Reply to LO9439, 9376, re the debate as to who coined the term knowledge
worker - i.e. Drucker and when.
Eccles, Nohria & Berkley have a lot of fun, it seems, in debunking much of
our precious sense of what is new and what is not (in their 1992 book,
Beyond the Hype, Harvard Business School).
For example, Mary Parker Follet, an early administrative theorist,
working in the 1920's, suggested that, " authority should go with
knowledge and experience", and called for, " an emphasis on cross
functioning, and replacement of vertical authority with horizontal
authority - in order to promote the exchange of knowledge in organizations".
Eccles et al, suggest that even casual reading of management literature
over the last 75 yrs, shows that every age "discovers" principles anew.
And to stress this they also quote Drucker (1977), saying, " in the ten
years between 1910 and 1920 .. every single one of the great themes of
management is struck. And almost everything we have done since is,
.....only a variation and extension of the themes first heard during that
decade."
So - hope this info feeds your daily diet of ambiguity about our world...
Tony Kortens
Practitioner, some day scholar, always learner
tkortens@stmarys-ca.edu
--Tony Kortens <tkortens@stmarys-ca.edu>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>