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INTRODUCTION 21

the work decreased. Later, the ‘Human Relations’ school, led by the pioneering
work of Elton Mayo at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company,
led to the development of different approaches to the organization of work based
on group work and group responsibility for work tasks. This demonstrated that
workers have social, not just monetary, needs and are also motivated by intan-
gible rewards such as job satisfaction and recognition of a job well-done.
It would be a mistake to think that we have witnessed the end of Scientific
Management. The underlying principles are still applied across sectors today,
especially, where efficiency, standardization and cost minimization are the main
drivers of competition. Take, for example, the rise of fast food chains like McDon-
alds or the ever increasing number of call centres outsourced to low-wage coun-
tries. Many of the problems around quality of products or, increasingly, services
are now addressed technologically, with mechanisms for surveillance and qual-
ity control being built into the core technologies used by workers (Sewell and
Wilkinson, 1992). For example, call centres across a range of sectors now use
sophisticated information technology to monitor the number of calls taken by
workers and the quality of the interaction between client and worker. Essentially
the idea with these systems is still to take knowledge, and all the uncertainty that
this creates, out of the work (and workers) and place this in the hands of man-
agement and the technologies that they choose to use.

>> MANAGING KNOWLEDGE IN THE ‘INFORMATION AGE’

Whilst this earlier work alerts us to the fact that managing knowledge has long been
seen as important in organizations, the so-called ‘Knowledge Era’ or ‘Information
Age’ has seen major advances in this idea. This can be traced to wider debates about
the organization of work and the sources of wealth creation in contemporary soci-
ety. A whole ‘new’ language has arisen around concerns that it is knowledge, and
not other resources such as labour or capital, that is the main source of competitive
advantage across sectors. This language is now used widely in management and in
politics and includes such terms as: the learning organization, Knowledge Man-
agement, strategic management of core competencies, the knowledge-based view
of the firm, knowledge-based systems, knowledge-intensive firms, intellectual and
social capital, knowledge capital, talent management and so forth.
The fashionable labels come and go and, as predicted in the previous edition
of this book, ‘Knowledge Management’ has largely lost its ground as ‘flavour of
the month’ (Scarbrough and Swan, 2001). The emergence and demise of these
management fads, however, is itself continued testimony to the phenomena
which they address – that is, the growing knowledge-intensity of business,
the impact of discourse on patterns and styles of management, the seemingly
endless importance of information and communication technology (ICT) on
work and work relationships, and the importance of change and innovation for
organizations facing increasingly turbulent environments. These factors are not
the product of fashion but of history – a convergent set of forces which have
unleashed fundamental patterns of change on advanced industrial economies.

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