Book

The New Society of Organizations
Abstract: Traces the rise of knowledge as the primary resource for individuals and the overall economy in the United States.
How knowledge has replaced land, labour and capital as the key source of production; Implications for business managers and organizations.
In the knowledge society, managers must prepare to abandon everything they know
Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred. In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself -- its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.
Our age is such a period of transformation. Only this time the transformation is not confined to Western society and Western history. Indeed, one of the fundamental changes is that there is no longer a "Western" history or a "Western" civilization. There is only world history and world civilization.
Whether this transformation began with the emergence of the first non-Western country, Japan, as a great economic power or with the first computer -- that is, with information -- is moot. My own candidate would be the GI Bill of Rights, which gave every American soldier returning from World War II the money to attend a university, something that would have made absolutely no sense only 30 years earlier at the end of World War I. The GI Bill of Rights and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans signaled the shift to a knowledge society.
In this society, knowledge is the primary resource for individuals and for the economy overall. Land, labour, and capital -- the economist's traditional factors of production -- do not disappear, but they become secondary. They can be obtained, and obtained easily, provided there is specialized knowledge....