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Knowledge Capitalism
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Knowledge Capitalism

Business, Work, and Learning in the New Economy

Alan Burton Jones
Oxford UP, 1999
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Overview

Recommendation

This book falls squarely into the apocalyptic tradition of business literature. It preaches the end of the world, and exhorts readers to repent and prepare for a new world unlike anything they have known. Burton-Jones has absorbed, organized and presented a mass of data to support his message. The data themselves are worth the price of the book, because they provide ample raw material from which to draw one’s own conclusions about the validity of the author’s thesis. He has trademarked certain key phrases in the book, and the frequent appearance of the superscript “TM” is a helpful reminder to the reader to remember that this book is at least in part a sales pitch for a consultancy practice. But it is nonetheless important to read this book because while Burton-Jones may be wrong about some things, he is clearly right that a big global economic change is underway, and he sets forth in clear, if colorless, prose a reasonably plausible explanation of what it is and why it is happening. getAbstract recommends the book to owners, managers, individuals, students, teachers, and policy-makers.

Summary

The Knowledge Revolution

The old world, a world in which the mastery of material things led to wealth and power, has lasted for thousands of years. But that world is ending, and it is about to be replaced by a new world in which knowledge will be the key to riches. The knowledge revolution is in its early stages, but it is already causing fear, malaise and uncertainty. The Knowledge Revolution will overturn and supplant the Industrial Revolution. The industrial capitalists owned and/or controlled the material resources critical to industrial production. They built industrial organizations - big, hierarchical, authoritarian corporations in which masses of laborers toiled for wages under the supervision of ranks of middle managers, who took their orders from the top managers, who were at least in theory responsible to the shareholders who owned the corporation.

The Industrial Corporation was not networked to other corporations. Each Industrial Corporation had its own way of doing things, its own idiosyncratic knowledge specific to the firm. Manufacturing management broke tasks into discrete components in a process perhaps first described in 1776 by Adam Smith and perfected...

About the Author

Alan Burton-Jones, formerly Business Development Director of British Oxygen’s London-based computer services subsidiary, now heads an international IT and management consultancy practice headquartered in Australia and frequently speaks at business and technical conferences.

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