Page 177 - The Drucker Lectures

158 [ The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge workers will be both employees who have a boss
and bosses who have employees.
Organizations were not known to yesterday’s social science,
and they are, by and large, not yet known to today’s social sci-
ence. The great German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, in his
1888 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Soci-
ety] classified the known forms of human organization as being
either community, which is organic, and fate, or society, which
is a structure and very largely under social control. He never
talked of organization. Nor did any of the other sociologists of
the nineteenth or early twentiethcentury.
But organization is neither community nor society, although it
partakes of some characteristics of each. It is not fate. Member-
ship in an organization is always freely chosen. One joins a com-
pany or a government agency or the teaching staff of a university.
One is not born into it. And one can always leave. It is not society,
either, especially as it does not embrace the totality of its members.
The director of market research in a company is also a member of
half a dozen other organizations. She may belong to a church, to
a tennis club, and may well spend, especially if an American, five
hours a week as a volunteer for a local nonprofit organization—for
example, as a leader of a Girl Scout troop. Organizations, in other
words, are not true collectives. They are tools—means to an end.
There have been earlier organizations. The professional mili-
tary as it arose after the seventeenth century was an organization;
it was neither a society nor a community. The modern university,
as it emerged after the foundation of the University of Berlin in
1809, was an organization. Faculty members freely joined and
could always leave. The same can be said for the civil service as
it arose in the eighteenth century, first in France, then on the
European continent, and finally in late nineteenth century in
Great Britain and Meiji Japan (though not until 1933 or World
War II in the United States).