Toward a global sociology
of knowledge: Post-colonial
realities and intellectual
practices
Raewyn Connell
University of Sydney, Australia
Fran Collyer
University of Sydney, Australia
João Maia
Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil
Robert Morrell
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Abstract
This article discusses changing social perspectives on knowledge, from the old sociology of
knowledge to current post-colonial debates. The authors propose an approach that sees
knowledge not as an abstract social construction but as the product of specific forms of social
labour, showing the ontoformativity of social practice that creates reality through historical
time. Research in three southern-tier countries examines knowledge workers and their labour
process, knowledge institutions including workplaces and communication systems, economic
strategies and the resourcing of knowledge work and workforces. This research shows in detail
the contested hegemony of the global metropole in domains of knowledge. It reveals forms
of negotiation that reshape knowledge production, and shows the importance for knowledge
workers of the dynamics of global change.
Keywords
global South, intellectuals, labour process, postcolonial, sociology of knowledge
Corresponding author:
Raewyn Connell, Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
Email: raewyn.connell@sydney.edu.au
676913 ISS0010.1177/0268580916676913International SociologyConnell et al.
research-article2016
Article
22 International Sociology 32(1)
The changing problem of knowledge and society
Major questions about knowledge are part of the public culture we live in. We are bom-
barded by corporate claims about the knowledge economy and by social commentators’
chat about creative classes. Climate science is challenged by oil and coal interests, evo-
lutionary science by religious fundamentalists. Expensive university systems and
research infrastructure are built by states hoping to exert global power. It is not surprising
that contemporary sociologists have become familiar with issues about knowledge.
Which of us has not tried to decode Foucault’s power/knowledge, unravel Castells’ net-
work society, or grasp the secret of the Internet?
This is not exactly a new set of concerns. A field called Wissenssoziologie, quickly
translated into English as the ‘sociology of knowledge’, crystallized in the revolutionary
1920s amid sharp debate in Germany. Key figures were Lukács (1923), Scheler (1926)
and Mannheim (1929), with background influence from Marx and Weber. Their project
was carried into the Cold War era by Merton (1973) and others more influenced by phe-
nomenology. ‘The social construction of reality’, in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966)
famous phrase, became a familiar idea in sociology after the mid-century.
Berger and Luckmann’s bland constructionism was soon challenged by critical pro-
jects such as Smith’s (1990) feminist sociology of knowledge. But it was sociological
research on the labour process in natural science that provided a new empirical base,
starting with Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1979), maturing into the currently
very active field of science and technology studies. At the same time sociological
research on education (Apple, 1979) and medicine (Wright and Treacher, 1982) showed
how specific forms of knowledge were institutionalized and transmitted on a mass scale.
The idea that ‘truth’ was the main cause for the evolution of science was contested by
Bloor (1976), who analysed how social interests shaped knowledge paradigms. The
‘strong programme’ in the sociology of knowledge offered a broader understanding of
the social dimensions of both failed and successful scientific theories.
All the texts just mentioned come from Europe and North America. The sociology of
knowledge was constructed, not just as Eurocentric, but as part of an internal debate in
the global metropole. The social actors theorized in Lukács’s brilliant History and Class
Consciousness, or in Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, were exclusively collectives
formed within European society, specifically social classes and the ‘relatively classless
stratum’ of the intelligentsia. An unquestioning focus on European and North American
material persisted through the second generation of theorists mentioned above, and is
still often found in the literature (e.g. Camic and Gross, 2001; Stehr and Meja, 2005).
Yet at the same time vigorous debates about knowledge have been happening around
the colonized and post-colonial world (where, of course, the majority of the world’s
people live) which have had different concerns. This work too has a long history, with
very famous participants who should be hard to miss. For instance al-Afghani’s Refutation
of the Materialists (1880–1) and Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (1927)
both have sophisticated discussions of the relations between European knowledge, tech-
nology and culture, and those of colonized peoples.
