“Knowledge society” has been a central notion for the last two decades in international debates about the transformation of Higher Education (HE). In part, this centrality is due to the use that some highly influential international organization have been doing of it when discussing the limits, problems and possibilities of higher education systems, in an age marked by accelerated scientific and technological changes. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to analyse the notion of Knowledge Society (KS) as it has been used by three international organizations (IO), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank (WB) and the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) in their recommendations for the transformation of HE, with the purpose of identifying its epistemological, educational and cultural assumptions. This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation developed ate the CINVESTAV, Mexico and University of Wisconsin-Madison, EUA. Leading questions in the research were: How is KS understood by international organizations and what is HE role in this notion? What are the epistemological, educational, political and cultural assumptions supporting this notion? What policy recommendations are drawn from here and what are their consequences for comprehension of HE and knowledge? The research was organized into two axes and two dimensions of analysis. Regarding the axes, in the first one I analysed the conceptualization of KS used by the three organizations with two specific aims, one: to identify the epistemological, educational, political and cultural assumptions sustaining their conceptions; and two: to understand how in their discourses is being constructed the relationship between KS, the knowledge based economies and elements like the so called, knowledge culture, in higher education systems. Through the second axis I studied specific policy recommendations made by these organizations to understand how conceptualizations would be materialized in specific reform policies. Regarding the dimensions of analysis, I studied the international dimension of the policy recommendations and also the local dimension, specifically for Mexico. In this paper I only address the first two questions in the global dimension. The research analytical perspective was constructed by borrowing theoretical elements from the Essex School of political discourse theory and a deconstructivist approach as developed by Jacques Derrida and other post-structuralist thinkers. This perspective served to analyse the construction and dissemination of the notion of KS throughout the corpus, the previous mentioned assumptions and the way in which all these are translated into specific policy recommendations. It is relevant to say that from this theoretical framework, special attention is given to the role of “the political”. Here, the political is neither restricted to a specific realm of reality, nor reduced to a matter of social management or action; instead, it appears at the core of the process of construction of any notion of the social, of HE, knowledge and culture, because the political is precisely a moment of ontological differentiation, of struggles and articulations, construction and dissolution of social spaces and structures.

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