This final chapter briefly summarizes the book’s central argument and evidence. The chapter then discusses some implications of the book’s two key independent variables: rents and conquest. The former is situated in a broader discussion of economic and political development. This discussion introduces the concept of a political transfer problem. For the latter variable, the chapter discusses the muted possibility of political and economic liberalization in Muslim societies that experienced conquest.

The analytical framework in chapter 2 identified two parameters that affect political violence: variation in rents and the nature of preexisting “sharing” institutions. This chapter aims to explain why so many Muslim countries have institutions that tend to be less sharing compared to non-Muslim societies. The chapter provides a historical narrative for the emergence of an equilibrium of authoritarian power structures in the medieval period associated with the expansion of Islam via military conquest. The chapter describes how Muslim conquest established a set of governing institutions and associated alliances between political actors that set many Muslim societies on a trajectory towards less democratic politics in the contemporary period.

Today, we continue to live in magic. Scientific and technological advancement have indeed lifted our everyday lives to wonderment, but these advances have also introduced magical practices to governance. Our book has been about the magic taking place in knowledge governance, the processes of steering and governing state information, and has been the key to national competitiveness. We referred to this magic as knowledge alchemy, which we defined as a generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of knowledge governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards and universal symbolic formulas. Through this reclassification, an object, be it an individual, higher education institution, city or country, has been integrated into a value production chain, a series of actions (a syntax, script, narrative or storyline) that produced value. In this concluding chapter, we summarize the multiple processes that have ushered in alchemy into knowledge governance, the mechanisms through which these processes have been taking place, and how our book connects with major debates in the social sciences and policy circles about social transformation.

The rise of quantification and governance by indicators found a parallel process in automation through machine-based reasoning. Here, automation refers to a process that involves limited or no human agency in predetermined models and patterns of governance. Societies have been increasingly governed by algorithms, ranging from the digitalization of our daily lives to algorithmic reasoning in market activities and public governance. Quantification and automation depend on and, in effect, feed into one another. Based on logical rules in weighting of different attributes, rankings themselves are algorithms and thus the numerical objectifications of reality embodied in indicators have rendered complex social institutions comparable and suitable for rules-based reasoning. These developments have strong implications in how we design policies and practices to govern our interactions and tackle global challenges.

Our book argued that governance of innovation, higher education and human capital are being transformed by processes of commodification and quantification that now intersect with automation. For us, automation imposed strong future imaginaries and presupposition of policies based on, interestingly, the past.

Introduction

In this chapter, we examine the knowledge alchemy involved in transforming academic mobility as a familiar act of academic travel to a commodified activity in today's global competition for talent. In contemporary policy making, the assumed practices of the medieval scholar often inform the common image of an academic today. This scholar is a man (gender specific) who possesses deep and unique knowledge in his field of learning. He is perennially on the move, trekking from one centre of learning to another, sharing his latest inventions and discoveries with learned colleagues while spreading his doctrines to eager disciples. Patrons – often royal or religious – support his scholarly ventures: financially (by funding travel, subsistence or access to collections) and politically (by granting safe passage). A visual that emerges is one of free flow of knowledge even though the actual practices of scholarly mobility – especially in medieval times – are hardly without incident (Cobban 1971, 1975; de Ridder-Symoens 1991). So why is this image so enduring and how does it affect our contemporary debates concerning the global competition for talent? For policy makers at multiple governance levels – university, national, regional and international – this image is ever present because a mobile scholar generates seemingly untold benefits, not least in scientific terms, and, more recently, economic competitiveness gains and cultural diversity.

We reveal that the two modalities we associate with knowledge alchemy are present in this transmutation process: first, the emergence of presuppositions concerning the connections between scientific mobility and innovation capacity, and, second, the embedding of these presuppositions into policy models (particularly in higher education policies and migration policies), as well as university recruitment practices. The interdependence of these two modalities of knowledge alchemy is so powerful that, we argue, these presuppositions persist in informing university, national, regional and international policy actors about how to be ‘competitive’ in the ‘global war for talent’; indeed, it is now a taken-for-granted approach that has been embedded in regional, transregional and city-level strategies (see Chapter 6). As we shall also show, these presuppositions are removed from the everyday practices of academic mobility from the perspective of scholars and scientists, who are motivated by a combination of professional and very personal factors to become mobile that may have very little to do with enhancing innovation capacity.

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).

Building on our previous collaboration on higher education governance, global knowledge governance, governance indicators, university rankings, talent migration and transnational elites, the idea for this book took shape in the usual way, during a casual conversation over coffee. We were intrigued by what our observations in our individual research tell us about the state of knowledge governance. While working on the book, we have presented our ongoing research at seminars and various academic conferences, including the European Consortium for Political Research (2021), the International Studies Association (2019, 2018, 2015), the Finnish Political Science Association (2018), the European Forum for the Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation (2017), the European Science Foundation (2016, 2014) and the conferences of the European Educational Research Association (2016) and the Association européenne de l’éducation (2014).

The theme of this book is 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. Such value-producing global models now widely inform national and institutional policies and practices on global competitiveness, higher education and innovation. We have been particularly interested in the imaginary of global competition and the global talent competition paradigm and related policy models. This book provides critical accounts of policy actors’ limited agency and of the impact numerical policy scripts carried by ‘global data’ have on decision-making.

The narrative elements of rankings and indicators are crucial to an understanding of the forces that shape the globe today. Numbers tell stories. Revealingly, the French words compter (to count) and conter (to tell a story) have a similar pronunciation, sharing a Latin root (computare, to count). Narratives carried by numbers have strong temporal elements and the numerical global knowledge governance is increasingly becoming future-oriented. Interestingly, instead of seeing the future as an open horizon of alternatives, historical narratives often project past experiences onto an assumed future. Global ranking producers now highlight education and innovation – the ability to grow and attract talent – as remedies for the future challenges of digitization and automation by algorithms.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the development of global rankings in good governance and higher education. This also serves as a background for Chapter 3, where the metrics in city competition, talent and AI-readiness are discussed at the cusp of automation. Indicators and rankings are outputs of algorithmic reasoning; often, the aggregate figures that allow rank orders are based on statistical operations according to a predetermined logical order. These two chapters explore some of the taken-for-granted presuppositions of data-driven knowledge governance. In so doing, we aim to show the convergence and reinforcement of a global imaginary, norms and anticipations produced and sustained by elite networks in public and private institutions.

Initially, the metrics dealt with good governance and competitiveness of countries, but since the 2000s the global rankings on higher education and innovation have emerged. Recently, city rankings have highlighted the importance of assessment of academic research and education. The effects of these rankings have been numerous, and innovation, higher education and academic life more generally have been increasingly governed by high-pace data-driven reforms, as for example our discussion on the case of Paris-Saclay University demonstrates.

The indicators shape perceptions about national and regional ‘models’ and learning from others. Analysing global indicators on education and innovation, we discuss the kinds of political value choices made in the production and use of data, and the ways in which quality is translated into quantity. As will become commonplace in our subsequent chapters, knowledge alchemy translates the formula of ‘quality into quantity’ magically into ‘quantity means quality’ in a variety of policy domains (see Chapter 6). We also explore the field development of global ranking as a set of practices and values that cut across established policy areas, where new actors are entering the field with alternative measurements.

Though rapidly increasing in numbers, global indicators overlap ideationally, methodologically and most of all epistemologically by the sharing of the same data. This high degree of concentration of data means that, through a selection process, certain datasets and the institutions that produce them take a central and outsized role in global governance.