The E-learning Curve at Edublogs

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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