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.