Digital Age: Knowledge Work

Knowledge Work

• Overview:  In the first decades of this century up to the first world war society in all developed countries, even in the most highly industrialized ones such as the U.K. or Belgium, was in its structure still pretty much what it had been since the first humans became farmers and settlers on the land some five thousand years earlier. Blue-collar workers in industry, in mining, in transportation largely the creation of the nineteenth century were growing very fast between 1870 and 1914.
  
  What is even more astonishing and even less precedented is the rise of the group which is fast replacing both history's traditional groups and the groups of industrial society; the group which is fast becoming the center of gravity of the working population; the group, incidentally, which is fast becoming the largest single group (though by no means a majority) in the work force and population of post-industrial society and in every developed country: knowledge workers.
  
  What we mean by the term "knowledge worker", increasingly, will be people who have learned how to acquire additional specialties, and especially to acquire rapidly the specialized knowledge needed for them to move from one kind of work and job to another, e.g., from being a market researcher into general management, or from being a nurse in a hospital into hospital administration. The knowledge worker gains access to work, job and social position through formal education. The first implication of this is that education will become the center of the knowledge society and schooling its key institution.
  
  In the knowledge society, it is not the individual who performs but the team and the organization. The ability to diagnose what kind of team a certain kind of knowledge work requires for full effectiveness, and the ability, then, to organize such a team and integrate oneself into it, will increasingly become a requirement for effectiveness as a knowledge worker. We are now in the very early stages of work on teams, their characteristics, their specifications, their performance characteristics and their appraisal. Equally important is the second implication of the fact that knowledge workers are, of necessity, specialists: the need for them to work as members of an organization.

Equally important, perhaps more important, in the knowledge society the employees, that is knowledge workers, again own the tools of production. Marx's great insight was the realization that the factory worker does not and cannot own the tools of production and therefore has to be alienated. There was no way, Marx pointed out, for the worker to own the steam engine and to be able to take the steam engine with himself when moving from one job to another. The capitalist had to own the steam engine and had to control it. Increasingly, the true investment in the knowledge society is not in machines and tools. It is in the knowledge of the knowledge worker. Without it, the machines, no matter how advanced and sophisticated, are unproductive

Because the knowledge society perforce has to be a society of organizations, its central and distinctive organ is management. When we first began to talk of management, the term meant business management for large-scale business was the first of the new organizations to become visible. To be sure, management, like any other work, has its own tools, and its own techniques. But just as the essence of medicine is not the urine analysis, the essence of management is not technique or procedure. The essence of management is to make organizational knowledge productive.

More...............................  Knowledge Work and Knowledge Society: The Social Transformations of this Century