The current generation has seen a great elaboration of the post-colonial critique of
European thought; the familiar marker is Said’s Orientalism (1978). Developments
Connell et al. 23
include the attempt to ‘provincialize Europe’ in thinking about history (Chakrabarty,
2000), or to find alternative frameworks such as Islamic science (Ghamari-Tabrizi,
1996). Indigenous knowledge projects have produced an important critique of social-
science methodologies (Smith, 2012). Epistemological projects with Latin American
connections have combined philosophical critique of European modernity with valida-
tion of alternative knowledges (Mignolo, 2007; Santos, 2014).
Latin American historians and sociologists have long been researching the develop-
ment of science within an unequal international division of labour (Beigel, 2013; Medina
et al., 2014; Vessuri, 2003). Similar developments occurred in Africa, particularly in
South Africa where the struggle against apartheid produced critiques some of which
emphasized racial oppression (Magubane, 1979), others cultural practices and in-
digenous knowledge (Vilakazi, 1962), and yet others reflected global debates about neo-
colonialism and dependence (Palmer and Parsons, 1977). Now more globally inclusive
paths are proposed for the social sciences (Alatas, 2006; Bhambra, 2014; Rosa, 2014).
Post-colonial and Southern perspectives have been presented in social-science fields as
diverse as education (Epstein and Morrell, 2012), disability studies (Meekosha, 2011),
criminology (Aas, 2012), management studies (Murphy and Zhu, 2012), urban studies
(Watson, 2009) and industrial sociology (Keim, 2011).
These discussions are not just academic exercises: the issues can have powerful im-
plications for practice. Smith’s work on methodologies, for instance, is closely connected
with the Kaupapa Māori project in Aotearoa New Zealand, which involves Māori-
controlled education, instruction in the indigenous language, and broader decision-
making by Māori communities. Davy (2009) shows the importance of Southern
perspectives in the intensely political arena of poverty and land rights. In South Africa in
the early 2000s, the then president and the minister of health asserted an opposition
between the biomedical account of AIDS and indigenous knowledge in health, result-
ing in a bitter conflict over antiretroviral drugs that cost an estimated 330,000 lives
(Chigwedere et al., 2008; Green, 2012).
Post-colonial thought has begun to impact on the sociology of knowledge and related
fields in the metropole. Harding’s (2008) Sciences from Below, for instance, makes a
serious attempt to link feminist science studies with post-colonial thought. Law (2008)
has recognized that science and technology studies have a historic Northern bias, and
recent research influenced by the STS perspective has tried to combine ethnographic
accounts with a centre/periphery approach (Medina, 2013).
The generalized epistemological critique of Western knowledge systems is a great
deal stronger than empirical investigation of coloniality in knowledge making. But there
is a growing concern to fill in the sociological gap, to develop empirical pictures of the
making of knowledge in global South contexts. Cooper and Morrell (2014), for instance,
have recently published a collection of African studies that document emerging knowl-
edges. They argue for the importance of a third space between Afrocentrism and
Eurocentrism that acknowledges the importance of colonial histories, as well as the
existence of perspectives that are not easily accommodated by current Northern
orthodoxies.
In this article we propose, in the same spirit, a sociological approach to knowledge
that is informed both by post-colonial thought and by Northern sociologies of
24 International Sociology 32(1)
knowledge. Our argument draws on current empirical research in three post-colonial
countries of the southern hemisphere: Australia, South Africa and Brazil.
The research examines knowledge-making processes in three domains of knowledge:
climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies. These domains were chosen as being:
interdisciplinary, involving knowledge of both society and nature; historically recent,
either newly created or expanded; significant for public policy or social debate; and hav-
ing a history in which knowledge from the global South has played a significant role. Our
empirical research is multi-method, including life-history interviews, citation-context
analysis, organizational ethnography and documentary studies.
Knowledge practices and knowledge formations
In his brilliant case study of a colonial community in eastern Congo, Mudimbe observed
that ‘To establish itself, the new power was obliged to construct a new society’ (1994:
140). He shows here, and in his broader analysis of colonialism in Africa, how the colo-
nizing structure undertook the domination of space, the re-shaping of economies, and the
re-forming of the natives’ minds.
The second and third of these tasks are not sharply separate. Colonization was under-
taken by a workforce that from the start included knowledge workers: priests, clerks,
engineers, map-makers, and soon enough lawyers, accountants, architects, teachers and
researchers. Indigenous knowledge holders were sometimes killed, sometimes co-
opted. Increasing numbers of the colonized were drawn into knowledge work on new
terms in the new colonial society, such as the évolués of Francophone Africa and the
babus of British India. The terms on which this happened were contested, often bitterly,
with the colonizers debating whether natives could become Christian priests, teachers
and lawyers.
