Introduction

This book is about knowledge alchemy – a generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of knowledge governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards and universal symbolic formulas. We argue and show that knowledge alchemy is prevalent around the world, informing national and institutional policies and practices on global competitiveness, higher education and innovation. Given how interdependent the world remains, knowledge alchemy is also embedded in transnational administration and steers global policy making. To understand contemporary national and transnational governance, it is thus essential to know how knowledge alchemy unfolds across multiple policy domains and sectors.

Over the past few decades, there has been a surge of global rankings and indicators, resulting in quantification and numerical comparisons of various domains. Global ranking producers now highlight education and innovation as remedies for future challenges of digitization and automation by algorithms. Knowledge governance – the process of steering and governing state information – has been identified as essential in ensuring national economic competitiveness. As we highlight in our analysis, global knowledge governance is strongly future-oriented and anticipatory, but somewhat paradoxically builds on historical analogies where the assumed medieval patterns of academic mobility, professionalization, city-states, cartography and navigation are now projected onto expected futures.

While imagining the future based on past developments may seem commonplace and expected, we argue that contemporary knowledge governance presupposes a transmutation process based on leaps of imagination. We critically analyse these processes through another medieval analogy, the practice of alchemy. According to one dictionary definition, alchemy is ‘the medieval combination of chemistry, philosophy, and secret lore aimed at transmuting base metals into gold (by means of the philosopher's stone), and discovering the universal cure for disease and mortality’ (Blackburn 2016).

As a precursor of modern chemistry (Rey 2018), alchemy aimed at defining universal formulas for transforming somewhat worthless materials into gold. Such transmutation was the ultimate goal of alchemists, the craftsmen of this trade. The work of alchemists involved many elements resembling the craftmanship of chemistry, but without systematic rigour and modern scientific knowledge. Yet, early forms of chemistry, similar to alchemy, had connotations of hurrying or carrying out God's work (Knight 2013).