Post-Capitalist Society

Peter Drucker argues that the developed economies had passed through a transformation as significant as the industrial revolution, in which the primary economic resource ceased to be capital, land or labour and became knowledge. He calls the result the knowledge society and the book is his attempt to describe its institutions.

His argument about knowledge has three stages. Knowledge was applied first to tools and products, producing the industrial revolution; then to work itself, through Taylor's scientific management, producing the productivity revolution; and then to knowledge itself, producing the management revolution. In the resulting society the people who own the means of production are the knowledge workers who carry it in their heads, which changes the relationship between employer and employee fundamentally. He argues that the central management problem becomes the productivity of knowledge and service work, which nobody has yet solved as Taylor solved manual work.

The political sections argue that the nation state is losing capability upward to transnational structures and downward to regions, that the megastate built through the twentieth century has failed at most of what it attempted, and that the social sector of non-governmental organisations must take on functions the state cannot perform. Drucker also argues that pension funds owning corporations creates an unresolved governance problem. The predictions about knowledge work were largely correct; those about the state and about the social sector were not, or not yet. Drucker's insistence that knowledge workers must be managed as volunteers has been repeatedly confirmed.

Management writer and consultant; professor at Bennington, NYU and Claremont Graduate University

He invented management as a field of study, and The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive remain the primary sources every later writer builds on.

NYU, Claremont Graduate University