The Post-Business Society

The biggest shift, bigger by far than the changes in politics, government, or economics, is the shift to the knowledge society in all developed non-communist countries. Here are some of its important features.

The social centre of gravity has shifted to the knowledge worker. All developed countries are becoming post-business, knowledge societies. Access to good jobs and career opportunities in developed countries increasingly requires a university diploma. Looked at one way, this is the logical result of a long evolution in which we moved from working by the sweat of our brow and by muscle, to industrial work and finally to knowledge work. But the development also represents a sharp break with the past. Until quite recently there were few jobs requiring knowledge. Knowledge was ornament rather than necessity. Only one of America's business builders in the nineteenth century had any advanced schooling: J. P. Morgan, the great financier. And he was a ‘college dropout’, leaving Goettingen University, where he had gone to study mathematics, to become a trainee in a small bank. Very few of the other prominent business figures of the nineteenth century even entered high school let alone graduated from it. Knowledge work began to expand - 168and fast – in the twentieth century. The American population has tripled this century – from 75 million in 1900 to 250 million now. But college teachers grew from fewer than 10,000 at the beginning of the century – most of them teaching in small church schools – to more than 500,000 eighty years later. All other categories of knowledge workers grew at similar rates – accountants, physicians, medical technologists, analysts of all kinds, managers, and so on. And the trend in other developed countries closely parallels the United States.

The shift to knowledge and education as the passport to good jobs and career opportunities means, above all, a shift from a society in which business was the main avenue of advancement to a society in which business is only one of the available opportunities and no longer a distinct one. It represents a shift to the post-business society. The shift has gone furthest in the US and in Japan. But it is also in train in most of Western Europe.

Even in the decades following the Second World War when college enrolments exploded and when knowledge rapidly became the economy's foundation and its true ‘capital’, the quickest and easiest road to a good job and to job security in developed countries was however not through education. It was going at age 17 into the unionized mass-production factory as a semi-skilled worker. A year later – often sooner – that worker earned more in all developed countries (excepting only in Japan) than the holder of a university degree could expect to earn for fifteen or twenty years. Even then the semiskilled mass-production worker had higher job security after fifteen or twenty years of service than college graduates, except for government servants and tenured teaching faculty. But now the centre of gravity in society is shifting to a group – the knowledge workers – which has new values and expectations. The blue-collar workers in manufacturing industry, who registered the most spectacular advances in income and social status during the first three-quarters of this century, are becoming the 169‘other half and a ‘social problem’. They are becoming a ‘counterculture’ rather than ‘mainstream’. Whether the industrial workers’ own institution, the labour union, can survive, and in what capacity, is becoming problematical.

Another ‘counterculture’ is emerging in the US – the Third Sector of non-profit, non-governmental institutions with their ‘unpaid staff’ of volunteers.

Management has emerged as both central social function and as new and distinctive liberal art. But this raises the question of management's legitimacy. And organizations are evolving into new forms: they are becoming information-based.

That knowledge has become the capital of a developed economy, and knowledge workers the group that sets society's values and norms, finally affects what we mean by knowledge and how it is learned and taught.