Post-Capitalist Society (by Peter Drucker—bibliography)

Unimagined Futures: "EVERY FEW HUNDRED YEARS in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. We cross what in an earlier book, I called a "divide." See The New Realities—1989.

Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself—its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.

We are currently living through just such a transformation. It is creating the post-capitalist society, which is the subject of this book. (See Bob Embry's Time-Life Navigation © article notebook for examples taken from the daily news.)

• Post-Capitalist Society (by Peter Drucker)
  • Introduction: The Transformation
    • Post-Capitalist Society And Post-Capitalist Polity
    • The Shift To The Knowledge Society
    • Outflanking The Nation-State
    • The Third World
    • Society, Polity, Knowledge
  • Part one: Society
    • From Capitalism to Knowledge Society
      • The new meaning of knowledge
      • The industrial revolution
      • The productivity revolution
      • The management revolution
      • From knowledge to knowledges
    • The Society of Organizations
      • The society of organizations
      • The function of organizations
      • Organization as a distinct species
      • The characteristics of organizations
      • Organization as a destabilizer
      • The employee society
    • Labor, Capital, and Their Future
      • Is labor still an asset?
      • How much labor is needed—and what kind?
      • Capitalism without capitalists
      • The pension fund and its owners
      • The governance of corporations
      • Making management accountable
      • Labor, capital, and their future
    • The Productivity of the New Work Forces
      • What kind of team?
      • The need to concentrate
      • Restructuring organizations
      • The case for outsourcing
      • Averting a new class conflict
      • The productivity of the new work forces
    • The Responsibility-Based Organization
      • Where right becomes wrong
      • What is social responsibility?
      • Power and organizations
      • From command to information
      • From information to responsibility
      • To make everybody a contributor
      • The responsibility-based organizations
  • Part two: Polity
    • From Nation-State to Megastate
      • The paradox of the nation-state
      • The dimensions of the Megastate
        • The nanny state
        • The Megastate as master of the economy
        • The fiscal state
        • The cold war state
        • The Japanese exceptions
        • Has the Megastate worked?
        • The pork-barrel state
        • The cold war state—the failure of success
    • Transnationalism, Regionalism, Tribalism
      • Money knows no fatherland…
      • … nor does information
      • Transnational needs
        • The environment
        • Stamping out terrorism
        • Arms control
      • Regionalism: the new reality
      • The return of tribalism
        • The need for roots
    • The Needed Government Turnaround
      • The futility of military aid
      • What to abandon in economic theory
      • Concentrating on what does work
      • The half-successes: beyond the nanny state
    • Citizenship Through the Social Sector (see Managing the Non-Profit Organization)
      • The need to “outsource”
      • Patriotism is not enough
      • The need for community
      • The vanishing plant community
      • The volunteer as citizen
      • Citizenship through the social sector
  • Part Three: Knowledge
    • Knowledge: Its Economics and Its Productivity (see The Knowledge System view)
      • The economics of knowledge
      • The productivity of knowledge
      • The productivity of money
      • The management requirements
      • Only connect …
    • The Accountable School
      • How the Japanese did it
      • The new performance demands
      • Learning to learn
      • The school in society
      • The schools as partners
      • The accountable school
    • The Educated Person

An outline of the education related chapters from Post Capitalist Society

The Shift To The Knowledge Society

The move to the post-capitalist society began shortly after World War II. I first wrote of the "employee society" even before 1950 (See for example, The New Society (1949)). Ten years later, around 1960, I coined the terms "knowledge work" and "knowledge worker." And my The Age of Discontinuity (1969) first talked of the "society of organizations." Post-Capitalist Society is thus based on work done over forty years. Most of its policy and action recommendations have been successfully tested.

…

The same forces which destroyed Marxism as an ideology and Communism as a social system are, however, also making Capitalism obsolescent. For two hundred and fifty years, from the second half of the eighteenth century on, Capitalism was the dominant social reality. For the last hundred years, Marxism was the dominant social ideology. Both are rapidly being superseded by a new and very different society.

