On the Increasing Complexity of Information in the Late 20th Century: Knowledge Workers - a Short History, Part 2

[We] are living through a period of profound change and transformation of the shape of society and its underlying economic base ... The nature of production, trade, employment and work in the coming decades will be very different from what it is today. The determinants of economic success will be different to those that were relevant in the past or those required at the present time.

Shaping our Future (p. 3)

In yesterday's post I asserted that the knowledge worker emerged from two defining forces: the rise in complexity of economic activities, and the increasing globalization of economic affairs. At the conclusion of the piece, I suggested that the the knowledge economy has it's roots in the Cold War: to extend the agricultural analogy, a case could be made for saying that this economy was 'seeded' by the growth of the United States' sphere of influence in the period 1947-1964 (the first-generation "hi-tech" economies including Japan and Taiwan, as well as in Federal Republic of Germany following the "Miracle on the Rhine" were all central to the US Government's policy of Containment). The rapid industrialization (or re-industrialization in the case of West Germany) and growth in these regions were the perfect environment for the emergence of the nascent knowledge-working class.  

From the 1980's, through the 1990's and on to the early 21st century, the rise in knowledge complexity is being driven by the combined forces of the information technology revolution and the increasing pace of technological change. Globalization is being driven by national and international deregulation, and by the IT-related communications revolution. As noted by Houghton & Sheehan in A Primer on the Knowledge Economy (2000) in the last twenty years in particular, an exponential growth has occurred in the application of computing and communications technologies in all areas of business and community life. This "explosion" has been driven by substantial falls in the cost of computing and communications per unit of performance, and by the rapid development of applications relevant to the needs of users (p.5).

As is well-established by now, the Internet enabled these technologies come together, "and it is the Internet phenomenon that exemplifies the IT revolution" (p.5). In the first decade after its invention,
the Internet was an academic research network. By 1989 there were 159,000 Internet hosts worldwide. Just ten years later, there were more than 43 million (see Figure 1).

 

According to the Internet Systems Consortium by July 2008, that figure had increased to five hundred million Internet domains (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Internet Domain count, July 2008

We can say that information technology as realized through the Internet has enabled the construction of a stable platform which provides the facility to manipulate, store, and transmit large quantities of data at low cost; and the pervasiveness of Internet technologies has made information technology an important channel for every component of the economy. With the low cost of managing information,  the application of knowledge to all aspects of the economy has grown, and the knowledge complexity of economic activities greatly increased.

However, as noted Working for the Future: Technology and Employment in the Global Knowledge Economy

...it is important to note that the term ‘Knowledge Economy’ refers to the overall economic structure that is emerging, not to any one, or combination of these phenomena.

More...

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References:

Forfás (the policy advisory and coordination board for industrial development, science
and technology in Ireland) (1996) Shaping our Future. [Internet] Available from: http://www.forfas.ie/publications/archive/sof/chap1.htm  [Accessed 16 August 2008]

Houghton, J. Sheehan, P. (Eds.) (2000) A Primer on the Knowledge Economy. Centre for Strategic Economic Studies. Victoria University

McDowell, A. (2006) Globalisation and the Knowledge Economy – the Case of Ireland. Forfás  [Internet] Available from: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/59/5/37563948.pdf [Accessed 16 August 2008]

Sheehan, P. Tegart, G. (Eds.) (1998) Working for the Future: Technology and Employment in the Global Knowledge Economy. Victoria University Press.

Emergence of Knowledge Workers: a Short History

In yesterday's post I began this series by outlining the social, economic and technological circumstances that led to the emergence and characterization of the Knowledge Economy in the last third of the 20th century. In this section, I am going to outline the history of the knowledge workers themselves.

In his 1998 text Rise of the Knowledge Worker, James Cortada describes three approaches to understanding the emergence of knowledge workers:

1. Information and knowledge have their own history with patterns of behavior and use that are of practical concern to business, government, and private use
2. The (short) history of knowledge workers - those primarily concerned with gathering and using information or knowledge, typically as an economic activity
3. Knowledge workers in the context of knowledge management, also a relatively new topic of investigation

The author asserts that

these three sets of historical experiences teach us much about the nature of knowledge

(p.4)

and, I would suggest, about knowledge workers themselves.

It can be said that knowledge workers as a class or economic influencer emerged when

a body of related information ... to be collected, applied an built on for subsequent action [emerged]

(p.14)

As the volume of information about a subject or economic activity expands, the potential for a "specialized workforce" (p.14) to work with, interpret, and manipulate that information will likely be realized. Similarly, knowledge work is often created by the introduction of some new "knowledge-handling" (p.15) technology; characteristics of this kind of work include

• An "intimate" understanding of the mechanics of the technology (how to send a fax, program a computer etc)
• An understanding of how to apply that technology to create new information or knowledge
• Expansion of the socio-cultural milieu and enhanced insight into the body of knowledge being utilized
• An understanding of how to enhance and improve the information or knowledge corpus

This process typically leads to increased complexity of of both the information and knowledge, as well as the types of work that it is applied to, which inevitably generates an increase the number of knowledge workers where complexity of economic activities expands at the same times as the type of work or the organization undertaking knowledge work expands.