These issues reflect a crucial fact about knowledge, which became stark in the condi-
tions of colonization. In the older sociology of knowledge, frameworks of knowledge
were figured as emanating from a social class or a community in a generalized way: as a
mental deposit from the interactions of everyday life, in Berger and Luckmann’s model;
as a consequence of underlying interests, in Lukács’s and Mannheim’s. But knowledge
is not just an abstract social ‘construct’. It is specifically a social product, generated by
and embodied in particular forms of work.
Such labour can become specialized, and allocated to particular groups of workers.
This process has a very long history, as the great prehistorian Childe (1956) showed for
the Bronze Age. In recent history this labour is institutionalized in school and university
systems. But it also has potential for broad social involvement. The Brazilian educator
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), to take a famous example, makes careful
provision for cooperation between illiterate students and professional specialists in the
work of creating curricula.
Such work has, always, a local reality in the lives of people who are perfectly able to
describe what they do. This is the basis of the interviewing that underpins a whole
research literature about intellectuals and professionals (Connell, 2007a). Crucially, this
labour is also part of a collective process in which knowledge formations come into
existence, are sustained, applied and transformed. This is illustrated by the remarks of
Connell et al. 25
Felipe, an ocean scientist from a Brazilian university who was interviewed in our
research.1 He described the complex web of activities that structure labour in science, the
relevance of climate science to other people, and the way the situation affects him
personally:
The more complex the structure, the more difficult it is to maintain it. Nowadays I even try to
go back a little, to simplify things, but it is very difficult, right? Because there are many people
involved, depending on you. I find this … Many of my colleagues do not worry very much
about this, you know? ‘Ah, no, your role is to educate …’ This worries me, whether people are
OK, whether they are not … I got involved in this among other things because of you, right? In
other words, I have this concern with these people who are around [me]. I know this is
exaggerated. At times I have to be more ‘No, this does not interest me …’ and all that. But it is
part of the game. It is my personality, right?
The collective character of major knowledge formations is strongly emphasized
in indigenous-knowledge discussions and in the decolonial literature, both of which
make a sharp distinction between the knowledge held by colonized societies and the
knowledge brought by the colonizers. This is often formulated as a contrast between
Western and non-Western ‘knowledge systems’, and discussions have arisen, notably in
Africa, about the articulation between them (Odora Hoppers, 2002).
The difficulty with the idea of knowledge systems is not in the recognition of cultural
difference but in the ‘system’ metaphor. This metaphor has two related effects. The first
is to emphasize boundaries and closure, implicit in the definition of a system. The second
is to emphasize a static, consensual picture of knowledge formations, rather than a
dynamic and internally conflictual picture. This can be seen in the ethnographic present
that predominates in ethnophilosophy and ethnoscience studies. An emphasis on alterity,
closure and fixity, especially in the politically charged context of decolonization, has
troubling practical consequences – which became a theme of the debate over African
philosophy (Hountondji, 1983; Serequeberhan, 1991).
A way past this problem can be found; it requires re-examining the nature of intel-
lectual labour. Such labour produces knowledge, which may become part of a collective
knowledge formation. If it does, it is because this knowledge is taken up – used, devel-
oped or contested – in further social practice. This occurs not abstractly but in a specific
social milieu located in time and space. The dimension of historicity is integral to social
practice, in the arena of knowledge as elsewhere.
The historicity of practice was emphasized by the Czech philosopher Kosík (1976),
who spoke of the ‘ontoformativity’ of social practice, the way practice creates reality in
historical time. Kosík, an existentialist Marxist working under the strange Soviet empire
in Eastern Europe, wrote in coded abstractions – for obvious political reasons. But his
work addressed a real historical situation, and is helpful in thinking concretely about
intellectual labour in other situations. The knowledge such labour generates is objecti-
fied in the world – whether in written records, in speech, in the design of technology, or
in other forms – and this objectification becomes the basis for subsequent practice.
