In the past 10 years the Scottish higher education sector has experienced the emergence and continual development of policies for knowledge transfer. This policy partly parallels the wider UK higher education policy agenda and its focus on the "third mission" (i.e. the rate and extent to which universities disseminate knowledge and how commercial organizations can capitalize on it). However, the policy texts on knowledge transfer are, to varying degrees, inflected with content reflecting the specificities of the Scottish context. This paper emerges from research focused on this context and explores critically the ways in which the discourse of knowledge transfer has emerged and how knowledge, knowledge production, and the dissemination of knowledge have been constructed here. (Contains 4 notes.)