I would suggest that a strong case could be made for asserting that the modern era of the knowledge worker grew directly from the development of the industrial-military complex that was created in the United States to enable the Allies successfully prosecute World War Two.

Global spheres of influence of the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War (courtesy Wikipedia)
[Click to enlarge]

Beginning with the Marshall Plan, the political and economic conditions of the succeeding Cold War provided the impetus to enable a global implementation of telecommunications and digital technology, as well as the exponential growth of transnational corporations. This created the conditions whereby huge territories in Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region underwent technological development at an accelerated pace, as one of the strategies deployed to promote Capitalism and defeat International Communism.

More...

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References:

Cortada, J. (1998) Rise of the Knowledge Worker (Resources for the Knowledge-Based Economy). Butterworth-Heinemann

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The Half-Life of the Knowledge Worker

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

Gen. Eric Shinseki

The US and EuroZone economies are in recession, China is ascendant, Russia is asserting it's regional dominance, all the knowledge jobs are going to India, and it hasn't stopped raining for two weeks.

As you know if you're a regular reader of The E-Learning Curve Blog, I occasionally reflect on e-learning, the economy, and the effect that the one has on the other.

This time I have decided to discuss the emergence and current role of knowledge workers, how this role is changing, and will come to propose a definition for a new type of worker that seems to emerging, particularly in the traditional home of knowledge work, North America and Europe.

Now read on...

In 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” to describe

one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. It is performed by subject-matter specialists in all areas of an organisation;

(1973, p.839)

their tools are the knowledge assets they use in an organisation. Knowledge workers are characterised by a number of traits, among them the ability to extract and synthesize key information to enhance innovation and productivity.

It is “generally accepted” (Drucker, 2006, p.165) that the knowledge workers’ expertise in their role is the starting point for enhancing productivity, quality and performance. If knowledge workers are to continue contributing to an organisation and the economy at large, their knowledge must remain up-to-date. Ongoing training and continuous learning must accompany gains in performance; “the greatest benefit of training comes not from learning something new but from doing better what we already do well” (2006, p.165).

Three years later, Fritz Machlup published The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. In concert with Drucker's work, we can say that the early 1960's marked the beginning of the study of the post-industrial information society. Machlup coined the phrase "knowledge economy" to include everything from stationery and typewriters, advertising, and presidential addresses - in fact, anything that involved the activity of telling anyone anything - to evaluate the use of knowledge technologies to produce economic benefits.

The transformation to a knowledge economy continued throughout the rest of the 20th century, especially following the invention and growth of the Internet.

Especially in the wake of the invention and growth of the Internet, we can say that today's global economy is characterized as being in transition to a knowledge economy, and an extension of what we can call an information society. This transition requires that the rules and practices that determined success in the industrial economy need to be rewritten in an interconnected, globalized economy where knowledge resources such as know-how, expertise, and intellectual property are more critical than other economic resources such as land, natural resources, and even manpower. According to analysts of the knowledge economy, these rules need to be re-factored at the levels of companies, organizations, and industries in the context of managing knowledge and (possibly more imperatively) at the level of government- or public policy.

Due to the increasingly technological nature of industrial growth and the emergence of globalization as a influencing factor on the world economy of the last 60 years, there is an ongoing and increasing requirement for an academically capable workforce. As a result, knowledge workers are now estimated to outnumber all other workers in North America by at least four-to-one (Haag et al, 2006, pg. 4).

...and at this point I will conclude for today, as this is a blog post, not an essay and I'm sure, dear reader, that you have other things to be getting on with. In tomorrow's post, I will continue to develop the concept of the half-life of the knowledge worker and begin to look at how the Asian Tigers have superceded the advanced industrial nations of the 20th century.

In the meantime, as I started today's piece with a quote, I think that for the sake of symmetry I should conclude this article with another excerpt:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

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References:

Drucker, P. F. (1973) Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. New York, Harper & Row

Drucker, P. F. (2006) Classic Drucker. Boston, MA. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

Haag, S. Cummings, M. McCubbrey, D. Pinsonneault, A. & Donovan, R. (2006) Management Information Systems For the Information Age (3rd Ed.). London, McGraw-Hill Education

Machlup, F. (1962) The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton University Press

Yeats, W. B. (1920) The Second Coming. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th Edition. W. W. Norton & Co.

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