The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society and Economy

20The Knowledge Worker and the Knowledge Society1994

The knowledge society is an employee society. Traditional society—or society before the rise of the manufacturing enterprise 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 farming 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 assistants and salespeople for a merchant; as domestic servants, ...