Personal Insights

• Love the history of epistemology (key leaders, schools of thought, implications, embodiment)
• It’s really interesting how things are taught in history and how things actually happened according to first-hand accounts. For example, Peter Drucker makes the case that Frederick Winslow Taylor was the subject of one of the “worst character assassinations in American history.” Also, I think part of it is the summarization. I was taught about Taylor in a negative light because his ideas were applied to school systems in a negative way. It’s fascinating to learn more about him as a human and how his ideas fit into the time.
• According to him, Taylor wasn’t just interested in efficiency, even though that’s what he’s known for. He almost was creating a manifesto for how capitalism could work, except it was applied more than theoretical.
• Marx believes that machines, by nature, alienate humans from their work, create huge class divides.
• Taylor, like myself, believes that these are avoidable consequences of things in a moment in time and culture, and not innate to the fundamental system.

Quotables

We now see knowledge as the essential resource. Land, labor, and capital are chiefly important as restraints.

Old: A manager is responsible for the performance of people. New: a manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Phases Of Knowledge Revolution

It took 100 years, from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, for the Industrial Revolution to become dominant and worldwide. It took some 70 years, from 1880 to the end of World War IJ, for the Productivity Revolution to do so. It has taken fewer than 50 years-from 1945 to 1990-for the Management Revolution to prevail.

Pre-Industrial

But earlier technological change almost without exception remained confined to one craft or one application. It took another 200 years, until the early 16th century, before Bacon's invention acquired a second application: to correct nearsightedness. Similarly, the redesign of the windmill around A.D. 800, which converted it from the toy it had been in antiquity into a true machine, was not applied to ships for more than 300 years. Ships were still oared; if wind was used at all to propel them it was as an auxiliary and only if the breeze blew in the right direction.

Industrial Revolution (Knowledge Applied To Tools)

For 100 years-in the first phase-knowledge was applied to tools, processes, and products. This created the Industrial Revolution. But it also created what Marx called "alienation" and new classes and class war, and with them communism.

The inventions of the Industrial Revolution, however, were immediately applied across the board, and across all conceivable crafts and industries. They were immediately seen as technology. James Watt's redesign of the steam engine between 1765 and 1776 made it into a cost-effective provider of power. Watt himself throughout his own productive life focused on only one use of his engine: to pump water out of mines-the use for which the steam engine had first been designed by Thomas Newcomen in the early years of the 18th century. But one of England's leading iron masters immediately saw that the redesigned steam engine could also be used to blow air into a blast furnace, and so he put in a bid for the second engine Watt built. Furthermore, Watt's partner, Matthew Boulton, promptly promoted the steam engine as a provider of power for all kinds of industrial processes, especially, of course, for what was then the largest of all manufacturing industries, textiles. Thirty-five years later, an American, Robert Fulton, floated the first steamboat on New York's Hudson River. Twenty years later the steam engine was put on wheels and the locomotive was born. And by 1840-at the latest by 1850-the steam engine had transformed every single manufacturing process, from glassmaking to printing. It had transformed long-distance transportation on land and sea, and it was beginning to transform fanning. By then, too, it had penetrated almost the entire worldwith Tibet, Nepal, and the interior of tropical Africa the only exceptions.

Productivity Revolution (Knowledge Applied To Work)

In its second phase, beginning around 1880 and culminating around World War 2, knowledge in its new meaning came to be applied to work. This ushered in the Productivity Revolution, which in 75 years converted the proletariat into a middle-class bourgeoisie with near-upperclass income. The Productivity Revolution thus defeated class war and communism.

Management Revolution (Knowledge Applied To Knowledge)

The last phase began after World War 2. Knowledge is being applied to knowledge itself. This is the Management Revolution. Knowledge is now fast becoming the one factor of production, sidelining both capital and labor.

But knowledge is now also being applied systematically and purposefully to define what new knowledge is needed, whether it is feasible, and what has to be done to make knowledge effective. It is being applied, in other words, to systematic innovation.

We now know that management is a generic function of all organizations, whatever their specific mission. It is the generic organ of the knowledge society.

