Book Reviewed in this article: Consuming Children: education‐entertainment‐advertising Jane Kenway & Jane Bullen Education, Equality and Human Rights: issues of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, special needs and social class Mike Cole (Ed.) Researching your Professional Practice‐doing interpretive research Hilary Radnor Developing Writing for Different Purposes: teaching about genre in the early years Jeni Riley David Reedy The Miseducation of Women James Tooley Feminism and the Classroom Teacher: research, praxis and pedagogy Amanda Coffey & Sara Delamont Failing Working Class Girls Gill Plummer Learning Democracy and Citizenship: international experiences Michele Schweisfurth, Lynn Davies & Clive Harber (Eds)

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Knowledge economy policies are currently very powerful drivers of change in contemporary university approaches to research. They typically orientate universities to a national innovation system which both positions knowledge as the key factor of economic growth and sees the main purpose of knowledge as contributing to such growth. In this article, the authors explain the economic logic informing such policy interventions in university research and look at the conceptualisation of national innovation systems in various national and international policy sites around the world. Their interest is in what these particular sets of policies have in common, not in how they differ. They introduce three key themes of such systems and the academics they seek to produce. These themes are their techno-scientific orientation, network characteristics and commercial imperatives. The corresponding implied subjects are the techno-scientist, the knowledge networker and the entrepreneur. The authors make the case that evident in such constructions of the future of universities are some unacknowledged and under-acknowledged problems, one of which is a failure to recognise the power of the gift economies of academic culture.

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