A telling example is provided by the citation practices of contemporary academics. It
is required, in writing a journal article, to refer to ‘the literature’ – essentially, to treat
26 International Sociology 32(1)
one’s new contribution as a modification of the knowledge obtained from the work of a
designated selection of previous researchers. In principle, this allows a cumulation and
expansion of knowledge, which we see in all three domains in our study. With cultural
and organizational pressures, well known to university workers, it may also result in a
conservative repetition of disciplinary norms.
In the course of their labour, knowledge workers locate their arguments in texts that
arise within a specific and objectively definable historical and geo-socio-political space.
This has strategic consequences at the aggregate, if not individual, level. Thus we find,
empirically, workers in peripheral countries primarily citing the texts of authors from
the global North, while workers in the North mostly cite each other, and mostly ignore
the ideas and studies produced by workers in the global South (Collyer, 2014a). The
overall effect has been a structuring of knowledge production where Northern-produced
knowledge is treated as the ‘gold standard’, while the possibilities for disciplinary
diversity and innovation are constrained.
An approach to knowledge through the study of intellectual workers, their workplaces
and their knowledge practices, may seem remote from the abstract epistemological
debate about the coloniality of knowledge. We think, however, that the two levels are
related and that the study of knowledge work is essential for the development of the
epistemological discussion.
A powerful example is provided by Hountondji’s (1997) analysis of the history and
current functioning of mainstream university-based natural science, the dominant epis-
teme in the contemporary world. Hountondji argues that the development of European
sciences crucially depended on a flow of knowledge from the colonized world. A global
division of labour was created in which the periphery served as a source of raw material,
while the metropole was the site of data accumulation, methodology and theoretical
processing.
This structure is sustained in the post-colonial world by differences of wealth and
institutional support, but also by the practices of knowledge workers in the periphery. In
the stance that Hountondji calls ‘extraversion’, they learn the concepts and methods of
metropolitan science, travel to the metropole for advanced training, seek to publish in
metropolitan journals, and so on. The more they become embedded as subordinate play-
ers in a Northern-centred knowledge formation, the less they can negotiate relations with
what Hountondji calls ‘endogenous knowledge’.
This pattern of orientation to the metropole is seen in almost all areas of research
including recently created ones. Here is a vignette from the interview with Alison, a
high-tech climate researcher in Australia. Asked where the key centres for her work are
found, she answers:
So the real big players in global climate modelling are the Hadley Centre which is in the UK,
and that is part of the Met Office, that is the weather bureau. The NCAR, which is the National
Center for Atmospheric Research, that is Boulder, USA. The other one is GFDL, which is the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and where is that? somewhere on the East coast of the
USA, not New York but one of those places.
This detail about centres 15,000 kilometres away is part of Alison’s everyday working
knowledge, and it can be matched in interview after interview. Such knowledge is
Connell et al. 27
essential. In Alison’s own research practice she uses the models that come from these
centres, and from some others:
Actually I have got a handy piece of paper here, this is all the models I am using at the moment.
So let me check: Norway, Japan, Germany, Japan, Japan, France, Russia, UK, UK, USA, no
idea, Australia, France, Canada, USA, USA, Canada, China, Australia, yeah … So China
currently is really the only sort of developing country that has got one.
We cannot take the idea of an episteme or a knowledge system for granted. We must ask
how formations of knowledge emerge historically, as configurations of practice, work-
forces, symbolisms and institutions. The ‘social construction’ of knowledge is a collec-
tive work through time. How different knowledge formations are related to each other in
the world created by empire – in opposition, in hybridity, in symbiosis, in subordination
– can only be established empirically.
Studying knowledge practices in practice
Let us turn, therefore, to how this empirical work can be done. As the interviews with
Felipe and Alison illustrate, it can be done directly with knowledge workers themselves.
There is now a body of research, most though not all from the global North, that
examines groups of knowledge workers and describes their work, their daily life, their
training and careers. Studies range from autonomous high-tech workers in the computer
industry (Barley and Kunda, 2004), and the structure of scientific institutions and careers
in science (Balbachevsky and Schwartzman, 2010), to university academics (Collyer,
2014b) and school teachers (Reid, 2003). Using methods that range from quantitative
surveys to life-history interviews to ethnography, it is possible to explore gender, race or
generational patterns within knowledge workforces; or, with multi-country studies, dif-
ferences between regions and levels of economic affluence (Lewis and Altbach, 1996).