Management as a discipline emerged only after World War 11. As late as 1950, when the World Bank began to lend money for economic development, the word "management" was not even in its vocabulary. In fact, while management was invented thousands of years ago, it was not discovered until after World War 11.

during and immediately after World War 11, a manager was defined as "someone who is responsible for the work of subordinates." A manager in other words was a "boss," and management was rank and power. This is probably still the definition many people have in mind when they speak of managers and management. But by the early 1950s the definition had already changed to "a manager is responsible for the performance of people." Now we know that this is also too narrow a definition.. The right definition is "a manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.” Implicit in this definition is that we now see knowledge as the essential resource. Land, labor, and capital are chiefly important as restraints. Without them even knowledge cannot produce. Without them even management cannot perform. Where there is effective management, that is, application of knowledge to knowledge, we can always obtain the other resources. The fact that knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society "postcapitalist." It changes, and fundamentally, the structure of society. It creates new social dynamics. It creates new economic dynamics. It creates new politics.

What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and the economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything, this knowledge has to be highly specialized.

But today we do not speak of these specialized knowledges as "crafts." We speak of "disciplines." This is as great a change in intellectual history as any ever recorded.

A discipline converts a craft into a methodology-such as engineering, the scientific method, the quantitative method, or the physician's differential diagnosis. Each of these methodologies converts ad hoc experience into a system. Each converts anecdote into information. Each converts skill into something that can be taught and learned. The shift from knowledge to knowledges has given knowledge the power to create a new society. But this society has to be structured on the basis of knowledge being specialized and of "knowledge people" being specialists. This gives them their power. But it also raises basic questions-of values, of vision, of beliefs, in other words, of all the things that hold society together and give meaning to life. It also raises a big-and new-question: What constitutes the educated person in the knowledge society?

Most, if not all, educated people will practice their knowledge as members of an organization. The educated person will therefore have to prepare to live and work simultaneously in two cultures, that of the intellectual, the specialist who focuses on words and ideas, and that of the manager, who focuses on people and work. Intellectuals need their organization as a tool; it enables them to practice their techni, their specialized knowledge. Managers see knowledge as a means to the end of organizational performance. Both are right... Many people in the postcapitalist society will actually live and work in these two cultures at the same time.

But what we do need-and what will define the educated person in the Knowledge Society-is the ability to understand the knowledges, from law to computer science. What is each about? What is it trying to do? What are its central concerns? What are its central theories? What major insights has it produced? What are its important areas of ignorance, its problems, its challenges? To make knowledges into knowledge requires. that the holders of the knowledges, the specialists, take responsibility for making both themselves and their knowledge area understood. The media, whether magazines, movies, or television, can help. But they cannot do the job. Nor can any other kind of popularization. The knowledges must be understood as what they are: serious, rigorous, demanding. And such understanding can be acquired only if the leaders in each of the knowledges-beginning with the learned professors in their tenured university chairs-take responsibility for making their own knowledge understood and are willing to do the hard work this requires.

Evolution Of Theories Of Knowledge

Embodiment

• Person
• Technology
• Artefact (patent, book)

Schools Of Thought

• Self knowledge. “Function of knowledge is self-knowledge, that is the intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth of the person.” - Socrates / Taoist / Zen monk
• Rhetoric. “The purpose of knowledge is to make the holder effective by enabling him to know what to say and how to say it. For Protagoras knowledge meant logic, grammar, and rhetoric-later to become the trivium, the core of learning in the Middle Ages and still very much what we mean by a "liberal education" or what the Germans mean by allgemeine Bildung (general education).” —Protagoras / Confucian
• Knowledge as a craft skill (doing). Knowledge get embodied in people via practice, applied to one area (not a general principle), taught via apprenticeship, embedded within guilds, and practices by small crafts people.
• Knowledge as technology - Knowledge gets embodied in expensive equipment that requires capital to purchase. “It is this change in the meaning of knowledge that then made modem Capitalism inevitable and dominant. Above all, the speed of technical change created a demand for capital far beyond anything the craftsman could possibly supply. The new technology also required the concentration of production: thus the shift to the factory. Knowledge could not be applied in thousands of small individual workshops and in the cottage industries of the rural village. The new technology also required large quantities of energy, whether water power or steam power, which also encouraged concentration. Although they were important, these energy needs were secondary. The central point was that production almost overnight moved from being craftbased to being technology-based. As a result the capitalist moved into the center of economy and society.”
• Knowledge to work. “The application of knowledge to work after 1880 explosively increased productivity.*
• German system of apprenticeship. “combining practical plant experience under a master with theoretical grounding in school. This system remains the foundation of Germany's industrial productivity.”
• Applying knowledge to knowledge

