Page 176 - The Drucker Lectures

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The Knowledge Worker

and the Knowledge Society

1994

he knowledge society is an employee society. Traditional so-
Tciety—or society before the rise of the manufacturing enter-
prise and the blue-collar manufacturing worker—was not a society
of independents. Thomas Jefferson’s society of independent, small
farmers each being the owner of his own family farm, and farm-
ing it without any help except that of his wife and his children,
was never much more than a fantasy. Most people in history were
dependents. But they did not work for an organization. They were
working for an owner, as slaves, as serfs, as hired hands on the farm;
as journeymen and apprentices in the craftsmen’s shops; as shop as-
sistants and salespeople for a merchant; as domestic servants, free
or unfree; and so on. They worked for a master. When blue-collar
work in manufacturing first arose they still worked for a master.
In Dickens’s great 1854 novel of a bitter labor conflict in a cot-
ton mill [Hard Times], the workers worked for an owner. They
did not work for the factory. Only late in the nineteenth century
did the factory rather than the owner become the employer. And
only in the twentieth century did the corporation, rather than
the factory, then become the employer. Only in this century has
the master been replaced by a boss, who himself, 99 times out of
100, is an employee and has a boss.

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