Knowledge Workers
Reprinted from Future of Work Agenda March 2007
What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway? by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham In our consulting and research work we spend a lot of time exploring how the emergence of knowledge work as the primary driver of economic activity is changing the nature of the workplace and even basic organizational and management practice. Recently one of our clients asked us a very basic question: Just what is a knowledge worker?” As he said, “Everyone uses that term but it certainly doesn’t seem very well defined. And if we’re going to be doing market research and making investments aimed at attracting knowledge workers to our community and local businesses, we sure ought to have some kind of agreement about just who it is we’re talking about.” We agree, and that question stimulated the development of a working paper on “Knowledge Work and Knowledge Workers.” We’re pleased to offer an excerpt from that paper here.
Peter Drucker is generally credited with coining the term “knowledge worker” in 1959. In 1991 he wrote an article on knowledge worker productivity for the Harvard Business Review (“The New Productivity Challenge,” Nov-Dec 1991, pp69-79) in which he more or less put knowledge work (ill-defined at best) and service work in one large, rather amorphous, bucket. The closest he came to defining “knowledge and service” work in that article was this:
Knowledge and service workers range from research scientists and cardiac surgeons through draftswomen and store managers to 16-year olds who flip hamburgers in fast-food restaurants on Saturday afternoons. Their ranks also include people whose work makes them “machine operators”: dishwashers, janitors, data-entry operators.
At that time Drucker was not particularly concerned with where and when these knowledge workers accomplished their tasks; his focus was on improving their productivity, which he called the “single greatest challenge facing managers in the developed countries of the
What is a Knowledge Worker, Anyway? by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham In our consulting and research work we spend a lot of time exploring how the emergence of knowledge work as the primary driver of economic activity is changing the nature of the workplace and even basic organizational and management practice. Recently one of our clients asked us a very basic question: Just what is a knowledge worker?” As he said, “Everyone uses that term but it certainly doesn’t seem very well defined. And if we’re going to be doing market research and making investments aimed at attracting knowledge workers to our community and local businesses, we sure ought to have some kind of agreement about just who it is we’re talking about.” We agree, and that question stimulated the development of a working paper on “Knowledge Work and Knowledge Workers.” We’re pleased to offer an excerpt from that paper here.
Peter Drucker is generally credited with coining the term “knowledge worker” in 1959. In 1991 he wrote an article on knowledge worker productivity for the Harvard Business Review (“The New Productivity Challenge,” Nov-Dec 1991, pp69-79) in which he more or less put knowledge work (ill-defined at best) and service work in one large, rather amorphous, bucket. The closest he came to defining “knowledge and service” work in that article was this:
Knowledge and service workers range from research scientists and cardiac surgeons through draftswomen and store managers to 16-year olds who flip hamburgers in fast-food restaurants on Saturday afternoons. Their ranks also include people whose work makes them “machine operators”: dishwashers, janitors, data-entry operators.
At that time Drucker was not particularly concerned with where and when these knowledge workers accomplished their tasks; his focus was on improving their productivity, which he called the “single greatest challenge facing managers in the developed countries of the