There are as many theories about what we can know and how we know it as there have been metaphysicians, from Plato in antiquity to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper in our own century. But since Plato's time there have been only two theories in the West-and since roughly the same time, two theories in Asia-regarding the meaning and function of knowledge. According to Plato, Socrates held that the only function of knowledge is self-knowledge, that is the intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth of the person. Socrates' ablest opponent, the brilliant and learned Protagoras, held, however, that the purpose of knowledge is to make the holder effective by enabling him to know what to say and how to say it. For Protagoras knowledge meant logic, grammar, and rhetoric-later to become the trivium, the core of learning in the Middle Ages and still very much what we mean by a "liberal education" or what the Germans mean by allgemeine Bildung (general education). In Asia there were essentially the same two theories of knowledge. Knowledge for the Confucian was knowing what to say and how to say it, the way to advancement and earthly success. Knowledge for the Taoist and the Zen monk was self-knowledge, and it was the road to enlightenment and wisdom. But while the two sides thus sharply disagreed about what knowledge means, they were in total agreement about what it did not mean. It did not mean ability to do. It did not mean utility. Utility was not knowledge; it was skill-the Greek word for which is techné.

Knowledge As A Skill

But even to Socrates and Protagoras, techne, however commendable, was not knowledge. It was confined to one specific application and involved no general principles. What the shipmaster knew about navigating from Greece to Sicily could not be applied to anything else.

Furthermore, the only way to learn a techne was through apprenticeship and experience. A techne could not be explained in words, whether spoken or written. It could only be demonstrated by one who had mastered it. As late as 1700 or even later, the English did not speak of "crafts." They spoke of 'mysteriesu-not only because the possessor of a craft skill was sworn to secrecy but also because a craft by definition was inaccessible to anyone who had not been apprenticed to a master and taught by example

Knowledge As Technology

Then, beginning after 1700-and within the incredibly short span of 50 years-technology was invented. The very word is a manifesto in that it combines fechne, that is the mystery of a craft skill, with logy, organized, systematic, purposeful knowledge. The first engineering school, the French ~cole des Pontes et Chausskes, was founded in 1747, followed around 1770 in Germany by the first school of agriculture, and in 1776 by the first school of mining. In 1794 the first technical university, France's ~cole Polytechnique, was founded and with it was born the profession of engineering. Shortly thereafter, between 1820 and 1850, medical education and medical practice were reorganized as a systematic technology

When knowledge changed its meaning 250 years ago, it began to be applied to tools, processes, and products. This is still what "technology" means to most people and what is being taught in engineering schools. But two years before Marx's death the Productivity Revolution began.

Creation Of patents (1750-1800)

As part of a parallel development in Britain, the meaning of patents shifted between 1750 and 1800. Once monopolies to enrich royal favorites, patents now were granted to encourage the application of knowledge to tools, products, and processes, and to reward inventors, provided they published their inventions. This not only triggered a century of feverish mechanical invention in Britain; it finished craft mystery and secretiveness.

Rise of the encyclopedia

The great document of this dramatic shift from skill to technology-one of the more important books of all time-was the Encyclopedic (1 75 1-72), edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. This monumental work attempted to bring together in organized and systematic form the knowledge of all crafts, and in such a way that the nonapprentice could learn to be a "technologist." It was by no means accidental that articles in the Encyclopedic that describe individual crafts such as spinning or weaving were not written by craftsmen. They were written by "information specialists": people trained as analysts, as mathematicians, as logicians. Both Voltaire and Rousseau were contributors. The underlying thesis of the Encyclopedic was that effective results in the material universe-in tools, processes, and products-are produced by systematic analysis, and by systemat&, purposeful application of knowledge. But the Encyclopedic also preached that principles that produced results in one craft would produce results in any other. That was anathema, however, to both the traditional man of knowledge and the traditional craftsman.

They brought together, codified, and published the techne, the craft mystery, as it had been developed over millennia. They converted experience into knowledge, apprenticeship into textbook, secrecy into methodology, doing into applied knowledge. These are the essentials of what we have come to call the Industrial Revolution, in other words, the transformation by technology of society and civilization worldwide.

Rise of capitalism

It is this change in the meaning of knowledge that then made modem Capitalism inevitable and dominant. Above all, the speed of technical change created a demand for capital far beyond anything the craftsman could possibly supply. The new technology also required the concentration of production: thus the shift to the factory. Knowledge could not be applied in thousands of small individual workshops and in the cottage industries of the rural village. The new technology also required large quantities of energy, whether water power or steam power, which also encouraged concentration. Although they were important, these energy needs were secondary. The central point was that production almost overnight moved from being craftbased to being technology-based. As a result the capitalist moved into the center of economy and society.

