In the 1980s, as the escalating economic crisis in socialist Yugoslavia was turning into a political crisis, creating conditions ripe for the eventual dissolution of the country, science and technology came to play an unprecedented role in the public discourse: they were seen both as culprits (partly) responsible for the crisis and a force uniquely suited to help overcome it. Whereas most contemporary commentators agreed that the political crisis was a consequence of an economic crisis, which itself was a product a crisis of industrial productivity, which was a manifestation of a technological lack and lag, a network comprising practicing scientists, members of technical intelligentsia, and aligned sociologists, went further and argued that the underlying problem was the crisis of knowledge. Though critical of the ruling League of Communists, their critique was not necessarily aiming against Yugoslavia’s pronouncedly market-oriented socialism, nor were they calling for the introduction of capitalism. Whatever the path out of the crisis was, they believed it had to start with the knowledge regime. The technocrat network(s) at the center of the talk were equally obsessed with the notion of the Third Industrial Revolution as they were with the idea of Knowledge Society à la Daniel Bell, but whereas the former was relatively easy to integrate into their techno-scientific visions of socialist Yugoslavia, translating the latter into the self-management discourse and practice proved to be much more challenging since technocracy stood opposed to the principle of self-management, one of the pillars of socialist Yugoslavia. The talk examines the “translation” of the notion across socio-political systems and situates it against the backdrop of contemporary attempts to come up with ways out of the crisis grounded in science and technology.