Rise of the Knowledge Worker

James Cortada

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781136368189
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A generation of magnificent scholars, from Peter Drucker to Jack Welch, have taught us that understanding business issues and the profound changes the world's economy is undergoing makes sense if set in historical context. Today the best managers in the world demand to know how things came to be as they are. This collection of essays is designed to give the reader an historical perspective on the fastest growing sector of the work force: knowledge workers. The articles tell you how knowledge workers evolved from manufacturing and agricultural jobs and then go on to give you some insight as to what the future roles of knowledge workers will be. The readings in this volume come from a variety of sources not normally looked at by managers and business executives. There are reports from historians, sociologists, academics, and economic experts. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction on the material, its significance, and something about the context in which it was written, including brief biographical comments on the author. The Rise of the Knowledge Worker is intended for business people, managers, leaders, government employees, and students.

Part One
A New Profession Is Born: The Knowledge Worker

1 Where Did Knowledge Workers Come From?

James W. Cortada

Today, management throughout the industrialized world has become wary of new management concepts, calling new ideas “fads” and wondering where it will all end. Into this stew of suspicion many are pouring “knowledge work,” “knowledge management,” and “knowledge workers.” But not all concepts are fads; some have staying power. Knowledge work is one of those—it is not a fad. How do we know? We look to history—rather than to some academic management theorist—for the proof. It turns out knowledge workers have been around for thousands of years, and knowledge work (complete with its tools, such as brushes, tablets, books, pens, and other data handling items) for an even longer period of time. What is very new is the categorization of these people, activities, and tools into a discrete field—knowledge work—binding together practices and professions that were previously considered separately. By clustering these together, we do not create a new fad; rather, we gain the opportunity to learn how different types of people have worked well. One can carry over from one profession or activity to others some of the best practices that allow organizations to exploit information and insight to better run their operations. Again, history helps because this is exactly what successful leaders and organizations have been doing for centuries. We just never gave that set of activities a name until after World War II.

Even the act of naming the work has a history. Knowledge management is not a 1990s concept. In the 1950s, economists at Princeton University were busy at work studying the production of knowledge in America. In the 1960s, economists, biologists, and psychologists were continuing the work of their predecessors of the 1930s through 1950s in looking at biological feedback mechanisms and how they worked in people, animals, society, and business. To a large extent, competitive analysis, even strategic planning, of the 1960s and 1970s were formalized as part of the process of capturing and exploiting knowledge.

But perhaps the one circumstance over all others that brought knowledge work to our consciousness has been its exposure in business and, more specifically, to management. Professors, witch doctors, lawyers, and priests have been around for a very long time. These have always been “knowledge workers.” But until knowledge work—a new concept but old work—came to business, the whole notion of knowledge work and the theories and practice of knowledge work remained the preserve of educators, philosophers, and other academics. Only rarely did the term rear its head in business, usually in training or by the odd manager who, for example, happened to have started his or her career as an historian or priest.

Because the current interest in knowledge work is coming most aggressively from the business community, the history of what has long been going on outside of commerce in the area of knowledge is being brought to business—this book is an example of that—while the managerial practices of commerce are being applied to the collection, use, and assessment of knowledge. It is this latter set of activities— from Michael Porter and his assessments of the behavior of industries, to Laurence Prusak and Thomas H. Davenport in their concerns about how to exploit knowledge in corporations—that has informed students of business practices. But the history of knowledge work and its workers has much to teach us about the nature of knowledge and how to exploit it. In fact, the highly respected guru of business gurus, Professor Peter F. Drucker, may have coined the phrase “knowledge worker” in the late 1950s, but the point is, the notion of this new class of workers has been drawing the attention of scholars and managers at an increasing rate over the past half century as an economic trend of historic proportions.

There are three convenient ways to look at the history of knowledge and knowledge workers. First, information and knowledge have a history of their own, with long standing patterns of behavior, use, and convenience for humans that are of practical concern in business, government, and in our private lives. Second, there is the history of the knowledge worker, that is to say, of people in many walks of life whose primary professional function is gathering and using information or knowledge. Third, knowledge management and knowledge workers as a subject has its own history, although a much shorter one than the first two. These three sets of historical experiences teach us much about the nature of knowledge. These findings increasingly are becoming important as we continue to evolve into an economy in which knowledge drives development and distribution of products and services, and in which growing numbers of workers make their living in the creation and exploitation of information and knowledge for profit.

As we move through what is becoming increasingly apparent as a new industrial revolution, and away from the second industrial revolution, we are exploring ways to understand it. Various observers are attempting to help by giving it a label, often calling the new world the “information age,” the “third industrial revolution,” or the “postindustrial age.” What we see with some certainty at this point, however, is that the value of ideas in the running of organizations is enjoying newfound prominence. Historical experience sobers us by calling to our attention the fact that knowledge has been with us a very long time. Understanding its history holds out the promise of improving our ability to run corporations, universities, and government agencies in what is an emerging new economic world order. That is why the topic is of such importance.

INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE: A HISTORY OF THEIR OWN

The literature on the history of information and knowledge would fill a building. But some basic observations can be made that are of use to managers today. Perhaps the most basic observation is that from the beginning of recorded time, some basic patterns of behavior have remained consistent down to the present concerning the role of information and knowledge. This observation suggests what the value and use of knowledge can be.

History provides many examples. There is the British stock broker who in 1815 made a fortune just by learning hours before his fellow countrymen that Napoleon had lost the Battle of Waterloo. More recently we have the example of information on how to use personal computers making it possible for high school students to hold well-paying part time jobs in corporations, helping the rest of us use these new tools. Knowledge also had held value for many people. American General George S. Patton constantly relied on this insight to plan his highly successful campaigns during World War II. Earlier, Thomas Jefferson—the quintessential renaissance man of colonial America—sought lessons from history to inform all his political actions, from writing the Declaration of Independence to defining the role of an American president. Emperors of China always surrounded themselves with advisors who were scholars first, politicos second. Roman emperors, like the ancient Greeks, consulted educated priests to gain insight on the possible future. Today in business, we see technocrats doing “data mining,” the act of drawing insights from mountains of information stored in computers. The American government routinely calls in historians and experts on various regions of the world to advise the White House on how to deal with Cuba, Iran, and Iraq. The Cuban missile crisis of the 1960s and the unification of Germany in the early 1990s are two well-documented cases where national leaders turned to historians for advise on what to do. So what are some of the insights about the use of knowledge?

First, from the beginning of time for humankind, people have recognized the value of consciously collecting and using information. They have unceasingly continued to do this to the present. The development of language made it possible to pass on one’s experiences to children so that they did not have to reinvent existing knowledge through repeated experiences, the way animals usually have to. Language also made it possible to exploit the cognitive capabilities that were expanding in the human brain to deal with ideas and abstract notions; in other words, to engage in discussions about intangible things, such as love, faith, and ethics. With language humankind experienced, and possibly enjoyed, the birth of tacit knowledge. Our growing knowledge about how people learn has been tremendously augmented in the past century thanks to studies on linguistics, biology, and computing, and, in the past half century, through studies of the brain and of DNA encoding. Today, many students of the brain and nervous system speak of these in much the same way that computer scientists think about computers: data input, processing, data output, and data storage. The history of computing clearly demonstrates that it was the work of biologists more than the work of engineers that informed computer science. Mathematics and physics influenced computer science a great deal too. Yet it was the description of how computers work that so energized much understanding about the nature of feedback (a knowledge-driven process) in machines and in all living organisms. In fact, the biological metaphor is rapidly replacing the old Newtonian concepts of society and organizations operating like machines. This thinking has led to a more complex analogy in which people and institutions take in data about the environment, make sense of it, and then react advantageously to what is going on: fear (e.g., stay out of a market, or avoid a war), fight (enter a market, occupy a rival nation’s territory).

Second, humans have always tried to augment human memory with writing to aid in their preservation of information and knowledge for subsequent use. Cave drawings of bison may have been painted for religious purposes. But even more basic is the fact that they were painted for whatever reason. A painting of a bison is information (an image in this case) that had some value; otherwise, it would not have been created. Historians have done yeoman work in documenting the history of language and writing; both emerged almost one upon the other. From very early times humans have found ways to record pieces of information outside of their memories. In other words, from almost the beginning, humans looked for ways to store information outside their heads. These approaches ranged from assortments of rocks and sticks to clay tablets, to complex languages like that of the Egyptians and later that of the ancient Greeks, to today’s languages. Thousands of languages and writing systems litter the history of humankind.

Even today, while linguists complain that the world is becoming so homogeneous that indigenous languages and writings of primitive tribes are disappearing, they ignore the reality that new writing systems called programming languages are appearing all the time. In the half century since the invention of computer programming, several thousand languages for writing software have been created; in any given year there are about 250 in use. So the process of developing and using written languages as tools to store information for subsequent use has continued unabated. Alphabets from Assyrian times, through the grammar of Chinese and Romance languages, to the rules of programming in effect today, are the prime tools and practices that control the effective application of language and writing. Again, we see need for information followed by standards and conventions to ensure effective use of the tools.

Third, humankind has constantly developed physical objects in which to store and manipulate information. The first letters ever mailed were clay tablets that usually served as receipts for transactions carried out by traders in the Middle East. Centuries later, Roman soldiers received pay stubs, also made out of clay, with their salaries. The Egyptians invented papyrus to record data while the Chinese were busy at work inventing paper. Neither was invented to wrap up food bought in the market place. That came many centuries later! Tablets, papyrus, and paper were invented to augment human memory by allowing the recording (storing) of information for use later or by individuals other than the original author. Over time, thousands of other tools appeared to carry out similar functions: notched sticks, paintings, carvings on stone, mechanical devices, movable type in printing (in the 1400s), adding machines (1600s), typewriters (1700s and 1800s), calculators (1820s forward), and, beginning in the mid-1800s, a vast array of electronically based tools: telegraph, telephone, radio, television, tape recorders, phonograph, and, of course, the computer. Within each category of devices, inventors and engineers developed hundreds and often thousands of variations.