As late as 1750, large-scale enterprise was governmental rather than private. The earliest and for many centuries the greatest of all manufacturing enterprises in the Old World was the famous arsenal owned and run by the government of Venice. And the 18th-century "manufactories" such as the porcelain works of Meissen and Sevres were still government-owned. But by 1830 large-scale private capitalist enterprise dominated in the West. By the time Karl Marx died in 1883, private capitalist enterprise had penetrated everywhere except to such remote comers of the world as Tibet and the Empty Quarter of Arabia

We now know that there is no truth in the nearly universal belief that factory workers in the early 19th century were worse off and treated more harshly then they had been as landless laborers in the preindustrial countryside. They were badly off, no doubt, and harshly treated. But they flocked to the factory precisely because they were still better off there than they were at the bottom of a static, tyrannical, and starving rural society. The new factory workers experienced a much better "quality of life." In the factory town infant mortality immediately went down and life expectancy rose, thus triggering the enormous population growth of industrializing Europe. Today-in fact, since World War 11-we have the example of the Third World countries. Brazilians and Peruvians stream into the favelas and barrios of Rio de Janeiro and Lima. However hard, life there is better than in the impoverished Noreste of Brazil or on Peru's altiplano. As an Indian saying goes, "The poorest beggar in Bombay still eats better than the farm hand in the village.”

Why Productivity Is Important

What finally overcame the "inevitable contradictions of capitalism," the "alienation" and "immiseration" of the proletarians and with it the "proletarian" condition altogether? The answer is the Productivity Revolution

Taylor’s Greatest Impact

Taylor's greatest impact was in showing the importance of training. Only a century before Taylor, Adam Smith had taken for granted that it took at least 50 years of experience (and more likely a full century) for a country or a region to acquire the necessary skills to turn out high-quality products. His examples were the production of musical instruments in Bohemia and Saxony and of silk fabrics in Scotland. Seventy years later, around 1840, August Borsig-one of the first people outside England to build a steam locomotive-invented what is still the German system of apprenticeship, combining practical plant experience under a master with theoretical grounding in school. This system remains the foundation of Germany's industrial productivity. But even Borsig's apprenticeship took three to five years. Then, first during World War I, but especially during World War 11, the United States systematically applied

Historical Conceptions Of Work

Work was beneath the attention of the cause history has proven him right and the educated, the well-to-do, and the powerful. intellectuals wrong. In part, Taylor is ignored Work was what slaves did. "Everybody because contempt for work still lingers, above knew" that the only way a worker could pro- all among the intellectuals. Surely shoveling duce more was by working longer hours or sand-the subject of Taylor's most famous by working harder. Marx too shared this be- analysis-is not something an "educated perlief, as did every other 19th-century econo- son" would appreciate, let alone consider mist or engineer

In my father's generation-he was born in 1876-going to college was either for the sons of the wealthy or for a very small number of poor but exceptionally brilliant youngsters (such as himself). Of all the American business successes of the 19th century, only one went to college: J.P. Morgan, who went to Goettingen to study mathematics but dropped out after one year. Few others even attended high school, let alone graduated from it.

As late as 1960, the quickest route to a middle-class income-in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany (though already no longer in Japan)-was to go to work at age 16 in one of the unionized mass-production industries.

These opportunities are practically gone. Now there is virtually no access to a good income without a formal degree attesting to the acquisition of knowledge that can be obtained only systematically and in a school.

The Productivity Revolution Has Come To An End

When Taylor started propounding his principles, nine out of every 10 working people did manual work... By 1990 this group had shrunk to one-fifth of the work force. By 2010 it will constitute no more than one-tenth.

From now on what matters is the productivity of nonmanual workers. And that requires applying knowledge to knowledge.

Case Studies

American Industry During World War 2

But by applying Taylor's "task study," American industry, which played a far more important role in war production than the old government arsenals, learned how to train totally unskilled workers, many of them former sharecroppers raised in a preindustrial environment, and convert them in 60 or 90 days into first-rate welders and shipbuilders. The United States trained within a few months the same kind of people to turn out precision optics superior in quality to what the Germans produced, and did this, furthermore, on an assembly line.

Japan’s Industrialization

But perhaps equally important to the general acceptance of management has been the performance of Japan since 1950. Japan was not an underdeveloped country immediately after World War 11, but its industry and economy were almost totally destroyed and it had practically no domestic technology. The nation's main resource was its willingness to adopt and to adapt the forms of management that the Americans had developed during World War I1 (especially training). By the 1970s it had become the world's second leading economic power and a technology leader.

Case Study On Frederick Winslow Taylor

Much of the article is a case study on Frederick Winslow Taylor and his role in bringing on the knowledge society.

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