…

The new society—and it is already here—is a post-capitalist society. This new society surely, to say it again, will use the free market as the one proven mechanism of economic integration. It will not be an "anti-capitalist society." It will not even be a "non-capitalist society"; the institutions of Capitalism will survive, although some, such as banks, may play quite different roles.

But the center of gravity in the post-capitalist society—its structure, its social and economic dynamics, its social classes, and its social problems—is different from the one that dominated the last two hundred and fifty years and defined the issues around which political parties, social groups, social value systems, and personal and political commitments crystallized.

The basic economic resource—"the means of production," to use the economist's term—is no longer capital, nor natural resources (the economist's "land"), nor "labor." It is and will be knowledge. The central wealth-creating activities will be neither the allocation of capital to productive uses, nor "labor"—the two poles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic theory, whether classical, Marxist, Keynesian, or neo-classical. Value is now created by "productivity" and "innovation," both applications of knowledge to work.

The leading social groups of the knowledge society will be "knowledge workers"—knowledge executives who know how to allocate knowledge to productive use just as the capitalists knew how to allocate capital to productive use; knowledge professionals; knowledge employees.

Practically all these knowledge people will be employed in organizations. Yet, unlike the employees under Capitalism, they will own both the "means of production" and the "tools of production"—the former through their pension funds, which are rapidly emerging in all developed countries as the only real owners; the latter because knowledge workers own their knowledge and can take it with them wherever they go. The economic challenge of the post-capitalist society will therefore be the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.

The social challenge of the post-capitalist society will, however, be the dignity of the second class in post-capitalist society: the service workers. Service workers, as a rule, lack the necessary education to be knowledge workers. And in every country, even the most highly advanced one, they will constitute a majority.

The post-capitalist society will be divided by a new dichotomy of values and of aesthetic perceptions. It will not be the "Two Cultures"—literary and scientific—of which the English novelist, scientist, and government administrator C. P. Snow wrote in his The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), though that split is real enough. The dichotomy will be between "intellectuals" and "managers," the former concerned with words and ideas, the latter with people and work. To transcend this dichotomy in a new synthesis will be a central philosophical and educational challenge for the post-capitalist society.

…

The nation-state is not going to wither away. It may remain the most powerful political organ around for a long time to come, but it will no longer be the indispensable one. Increasingly, it will share power with other organs, other institutions, other policy-makers. What is to remain the domain of the nation-state? What is to be carried out within the state by autonomous institutions? How do we define "supranational" and "transnational"? What should remain "separate and local"?

…

These questions will be central political issues for decades to come. In its specifics, the outcome is quite unpredictable. But the political order will look different from the political order of the last four centuries, in which the players differed in size, wealth, constitutional arrangements, and political creed, yet were uniform as nation-states—each sovereign within its territory and each defined by its territory. We are moving—we have indeed already moved—into post-capitalist polity.

…

The last of what might be called the "pre-modern" philosophers, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), spent much of his life in a futile attempt to restore the unity of Christendom. His motivation was not the fear of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants or between different Protestant sects; that danger had already passed when Leibniz was born. He feared that without a common belief in a supernatural God, secular religions would emerge. And a secular religion, he was convinced, would, almost by definition, have to be a tyranny and suppress the freedom of the person.

…

But surely the collapse of Marxism as a creed signifies the end of the belief in salvation by society.

…

What will emerge next, we cannot know; we can only hope and pray. Perhaps nothing beyond stoic resignation?

…

I am often asked whether I am an optimist or a pessimist. For any survivor of this century to be an optimist would be fatuous. We surely are nowhere near the end of the turbulences, the transformations, the sudden upsets, which have made this century one of the meanest, cruelest, bloodiest in human history.

…

Nothing "post" is permanent or even long-lived. Ours is a transition period. What the future society will look like, let alone whether it will indeed be the "knowledge society" some of us dare hope for, depends on how the developed countries respond to the challenges of this transition period, the post-capitalist period—their intellectual leaders, their business leaders, their political leaders, but above all each of us in our own work and life. Yet surely this is a time to make the future—precisely because everything is in flux. This is a time for action.

Related:

• Management

• Knowledge

• Organization