Recently, more research has been done on the patterns of publishing in peripheral coun-
tries (Beigel, 2014) and on the geography of university ranking systems (Jons and Hoyler,
2013).
An important focus of this work, relevant to understanding formations of knowledge,
is the labour process in the relevant occupations, including the way intellectual work
is managed and controlled (Tancred-Sheriff, 1985). Particularly relevant is the way
knowledge workers’ labour processes have changed under neoliberal globalization,
with the growing commodification of knowledge and the re-structuring of education
along market lines (Collyer, 2014b; Robertson, 2000).
How these processes relate to extraversion in the global South, or the relation between
formations of knowledge, remains to be explored. A way into these problems is to con-
sider methodology as an aspect of labour process. In knowledge-production work, meth-
odology – though usually discussed in abstract terms – is materially part of the steering
of labour. Methodology prescribes rules for the gathering of data, or rules for legitimate
interpretation and communication.
At this level, extraversion is a remote, impersonal steering of knowledge-producing
labour. Through its very impersonality, it may be effective in subordinating knowledge
work in the South to models and norms developed in the North, which appear simply as
28 International Sociology 32(1)
definitions of best practice, scientificity, or modernity. The conditions that might disrupt
this steering, or introduce rival principles – for instance, responsibility to local com-
munities (Smith, 2012) – are important in understanding relations between knowledge
formations.
Research with knowledge workers, however, has limited use unless we also try to
understand the institutions in which their labour occurs. Research on control of the labour
process already concerns organizational power structures and professional normativity,
for instance the historically shifting balance of direct and indirect control over the work
of teachers (Lawn, 1987). The organization as a whole can be examined, as in research
on ‘knowledge-intensive firms’ (Alvesson, 2004) – which has raised serious doubts
about how rational or knowledge-intensive the management of this sector really is! A
growing body of research on universities is documenting the deepening consequences of
neoliberal policy and managerial takeovers, both in local cases and internationally
(Loomis et al., 2008). The shift to neoliberalism in South Africa, for instance, impacts
the capacity for a critical public sociology, as the neoliberal state presses not just for
applied research, but for intellectual work that supports state strategies (Webster, 2004).
Here the genre of ‘laboratory ethnography’ in science and technology studies fits in
the wider investigation of knowledge. In these studies, the production of knowledge is
examined through the daily routine of a research unit, and the negotiations among the
groups of workers within it (Charlesworth et al., 1989; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Stark,
2011). There is, now, a broad literature of workplace ethnography (Burawoy et al., 2000)
with a global dimension that is mostly lacking in the laboratory tradition, but is compat-
ible with it.
The institutional dimension of knowledge work is not confined to the organizations
that employ knowledge workers. It involves also professional and scientific societies, the
journals and conferences through which knowledge workers meet and circulate knowl-
edge, the publishing corporations that have now moved in on this circulation process,
and a host of other means of connection ranging from the Internet to indigenous practices
of access and transmission.
Some aspects of the circulation process lend themselves to quantitative as well as
ethnographic study. The growing scale of publication, the movement of information
online, and the impact of neoliberalism with its concern for ranking and competition,
have resulted in large databases that can give illuminating information for scholars work-
ing in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge. Data from the Thomson-Reuter ‘Web
of Science’, for instance, enables researchers to examine the characteristics, boundaries,
or impact of a discipline and its changes over time (Collyer, 2012; Hammarfelt, 2012),
the structure of scholarly activities in a given field (Lin and Cheng, 2010), or interactions
between disciplines or fields (Goldman, 1979).
Universities and publishing firms require large budgets, and this brings us to an issue
profoundly important for post-colonial debates about knowledge: the economics of
knowledge production and circulation, and the structure of post-colonial economies.
The global North discourse about the ‘knowledge economy’, as Alvesson (2004)
points out, features many self-promoting and exaggerated claims about the importance
of high technology and knowledge-intensive firms to overall production. The World
Bank, no less, now promotes itself as a knowledge institution. Nevertheless, it is clear
Connell et al. 29
that governments and ruling classes in the global metropole have made a sustained
investment in expensive higher education and research institutions.
