Running to stay still in the knowledge economy

To maintain their global positioning, some of the world's most prominent institutions are pursuing strategic transnational alliances. In this paper I examine one such transnational alliance – that between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore. Using governmentality as a framework of analysis, the paper locates the Singapore‐MIT Alliance within the broader policy architecture that underpins Singapore's knowledge economy aspirations. The Alliance demonstrates some of the practical complexities involved in ‘leap‐frogging’ into the ‘value‐added’ realms of knowledge and service‐related production. It highlights the resistances, tensions and contradictions arising from leveraging off foreign expertise to build an education hub. The paper concludes with a discussion of the changing regimes of value arising from aspiring knowledge economies.