Knowledge Leveragers: The Rise of a New Corporate Form

From the late 19th century onwards, corporations have evolved to become one of the most representative social institutions of our time whose assets, wealth, and fortunes are created by and affect millions of people in their capacity as workers, consumers, savers, and citizens. That we rarely think of corporations as a social institution is partly related to the radical transformations that the corporate form has experienced under the pressures of what I call the neoliberalisation-financialisation nexus. Widely used, confused, and abused, these two concepts are nevertheless useful in capturing distinct but co-constitutive processes that have been transforming the fabric of social, political, and economic life during the last three decades or so. Focusing on the proprietary pharmaceutical sector, the presentation aims to shed light on a new kind of corporation that has formed in the cauldron of neoliberalisation-financialisation pressures: the knowledge leveraging corporation preoccupied predominantly with leveraging knowledge of two kinds, knowledge protected by state-backed legal titles, and that specific to orchestrating the various networks where most of research, development, and production now occurs.

This will be a hybrid event.

For more information and the webinar link, please see http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Events.html.