One way to answer the question “Who is a knowledge worker?” is to make lists. List the occupations that are knowledge workers, and those that aren’t. This is at least one way to start sorting out our intuitions about knowledge workers.

Rather than just start out on my own, I’ll begin with a quote from James Cordata’s “Rise of the Knowledge Worker” (p. 13):

The obvious suspects include scholars and professors, teachers, priests, ministers, and other clerics, lawyers, accountants and bookkeepers, government office-bound employees (we began calling them clerks and bureaucrats in the eighteenth century), politicians, writers, witch doctors and all manner of medical personnel (not just doctors), and specialized experts on such things as forecasting the future (witch doctors or palm readers; sometimes a duty of priests, as in Greece and the Roman Empire). These professions were added to once the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century came into full blossom: social critics who supported themselves on their writings, inventors who put food on the table through business or patent activities, then clerks, accountants on tax laws and cost accounting, secretaries, office workers, consultants in the early 1900s, and punch card and, later, computer operators and programmers. When one starts to catalog all the types of knowledge workers, all of a sudden the list becomes quite long. It begins to represent a substantial part of the population of any community …

Ok, so this leaves us with some sort of intuition about what we mean by the term knowledge-worker. So who then should we class as a non-knowledge-worker? Should we call these manual workers? If not, then what else?

What do we think of these professions: builders, assembly-line workers, farmers, people on the “factory floor”, cleaners, cooks, gardeners. Are these knowledge workers or not? In other words, should we think of the traditional blue-collar worker as being a non-knowledge worker? Or has the changing nature of work meant that knowledge work is becoming more and more significant in these traditionally manual jobs?

The point I’m making is that although we may seem to have a strong intuitive idea of what knowledge work consists of, it really isn’t clear what sort of work isn’t knowledge work. Maybe this isn’t a serious problem, but I think that it at least shows that our intuitions about knowledge work are actually not all that clear.

For example, ponder this question: Are robots knowledge workers or not?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 6:24 pm and is filed under KM Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.