knowledge work| K society | K economy | K work |
References: knowledge work Topics Authors
--05.5.15--
Notes on Schutze, Ulrike.
--05.5.14--
Knowledge work is different from manual labor. In the same way as management has improved manual labor in the 20th century, it must do it with intellectual labor.
- improve the efficiency of repetitive intellectual labor: customer representatives, salespeople, clerical activities, etc.
- improve the effectiveness of knowledge work, since it has a much broader scope than manual labor. Knowledge workers must make decisions all the time. E.g. managers in general, generic consultants.
- improve the efficiency of creative intellectual work, that is, knowledge work which creates new products, new processes, new patterns. Here, it is interesting to note two levels of creativity: an operational creativity, which creates things under the same pattern (maybe it's the previous item), and innovation, which creates something completely new, a new pattern.
--Hayes & Walsham, 2003, Knowledge Sharing and ICTs--Haymann and Elliman (2000) define knowledge workers as people who enrich given information and who learn from the information that is communicated. They also view knowledge workers as being educated to a high level, having career loyalty to an area of expertise and being "given" sifnificant autonomy in how they perform their tasks.
-- 05.5.1 --... increasing trend towards greater differentiation, new rationality, more extensive flexibility, self-determination, and increased reflexivity of work in the service sector of the economy. (Stehr)
From Stehr:
It seems that the knowledge economy does not reduce the participation of industry in GDP, but does reduce labor in manufacturing. Therefore, in the knowledge economy, there will be fewer workers in manufacturing. There are two movements: from manual workers to intellectual workers, and from manual workers to less and higher-skilled manual workers. In other words, there is a decoupling of production from labor, in the same way that there is a decoupling of production from raw material.
The expectation is that the jobs lost are absorbed in the service sector or in service occupations (what are the implications of this difference?). But it seems that the same productivity increases that happened in industry will also affect service occupations: productivity of service workers. Therefore, Stehr believes that the unemployment is permanent, and the total supply of jobs in the knowledge economy will decrease relatively to the industrial economy.
There is demand for highly-skilled workers, mainly in knowledge-intensive industries. Lower-skilled worker are doomed, wherever they go. Employment grows in firms where technologies are utilized to a higher extent. Knowledge-intensive firms are responsible for the majority of the additional jobs and that the observed imployment growth falls in particular to those who have a better education; the decline in employment, in contrast, is disproportionately high among people with few professional abilities and in firms with low knowledge-intensity.
The decline in employment in both the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy in developed economies is taken for granted among economists. Further, it is assumed that this pattern will continue.
In the lower-skilled section of the workforce, there is growing trend towards part-time and temporary work (contract work?).
Global competition and mobility forces organization to do more with fewer employees. The introduction of technology requires higher-skilled workers earning higher wages, which reinforces the need to do more with less.
--older--The key piece here is to describe what knowledge work is. What are the characteristics of knowledge work? Parting from the many perspectives offered up to now, what is the nature of knowledge work? From the macro, societal perspective, from the industrial, organizational perspective, from the individual perspective. What constitutes knowledge work? How can it be enhanced? And what is the role of KM education in that? That's the next step.
More skilled workers, more autonomous, independent. Knowledge is better created and transfered in less hierarchical environments.
More part-time work, more contracting.
A large second-class knowledge workforce: clerical jobs, salespeople, computer programmers, customer representatives, estate agents, nurses, technicians, etc.
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