From the Publisher:
This collection of essays is designed to give the reader a historical perspective on the fastest growing sector of the workforce: knowledge workers. The articles tell how knowledge workers evolved from agricultural and manufacturing jobs and proceed to give some insights as to what the future roles will be.

This article examines the concept of employability. The recent policy emphasis on employability rests on the assumption that the economic welfare of individuals and the competitive advantage of nations have come to depend on the knowledge, skills and enterprise of the workforce. Those with degree-level qualifications are seen to play a particularly important role in managing the 'knowledge-driven' economy of the future. But the rhetoric that shrouds the idea of employability has been subjected to little conceptual examination. The purpose of this article is to show that the way employability is typically defined in official statements is seriously flawed because it ignores what will be called the 'duality of employability'. It also introduces 'positional conflict theory' as a way of conceptualising the changing relationship between education, employment and the labour market.

background

Rise of the Knowledge Worker

Employability in a Knowledge-driven Economy

This article is based on the Keynote Address to ECER, Lisbon, Portugal, 11-14 September 2002. The opportunity to make a better life is enshrined in democratic societies. In recent decades the growth in personal freedom and the rhetoric of the knowledge economy have led many to believe that we have more opportunities than ever before. We are told that the trade-off between efficiency and justice no longer holds in a global knowledge-driven economy, as the opportunity to exploit the talents of all, at least in the developed world, is now a realistic goal. This article will challenge such accounts of education, opportunity and global labour market. It points to enduring social inequalities in the competition for a livelihood and an intensification of 'positional' conflict. Our 'opportunities' are becoming harder to cash in. The opportunity-cost is increasing because the pay-off depends on getting ahead in the competition for tough-entry jobs. Middle-class families in competitive hot spots are adopting increasingly desperate measures to win a positional advantage. But the opportunity trap is not only a problem for individuals or families. It exposes an inherent tension, if not contradiction, in the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It will be argued that the legitimate foundations of opportunity, based on education, jobs and rewards, are unravelling. Within education, this not only represents further symptoms of the 'diploma disease' but a social revolution that fundamentally challenges our understanding of education, efficiency and social justice.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/eerj.2003.2.1.4

The Opportunity Trap: Education and Employment in a Global Economy

Purpose – To identify and critically assess the most recurrent themes in the ongoing debate on knowledge work.Design/methodology/approach – A representative selection of studies published since 1962 is reviewed. The review focuses on the theoretical strengths and limitations of the concept of knowledge work.Findings – The review indicates that definitions of knowledge work abound. Although knowledge work has attracted scholarly minds for several decades and the number of publications in this area has rapidly increased in recent years, it has proved hard to come by a clear and concise definition of this term. However, certain themes, such as a high level of education and skills and the use of information technology as an integral part of the informational labour process, have become increasingly common to both the empirical and the theoretical literature.Originality/value – The paper helps pave the way for more detailed research by providing an ideal‐typical profile of informational labour.

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The concept of knowledge work revisited

Management consultancy is a key sector in the economic change toward a service and knowledge economy. Originally published in 2006, this book explains the mechanisms of the management consulting market and the management of consulting firms from both economic and sociological perspectives. It also examines the strategies, marketing approaches, knowledge management and human resource management techniques of consulting firms. After outlining the relationships between transaction cost economics, signaling theory, embeddedness theory and sociological neoinstitutionalism, Thomas Armbruster applies these theories to central questions such as: Why does the consulting sector exist and grow? Which institutions connect supply and demand? And which factors influence the relationship between clients and consultants? By applying both economic and sociological approaches, the book explains the general economic changes of the previous thirty years and sharpens the relationship between the academic disciplines.

/pdf/the-economics-and-sociology-of-management-consulting-4m0waoc2wu.pdf

The Economics and Sociology of Management Consulting

There is a well established literature on the antecedents of organizational commitment, though the relative importance of these antecedents to particular groups of workers remains unclear. Relying on a general set of antecedents for all workers may result in the application of inappropriate HRM policies and practices. Our focus is on knowledge workers as they have been identified as important to organizational success.The literature is, however, divided on what constitutes knowledge work so we develop and apply a measure that focuses on what these workers do.We then use this measure to examine attitudinal and behavioural commitment. We find, using responses from 1969 employees, knowledge workers have higher attitudinal commitment and lower intention to quit than routine-task workers. Further, the antecedents of commitment for knowledge workers and routine-task workers differ in many important respects, creating challenges for organizational decision makers.

Rise of the Knowledge Worker

Citations

Employability in a Knowledge-driven Economy

The Opportunity Trap: Education and Employment in a Global Economy

The concept of knowledge work revisited

The Economics and Sociology of Management Consulting

Knowledge workers: what keeps them committed; what turns them away

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