Is 'knowledge worker' no longer useful?

The HBR blog has a piece on knowledge workers and how executives look at their employees: Are All Employees Knowledge Workers? by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. It's been making the rounds on my social networks.

We live in a world of haves and have nots. No, not the kind you might imagine. These people reside within our companies. We increasingly group the people in our firms into two classes: those who have knowledge and talent and, by implication, those who do not. This segmentation is misleading and damaging to firms in the long run.

I can see their point. Just about everyone within an organization has valuable knowledge about the ins and outs of the business and could contribute -- assuming the organization is willing and interested in hearing the contribution.

When Drucker coined the term and others borrowed it, I don't think the idea was differentiation so much as identification. Traditional "work" was the physical labor variety. As management ideas grew into the information age, they wanted ways to categorize (and measure) other workers within the organization. Knowledge work seemed a good way to describe what a larger and larger portion of the working population were doing.

I wonder if a more passe term is simply, "workers." The people who we want to contribute their knowledge are those who are invested in the organization in any form.

[Photo: "Bolting off to Work" by ...-Wink-...]

2 Comment(s)

Brett

said:

I like the distinction that Seth Godin makes in Linchpin, "factory" workers vs. "creative" workers. They all require skills and knowledge, it all depends on how they choose to use them. Or, as importantly, how managers choose to employ them.

April 6, 2010 5:35 PM

Bill Bennett

said:

I call my web site Knowledge Workers and tag that with a second deck which says; "for people paid to think for a living".

That's a slightly tongue in cheek reference to a statement that British employers would commonly hear in the 1970s and even in to the early 1980s:

"I'm not paid to think".

I don't know if this expression is well-known in the US, I've heard used in New Zealand and Australia.

I chose the phrase to illustrate a key point, today, most workers ARE paid to think.

Some workers might believe this doesn't apply to them. It's hard to see yourself as a knowledge worker if you work the night shift on the cash register at a petrol station.

But by and large, most modern workers are expected to be more than automatons. And by that standard they are knowledge workers.

Ultimately it's a state of mind. As Brett said in an earlier comment, everyone can choose to be a knowledge worker and every boss can choose to view all employees as knowledge workers.

April 6, 2010 10:19 PM