Entering the Knowledge Society : POST-CAPITALIST SOCIETY, <i> By Peter Drucker (HarperBusiness: $25; 232 pp.)</i>

Peter F. Drucker’s first book, “The End of Economic Man,” appeared in 1939, if one can believe it, and since then he has been hectoring and lecturing American business at regular intervals for over 50 years. His chief concerns have been management and organization, but he has also taken an occasional swipe at larger sociopolitical issues, as in “The New Society” (1949), “The Age of Discontinuity” (1969) and “The New Realities” (1989). He has become such a part of the landscape of American business thinking that it is hard to imagine not having “a new Drucker” to read, or read about, or worry about not having read.

His own career has spanned not only the working lifetime of today’s older business leaders, but the entire lifetime of those youngish-middle-aged executives now taking over the reins in most companies. It’s doubtful that anyone has been such a consistent force in American business theory and practice.

Drucker is a hard man to argue with. One may disagree with him intuitively, or empirically-anecdotally based on personal experience, but the scope of his works and the tremendous cross-disciplinary learning he brings to bear on the subject at hand lift his books out of the ordinary classification of “business” and into the realm of economic and political philosophy. Were it not for his insistent emphasis on the practical implementation of his ideas in the business world, Drucker’s books might well have been relegated to academia--and his influence, not to mention his book sales, might have been far less. The respect he commands with academics, however, is not lessened by his popularity, as it is in so many cases when a serious author achieves bestseller status. It is interesting to observe, in fact, how business school mavens scramble to heap accolades on his new titles as they appear. Just to be a blurb on a Drucker book jacket is an achievement in such circles, it would seem.

This year’s “new Drucker,” “Post-Capitalist Society,” is on a par with his previous works in terms of wide-ranging analysis. It brings history, philosophy, science, sociology--in fact, very nearly every branch of learning on the tree of knowledge--to bear on the subject: What does tomorrow hold for us, and what should we be doing about it today? It differs from many of his previous works mainly in length, for its 232 pages are in essence an extended essay, which makes this obligatory reading much faster to dispatch than the Drucker norm.

And it is indeed obligatory, not just for think-tankers and corporate strategic planners, but for any of us interested in preparing for and helping to shape the not-too-distant future. The gist of his argument is that we are entering a “knowledge” society (as opposed to one based on capital, land and labor), and that this will have a profound effect on the way business is conducted, how and where people work, what role education has to play, and the new kinds of organizations that will be required to make it all run smoothly. Knowledge, for Drucker, is wissenschaft --professional knowledge--and information.

Rather than offer generic futurology, the book takes aim at the present: at the underlying forces that are incubating the future. The argument is arranged according to issues relative to society, polity and knowledge; this is, according to Drucker, “in order of predictability” rather than importance. “With respect to the knowledge challenges,” he says, “we can only ask questions--and hope that they are the right questions.”

If all of this sounds too conceptual to sink one’s teeth into, rest assured, it is easy to translate into human terms. For the essential component in the “knowledge society” is the individual--the real repository of knowledge and therefore the vessel of the new economic resource--and the individual’s relationship to the highly specialized organizations of the new era. Throughout, Drucker stresses how his ideas affect the individual worker’s life and work regimen, whatever his or her responsibilities within an organization.

Management’s challenge in this scenario is to determine how existing knowledge can best be applied to produce results and systematic innovation. This involves continuous improvement, exploitation and creativity with knowledge-based resources, a process radically different from previous business endeavors because it does not rely primarily on “making and moving” things. As Drucker says, “From now on, what matters is the productivity of non-manual workers. And that requires applying knowledge to knowledge.”

Drucker thinks those who moan over the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are missing the point. That part of the economy is justifiably breathing its last, he says, pointing to mini-mills staffed by 97 highly specialized technicians that outperform U.S. Steel’s huge, vertically integrated factories. The new economy will be composed primarily of knowledge workers and service workers, all of whom must be vested with a sense of “responsibility” (he eschews the buzzword empowered ) for the success of the organization.

The mutual dependence of the individual and the organization, despite the career mobility knowledge confers, is a signal feature of this new world: “Post-Capitalist society is both a knowledge society and a society of organizations, each dependent on the other and yet each very different in its concepts, views, and values. Most, if not all, educated persons will practice their knowledge as members of an organization. The educated person will therefore have to be prepared to live and work simultaneously in two cultures--that of the ‘intellectual,’ who focuses on words and ideas, and that of the ‘manager,’ who focuses on people and work.”

Underlying Drucker’s thesis is his acceptance that just about everything is increasingly specialized: occupations, organizations, knowledge. His justification for this evolution is that both people and organizations are most effective when they concentrate their efforts on one task. Diversification destroys performance capacity.

Drucker’s arguments are forceful and his scholarship dazzling. A persuasive inevitability infuses his analyses and forecasts. But there is something troubling about this worldview as it unfolds, page by page. It has less to do with the uncertainties of tomorrow than with the question: What does this all really add up to? If people are indeed more productive, chock full of highly specialized knowledge, does this result in a better world, a happier work force, greater bounty in life? Drucker’s a priori assumptions about the need to compete and the importance of productivity are not unique, certainly, in the business world. He is simply working upward from what has always been taken for granted.

But it seems, to this reader at least, that these base line assumptions deserve closer scrutiny as we turn the corner into a new century. Why is competition necessarily good? What are the real benefits of being an economic superpower to the citizens of such an entity? Shouldn’t we take a good look at ourselves, at the Japanese, the Germans? And what about the rest of the world, the “third” world, the less (taking Drucker’s parlance to an extreme) “knowledgeable”? We need to scratch beneath these “givens” and arrive at some consensual redefinition of the meaning of work. Today’s re-engineered, demoralized, insecure workers--and managers--are not likely to buy into any plan unless we do.

While Drucker is an astute observer of broad trends and a brilliant analyst of the dynamics of economics, he seems oddly out of touch with the human realities--call it the “suffering index”--of contemporary work life. People are not motivated by pay and prestige increases, climbing the corporate ladder and job security, as they used to be, if only because the opportunities have greatly diminished in recent times. A void has been left in the soul of work that remains to be filled.

Surely someone, somewhere is thinking about this. Perhaps one day we will be surprised by a groundbreaking study on the transformation of the meaning of success and achievement in the workaday world, a study placing productivity and competition in their proper context, which at the same time allows for the emergence of the new--and obviously inevitable--knowledge economy.