be an invaluable resource to academics and researchers interested inEuropean politics, European Union studies and political sociology.

An invisible pattern draws together most studies dealing with French cultural radicalism in the 1960s with intellectual creation reduced to individual creation and the role of semiotic and social factors that influence intellectual innovation minimized. Sociological approaches often see a more or less external link between social location and intellectual production but, because of their structural approach, they are incapable of taking into account unique historical circumstances, the crucial role of personal impulses, and more importantly the semiotic logic of ideas as conditions of innovative thinking. This ground-breaking book will further an internal sociological analysis of ideas and styles of thought. It will show that the defining but largely neglected feature of what has become "French theory" was a collective mind and style of thought, an explosive but fragile mixture of scientific and political radicalism that rather quickly watered down to academic orthodoxy. For some time, radical intellectuals succeeded in producing ideas that were perfectly in tune with the demands of the consumers, mostly the young university audience. Ideas were used as part of radical posture that was set in opposition to the establishment and "those in power". Ideas could not be too empirical or verifiable, and they had to shock. It is not surprising that a slew of new sciences and concepts were invented to indicate this radical posture. The central argument of this study is that ideas become "power-ideas" only if they succeed in uniting individual and collective psychic investment in powerful social networks with significant institutional and political backing. These conditions were met in the French context for a certain specific period of time. From roughly the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, radical intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva developed a host of new ideas, concepts and theories, a number of which have subsequently been labelled as French theory.

In this book, available at last in paperback, Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'. Kauppi conceptualises the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender. The author shows how the dominance of both executive political resources and domestic political cultures has prevented the development of European democracy. Supranational executive networks have become more autonomous, reinforcing the dominance of the resources they control. At the same time, national political cultures condition the political status of elected institutions such as the European parliament. The book is particularly suited for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European Politics, European Union Studies and International Relations.

An invisible pattern draws together most studies dealing with French cultural radicalism in the 1960s with intellectual creation reduced to individual creation and the role of semiotic and social factors that influence intellectual innovation minimized. Sociological approaches often see a more or less external link between social location and intellectual production but, because of their structural approach, they are incapable of taking into account unique historical circumstances, the crucial role of personal impulses, and more importantly the semiotic logic of ideas as conditions of innovative thinking. This ground-breaking book will further an internal sociological analysis of ideas and styles of thought. It will show that the defining but largely neglected feature of what has become "French theory" was a collective mind and style of thought, an explosive but fragile mixture of scientific and political radicalism that rather quickly watered down to academic orthodoxy. For some time, radical intellectuals succeeded in producing ideas that were perfectly in tune with the demands of the consumers, mostly the young university audience. Ideas were used as part of radical posture that was set in opposition to the establishment and "those in power". Ideas could not be too empirical or verifiable, and they had to shock. It is not surprising that a slew of new sciences and concepts were invented to indicate this radical posture. The central argument of this study is that ideas become "power-ideas" only if they succeed in uniting individual and collective psychic investment in powerful social networks with significant institutional and political backing. These conditions were met in the French context for a certain specific period of time. From roughly the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, radical intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva developed a host of new ideas, concepts and theories, a number of which have subsequently been labelled as French theory.

In this book Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'. Kauppi conceptualises the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender. The author shows how the dominance of both executive political resources and domestic political cultures has prevented the development of European democracy. Supranational executive networks have become more autonomous, reinforcing the dominance of the resources they control. At the same time, national political cultures condition the political status of elected institutions such as the European parliament. The book is particularly suited for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European Politics, European Union Studies and International Relations.

No detailed description available for "The Making of an Avant-Garde".