The volume of tools invented is staggering. In ancient times, the great library of Alexandria reportedly had 700,000 volumes of manuscripts. By 1500 in Europe alone, there were 35,000 titles which resulted in publication of between 15 and 20 million books that had been published. Today, over 40,000 books are published annually in the United States; and even in Spain—a country only 13 percent the size of the United States—publishers bring out over 30,000 new titles yearly. The world has spent over $4 trillion on computers since 1950. Just before the start of World War I, eighty-two manufacturers were busy at work in the United States manufacturing tens of thousands of typewriters each year. As we became more numerically sensitive throughout the twentieth century, people began to count more, and one of the things they counted were such aids to information as the number of books, libraries, adding machines, TVs, and computers. In our lifetime we have seen the process continue.

As the variety and number of tools for storing and using information increased, so too did the amount of data available to humankind. The phrase “recorded knowledge” came into use in the nineteenth century to capture the essence of people’s desire to accumulate knowledge that they could use. Creation of the great modern libraries of the world, such as the British Museum and Library, the Library of Congress, Harvard University’s library, and the national libraries of France and Spain, reflect a modern version of a very old pattern of behavior. A library’s standing is still measured by the number of volumes in its collection. We are impressed with Alexandria’s ancient library because of its size—an analogy for valued information—and no self-respecting librarian would be ignorant of how many millions of volumes are in his or her collection. The same type of numerical shorthand for how much information exists can be seen in the world of computers. Every manager of a computer data center can recite how much information storage capacity they have in the form of disk drives in total volume of bytes of storage.

Collection of information (or knowledge) has also long been a prestigious activity of the wealthy. The essence of the definition of the “renaissance man” is someone who knows a great deal about many subjects. Often the manifestation of that interest, or display of an acquisitive nature, is the private library. The great merchants of Renaissance Italy amassed great libraries of manuscripts and, later, of books. Look at a wealthy noble family estate in Britain and you will find a private library of thousands of volumes. In the New World, the plantation owners along the James River in Virginia in the 1600s and 1700s, despite living at the edge of a violent and rustic frontier, nonetheless built libraries with thousands of volumes. In the late nineteenth century, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie endowed hundreds of public libraries in the United States, while the leading banker of the day, J. P. Morgan (on the East Coast), and railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington (on the West Coast), built some of the finest collections of books in the history of mankind.

The process continued unabated to the present. Histories of book collecting catalog collections of enormous size and variety being put together by people from all walks of life down to the present. In other instances, and for a variety of reasons, contributions to information continue in new ways. For example, Bill Gates, CEO and founder of Microsoft, and reputed to be the wealthiest man in the world, in the 1990s began to provide public schools in the United States with free access to the Internet. In short, at all levels of society and over a very long period of time, individuals and institutions made the collection of information and knowledge a high priority, despite the enormous expense involved.

Fourth, every major institution in society has collected, preserved, and exploited information. Indeed, as many historians have demonstrated through their studies of the Catholic Church, various national governments of Europe and Asia, and, more recently, such large geographically dispersed industries such as railroads and large-scale manufacturing, without information one could not control, let alone expand, operations. These institutions have always been the best customers for whatever new information handling tools came along. The Catholic Church was incontestably the largest buyer of manuscripts and books for centuries, and it may still be in certain parts of the world. Every major government in the world for the past two thousand years has supported centers of knowledge such as libraries, universities, monasteries, and departmental libraries and archives. Often these were administratively linked to the function of teaching, as occurred for centuries in monasteries and in universities. Every complex and large society has had what today are fashionably called “centers of learning.” Priests taught seminarians around the world, often creating new knowledge in the process in such diverse fields as agriculture, business, medicine, science, military tactics and strategies, religion, and government practices. The “best practices” have been to create these centers to consolidate large bodies of knowledge and then to use them to disseminate this information through education, research, business, and consulting. Benedictine priests in the Spanish Pyrenees often advised Catholic popes on liturgical matters. In the ancient Chinese Empire, administrators began their professional lives as scholars, then moved on to become managers and bureaucrats. Jesuit priests whispered advice into the ears of the emperors of the Hapsburg Empire in the 1600s, while today consultants from IBM, A. Andersen, McKinsey, and many other firms do the same to CEOs of corporations.

Fifth, information begets more information. Information normally leads to deep insight, to knowledge. It is a canon of knowledge gurus that bits of data can lead to a higher-order insight, which then can be applied to advantage. They call that higher order of insight “knowledge.” But the notion of a hierarchy of valued information is an old one. Recognition that it takes time and effort to create that knowledge is also an ancient notion. Most religions, for example, recognize that ultimate knowledge comes through years of study. Nirvana is not a gift to the new Asian believer, while in Europe mysticism was the preserve of the hard-studying and long-praying faithful. Formal study and application has long been recognized as the road to higher knowledge.

Credentialing early on became a way to recognize someone, or some organization, for having knowledge. Awarding an MBA or Ph.D. today serves essentially the same purpose that ordination of priests and rabbis did ove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series—Why Knowledge, Why Now?
• Preface
• Introducing the Knowledge Worker
• Part One A New Profession Is Born: The Knowledge Worker
• Part Two Recognition of the New Professions
• Part Three Social and Personal Consequences
• Index