Mkandawire (2005) portrays the situation of post-colonial intelligentsias in Africa in
strong contrast to this: marginalized by repressive governments and disrespected by
NGOs. Unstable funding and demand for short-term relevance by funders tends to
squeeze out basic research and theoretical work – reinforcing, we may infer, the pattern
of extraversion.
Some governments of developing countries, notably China, have invested heavily in
higher education, especially on its technological side. The traffic in international stu-
dents shows expanded private investment in education especially by ruling classes in
South, South-East and East Asia (for the scale and direction of international student
movements see OECD, 2014: Tables 4.3 and 4.6). The shift to neoliberal development
strategies weakened the consensus for large-scale state investment in education, without
reducing the role of education as a selection mechanism. There is currently a massive
growth in private higher education enrolments, in Latin America and South Asia.
Education is still widely seen as a way out of poverty, and qualifications are correlated
with being in employment, and with better pay; yet there is a limit to the return to educa-
tion in national economies (for the Indian case, see Jeffrey et al., 2008).
It does not seem likely that these trends will produce an autonomous intelligentsia on
a world scale. Very large numbers of the students in these new flows are heading for
technical or business management courses; many, perhaps most, are expecting integra-
tion into the elite workforce of the global corporate economy.
Southern situations and global arenas
No society, whether formally colonized or not, is now outside the economic, political and
cultural world created by European empire and the global neoliberal economy.
Epistemologies of the South exist in complex but strong relations with the North, not in
isolation nor in rupture. These relations are practical, significantly institutionalized, and
massive. They are also ridden by tensions, and constantly in change.
The long shadow of colonial history falls across whole domains of knowledge. The
struggle with HIV, for instance, was compromised in its early stages by official denial. In
the United States, the virus was often figured as an alien import originating in Africa,
spreading as a result of deviant lifestyles, and many lives were lost because prevention
strategies were hampered by racism and homophobia. In a number of developing coun-
tries, AIDS was figured as a product of Western decadence, and international criticism of
government inaction was rejected as Western racism. With the mass roll-out of antiretro-
viral therapy that moment has passed. But tensions around race and stigma, and the influ-
ence of missionary Christianity, still hamper social action to stop the epidemic.
The shadow of colonial history also falls inside knowledge institutions. Since the end-
ing of apartheid in 1994 the role of South African universities has been in the spotlight.
In some instances the state has pursued change using the authoritarian tools of new man-
agerialism and the language of a racial imperative (Chetty and Merrett, 2014). In others,
student activism has fuelled a national debate about knowledge construction and colonial
legacies. In a recent, dramatic case the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement at the University
30 International Sociology 32(1)
of Cape Town demanded the removal of a campus statue of the 19th-century imperialist
leader Cecil Rhodes. It contributed to a wider national conflict around the racial profile
of universities’ staff, language of instruction and curriculum content. That in turn sparked
a debate about decolonizing knowledge (Mbembe, 2015; Ramoupi, 2014; Worger, 2014),
which continues at the time of writing.
As Mbembe argues in some detail – following Fanon – disengaging from a Eurocentric
knowledge regime does not require substituting an Afrocentric one. It means developing
new practices, especially new pedagogies and arrangements about popular access that
democratize the knowledge institutions.
There is a spectrum of strategies and practices by which knowledge workers across
the global South negotiate their positions in the Northern-centred global economy of
knowledge. At one end is the conscious search for frameworks and guidance from the
metropole. This is illustrated by Rowena, a gender researcher in the humanities, inter-
viewed in Australia:
I attended very few international conferences in my time … But I was very keen to get my
colleagues out there. I saw myself as staying home, my research was Australian based, but I
was reading a lot of international literature. For example in both the X Project and the Y Project
we were using work that had been done internationally, to establish a framework for our own
research, because there was nothing in Australia. So we were constantly looking overseas
trying to find international frameworks.
