Toward Technological Bload and Academic Technocracy: The Information Age and Higher Education

Abstract

While the strategic goals of Knowledge Management might seem new to the academy, higher education has been central to the growing Knowledge Economy and the Information Age for some time. As electronic communications and information systems have been widely adopted in colleges and universities, little scholarship has reflected upon the organizational and social changes that these technologies bring to the academic workplace. This chapter provides the theoretical groundworkfor understanding three key transformations in higher education: the digital restructuring of academic labor; the use of technology as basis for efficiency arguments; and the unintended consequences of IT accretion, which we call “technological bloat.” As a consequence of these transformations, a new organizational structure may be emerging in higher education.