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22 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

These forces have been examined in a number of different studies of
industrial, occupational and organizational change in more recent decades.
In 1969, Drucker emphasized that knowledge had become the crucial
resource of the economy. Daniel Bell, in 1973, also described the potential
for the development of a post-industrial society dominated by knowledge
workers operating in knowledge-intensive firms. This would be a society
organized around knowledge for the purpose of economic development,
social control and institutional innovation and change. Other work in the
80s and 90s (e.g. Castells, 1996; Drucker, 1988; Gibbons et al., 1994)
indicated the extent of such changes in advanced economies since the days
when Scientific Management principles were first introduced. Such stud-
ies have outlined important characteristic features of the current era. These
include the following:

(i) The extent to which knowledge has been ‘globalized’, or freed up from
material, physical and geographic constraints.
(ii) The economic value of intangibles, such as new ideas, software, services
and network relationships.
(iii) The convergence of computing power and communications technology,
with a new generation of web-based technologies having major impacts
on the structuring of work and occupations.
(iv) The importance of knowledge as a primary means of production, acting
upon itself in ‘an accelerating spiral of innovation and change’ (Castells,
1996).
(v) An emphasis on normative, or cultural, rather than hierarchical forms
of control so that knowledge workers effectively manage and discipline
themselves (and each other).
(vi) Fundamental changes in the ways knowledge itself is produced – no lon-
ger just in ‘ivory tower’ academic organizations or R&D departments
(Mode 1) but as it is applied in new contexts (Mode 2) (Gibbons et al.,
1994; Nowotny et al., 2003). The different dimensions of these modes of
knowledge production are summarized in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge production
Mode 1 knowledge production Mode 2 knowledge production

Problems defi ned by academic and professional Knowledge produced in context of application
communities
Disciplinary knowledge Transdisciplinary knowledge
Homogeneity Heterogeneity
Hierarchical and stable organizations Heterarchical and transient organizations
Quality control by the ‘invisible college’ Socially accountable and refl exive
Source: Adapted from Nowotny et al. (2001).

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