Other interviewees emphasize practice-based forms of knowledge that have strong local
roots and exist alongside the Northern-centred academic knowledge institutions. Paul,
for instance, an Australian AIDS activist with long experience both domestically and
internationally, does this:
The argument that I had for a very long time around academic articles was that … there should
be findings from practice … I don’t have an academic background, and I don’t want an
academic background … Theory doesn’t matter as much to practitioners as practice does. And
if you can prove that something works through practice, then that is going to be very useful for
other practitioners.
An AIDS researcher in South Africa, Cindy, shows how South African scientists within
the mainstream institutions have established themselves globally by engaging with the
specific health challenges in South Africa. The country had one of the largest HIV-
positive populations in the world and now has the largest number of people on antiretro-
viral treatment:
[W]e’d been working as an HIV research organization since [date], initially doing pure clinical
pharmaceutical type research, to try and get people who were dying of AIDS onto antiretrovirals.
So it was a great way to get people onto antiretrovirals. It was an agenda set by the Pharma [i.e.
pharmaceutical companies] and coming from the First World. So that we could use it to our best
interest, we could actually get people onto antivirals and then begin to call the shots. So that we
could actually say that ‘you can’t do this for a child without providing treatment until the end
of these people’s lives’, or at least for a minimum reasonable time period. So by doing the
Connell et al. 31
research, and doing it well, we started to develop international renown and became indispensible
really to drug Pharmas’ quest for [a commercial market].
The negotiation, then, does not go always in the same direction. It is important that both
new forms of dependency, and new projects of autonomy, emerge. The consequence may
be carefully strategized practices of collaboration, as in Cindy’s case; or a division of
labour where the resources of the metropole are acknowledged but do not totally deter-
mine the development of the domain of knowledge.
Global climate science, for instance, now centres on mathematical models of the
atmosphere. These models, originally modest, are now huge affairs, around a million
lines of computer code. As Alison noted, almost all are developed and maintained in rich
countries. Other interviewees have told us that few researchers or activists in the climate
domain actually understand what is inside these models, though they use the models’
outputs for their own work on ecosystems, economic and demographic effects for
humans, and mitigation policy. Nevertheless, some scientists in the South develop for-
mal models working from their own local realities. We have interviewed more than one
natural scientist involved in modelling the effects of sea-level or atmospheric changes on
local species, for instance trees in Brazil or animals in the Australian bush.
Negotiation also occurs in relation to the circulation of knowledge, which has become
an acute issue for researchers. The institutional pressure to publish in elite Northern
journals is huge. But a number of our respondents’ publication strategies try to combine
publication in such journals with publication in local journals that have no prestige but
do have an informed local readership. So it is not an either/or dilemma. A similar prob-
lem, sharpened by language, has been described in the Arab east by Hanafi (2011).
All these negotiations are influenced by the economic and institutional situations of
knowledge workforces. These situations are far from uniform across the post-colonial
world. We can illustrate this diversity from the three southern-tier countries in which our
research has been conducted.
Brazil, South Africa and Australia are all post-colonial countries though not part of a
‘third world’; indeed each is a regional hegemon in economic terms. They have very dif-
ferent demographies and class structures, and though in all three class is interwoven with
racial hierarchy, the different dynamics of race and class reflect three different histories
of colonization and post-colonial development. Crucially for our research, each has a
state-funded research apparatus interwoven with a university system, though noticeably
smaller than the systems in Europe or North America.
In all three, higher education curricula are mainly based on the Northern-centred
economy of knowledge; though in South Africa there is stronger pressure to incorporate
indigenous knowledge and perspectives. Universities are entirely Anglophone in
Australia, mainly Anglophone in South Africa, and Lusophone in Brazil. The language
difference creates very different possibilities for the circulation of knowledge, and the
recruitment of knowledge workers, in an increasingly Anglophone global knowledge
economy. The fact that most researchers in Brazil are civil servants working in state-
funded universities must also be considered. This situation provides job security for cer-
tain knowledge workers but makes it difficult to attract scientists from other parts of the
world.
32 International Sociology 32(1)
Given these differences, multiplied across the continents (and the oceans: Hau’ofa,
2008), can we make any general claims about knowledge relations between global North
and South? Not if these claims assume a fixed global relation of dominance and subordi-
nation. Nor if they assume homogeneity within such a category as North or South.
But there is no contradiction between recognizing deep diversity, and recognizing
structures of centrality and inequality in a world economy of knowledge. The crucial
requirement is to see the issue historically. The knowledge economy we now inhabit has
been produced by the colonization of the world, and the tension-ridden working of impe-
rialism and global neoliberalism. Struggle and transformation are endemic to that history
and are still going on. The central analytic problem about ‘society and knowledge’, we
argue, is to identify the world-scale dynamics of change in the economy of knowledge.
The central political problem is to move those dynamics in a democratic direction.
These world-level problems are addressed, in different ways, in decolonial projects
for knowledge (Santos, 2014); in attempts to build on past or emerging Southern theory
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011; Connell, 2007b); and in social movement debates on
multiple perspectives, notably in feminism and indigenous politics (Bulbeck, 1998). This
is not an easy terrain. For instance, it is important to recognize, even celebrate, epistemo-
logical plurality (Olivé et al., 2009). Yet in doing so we risk falling into a mosaic episte-
mology that fragments rather than connects knowledge and political practice.
The practice-based approach to knowledge described in this article will not solve all
these difficulties. But we think it has a useful capacity to map and understand the interplay
between different knowledge projects and the workforces that undertake them. For instance,
it is clear that one important dynamic of change is the creation of new arenas of knowledge
that, under the pressure of events, break down existing discipline boundaries within organ-
ized knowledge and also the institutional boundaries of knowledge institutions.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic is an important example of this, with the main biomedical
research effort in the global North, the main burden of infection in the global South. The
practical knowledge about effects, prevention and care therefore accumulates far from
the virology research centres. The domain has been full of conflict, the South African
dispute over antiretroviral therapy and indigenous knowledge being only one among
many. In the last 15 years the AIDS domain has seen a gradual reassertion of dominance
for a biomedical perspective, centred in North America and supported by transnational
drug companies, which tends to replace community action with pharmaceuticals.
Movement in a democratic direction, then, is not ordained by history. If it occurs it
will be through social and intellectual struggle, as well as political and economic shifts.
The approach we have suggested helps identify necessary sites of struggle. One is the
situation of the knowledge workforce, always partly casualized, currently subject to
increasing pressure from neoliberal governments and managements. Another is the sci-
entific communication system, currently being commodified and concentrated in the
hands of a small group of corporations, but challenged by a popular open-access move-
ment. A third is the formation of intellectual workers, in education systems increasingly
privatized and homogenized on a world scale but also active sites of cultural contesta-
tion. A fourth is the production of knowledge in social movements such as environmen-
talism, challenging both the disinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry and the
hierarchies of knowledge in mainstream science.
Connell et al. 33
Social-science research on problems of knowledge can seem remote from the real
world, at a long remove from the main battlefields of 21st- century life. We are con-
vinced that the terrain of knowledge, seen in a long perspective, is itself one of the crucial
sites of social contestation and democratic action.
Funding
This research was funded by the Australian Research Council, grant DP 130103487.
Note
1. Quotations in this article are anonymized.
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Author biographies
Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and Life Member of the National
Tertiary Education Union. Her books include Southern Theory (2007) and Gender: In World
Perspective (3rd edn, with Rebecca Pearse, 2015).
Fran Collyer is senior editorial adviser to Health Sociology Review, and associate editor of
Sociology. Her interests include healthcare, the history of sociology and the sociology of knowl-
edge. Recent books include Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine (2012) and the
Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine (2015).
Robert Morrell is author of From Boys to Gentlemen (2001) and (with Debbie Epstein, Elaine
Unterhalter, Deevia Bhana and Relebohile Moletsane) Towards Gender Equality: South African
Schools during the HIV and AIDS Pandemic (2009). Among his edited works are Changing Men
in Southern Africa (2001) and (with Brenda Cooper) Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields
and Worlds (2014).
João ME Maia is Associate Professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He
holds a PhD in Sociology. Major areas of interest are history of sociology, Brazilian social thought
and knowledge production in the South. Publications include ‘History of sociology and the quest
for intellectual autonomy in the Global South’, Current Sociology (2014), and ‘Space, social the-
ory and peripheral imagination’, International Sociology (2011).
Connell et al.
